All letters to the Manor House are delivered locked in a bag. They always have been since the Flood, I believe, or at least since the invention of the postal service. And, of course, father won’t have it altered, So every morning there’s the ritual of unlocking this absurd bag. No one is allowed to do that but father--unless he is ill. Then mother has the privilege. And of course he. scrutinizes the outside of every letter and directly it’s opened asks who it’s from and what’s inside it. Your letters would have been noticed at once. MONTY How beastly! JANET The penalty of having nothing to do, Monty. MONTY I know. What a mess the whole thing is! JANET Just so. No. There was no way out of it except the hat-shop. MONTY _(remorsefully)_ It’s awfully rough on you, Janet. JANET Never mind. I dare say I wasn’t cut out for the wife of a subaltern, Monty; whereas I make excellent hats. MONTY _(savagely)_ You’re still making the d------d things? JANET Yes. Only at another shop. The Regent Street place had no room for me when I was well enough to go back to work. But the woman who kept it gave me a recommendation to a friend who was starting in Hanover Street. A most superior quarter for a hatshop, Monty. In fact _the_ superior quarter. Claude et Cie was the name. (Monty _(rather shocked)_ A _French_ shop? JANET No more French than you are, Monty. It was kept by a Miss Hicks, one of the most thoroughly British people you can possibly imagine. But we called ourselves Claude et Cie in order to be able to charge people more for their hats. You can always charge fashionable women more for their clothes if you pretend to be French. It’s one of the imbecilities of commerce. So poor dear Miss Hicks became Madame Claude and none of our hats cost less than seven guineas. MONTY Do people buy hats at such a price? JANET Oh yes. Everybody in Society bought them. Claude et Cie was quite the rage that Season. Nobody who was anybody went anywhere else. MONTY She must have made a great deal of money. JANET On the contrary. She made nothing at all and narrowly escaped bankruptcy. MONTY But I don’t understand. If her hats were so dear and everybody bought them? JANET Everybody _bought_ them but nobody _paid_ for them. In the highest social circles I believe people never do pay for anything--certainly not for their clothes. At least, nobody paid Miss Hicks, and at the end of six months she was owed £1,200 and hadn’t a penny to pay her rent. MONTY Why didn’t she _make_ them pay. JANET She did dun them, of course, but they only ordered more hats to keep her quiet which didn’t help Miss Hicks much. And when she went on dunning them they said they should withdraw their custom. In fact, she was in a dilemma. If she let the bills run on she couldn’t pay her rent. And if she asked her customers to pay their bills they ceased to be customers. MONTY How beastly! JANET Not again, Monty! MONTY