I licked the envelope and the stamp viciously and rang the bell. “Post this at once, please, Clara,” I said, “and when Jones’s boy calls in the morning for orders, tell him that a thousand years are not as one day to me, and that he may take his detestable tray of entrails to--” I stopped just in time--“back to the shop,” I added. “Yes’m,” said Clara, looking surprised and, I thought, frightened. “Would you like a cup of tea, m’m?” If one is what these people call “upset” they always suggest tea. Tea as a remedy for the butcher’s non-appearance struck me as absurd. “No, Clara,” I replied, “what I want is not tea but punctuality. All the same I will have a cup.” Of course it was impossible to say anything to Ruth that afternoon. It would have been making too much fuss over what probably was not her fault. _CHAPTER II_: THE COOK A lady who has kept house with marked success for fifty years once said to me: “My dear, there are only three things of any importance in a house. First the husband, then the nurse, then the cook, and after that it doesn’t matter.” At the time this collected wisdom slid through my head almost without recognition. I thought my husband perfect, and took it for granted that I knew all about him. I did not then require a nurse, and in my limitless ignorance I supposed a cook to be a person who cooks things, and whom, if she does not cook things well, one replaces by another cook who does. How, indeed, should I know more of the nature and habits of cooks than the general public knows of the physiology of the animals which it sees behind bars at the Zoo? At home I knew that there was a certain fat striped creature in the kitchen, whom my mother was obliged to propitiate before we could get scones for breakfast, and to whom I vaguely believed my father said prayers night and morning. But meals came up and went down, in winter and summer, autumn and spring, and that was all that I really knew about them.