“Because you would be the dearer by contrast. You would say, ‘Never mind, darling, you have me.’ But please let me go on. I was going to dwell on your mercies which you do not seem to be counting. Suppose, now, that I sat about in your drawing-room with fancy-work and asked how you were going to manage about the spring cleaning. That would mean telling you at great length how I always did it and how excellent my dear husband thought the arrangement. I should add that, of course, it was for you and Anne to decide.” “Well, I suppose it would be, wouldn’t it?” he asked foolishly. “Not if I said it was for you to decide. That would mean that unless you allowed me to arrange it in my own way I should say that no doubt you were right; everything was so altered since my day that I could not attempt to judge. And then I should be ill for a fortnight in your house and have all my meals carried upstairs, and the servants would give notice.” “Good Lord!” remarked Robert. “Exactly, then do not complain about my not showing nice feeling, because I don’t make myself a nuisance to Anne.” Another day I told him just to look, for instance, at Constance’s mother. He said he thought she seemed a very nice old lady. “All right,” I said, “Tom is outside, and he is likely to be open with us to-day, because his mother-in-law is staying for the week-end with Constance--come along.” I dragged him out under the trees where Tom was lying in a hammock, reading. When we had got chairs and explained that we had ordered tea outside to save him the trouble of coming in, I said: “I suppose you can’t stay to dinner if Constance’s mother is with you?” “Poor girl!” said Tom, “I suppose I had better go and give her a hand.” “But she is a very nice old lady, isn’t she?” I asked. “Oh, very,” he agreed flabbily. Then he saw my face, and noticed also Robert’s intelligent, inquiring expression. “What’s the matter with you two?” he asked. “The fact is, darling,” I explained, “that Robert was a little dissatisfied with me because he thinks I do not take enough part in his household arrangements, so we came out, less to save you the trouble of coming to tea than that you should save me the trouble of explaining to him.” Tom flung down his book. “I will tell you all about it from beginning to end,” he promised us. “People talk about the mind being a storehouse, but hers is the bottomless pit. And the only things that will go into it are details; if you give her the sort of things that are in most people’s minds they lie about outside the pit and make her uncomfortable. But I get so done up filling her with the stuff, and so does Con. She wants to know every detail of our lives, from the kind of shaving soap I use to whether I put the lights out myself or leave it to the servants. Constance has to tell all hers too. The old lady starves if she doesn’t get it, and no amount of it seems to satisfy her.”