My dinner slips and their history would fill a volume, therefore they must be laid aside just now. Suffice it to say that as a bride I conceived the idea of asking celebrated men and women to sign my tablecloths. Now after twenty years there are over four hundred names upon these cloths, including the signatures of some of the most prominent men and women in London at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries. All the men on _Punch_ have drawn a little picture, twenty Academicians have done likewise. Specialists, such as Marconi, Sir Hiram Maxim, Sir Joseph Swan, Sir William Crookes, or Sir William Ramsay, have drawn designs showing their own inventions. Others have made sketches or caricatures of themselves. Among them are Sir A. Pinero, Harry Furniss, Solomon J. Solomons, William Orpen, John Lavery, E. T. Reid, Weedon Grossmith, Forbes Robertson, Thompson Seton, Max Beerbohm, W. K. Haselden. A possession truly, and a record of many valued friendships. It has its comic side too, for sometimes when I am out at dinner and my name is heard my partner turns to me and says: “Are you the lady who has the famous tablecloth?” I own I am, and try to forget the fact that I ever wrote a book. And—yes, that is the point—they have all been signed at my own table and I have embroidered them myself. How did a “worker” manage to continue to give little dinners, may be asked by other workers who find hospitality a difficult task rather than a pleasure. Well, with a little forethought and care it can be done. During all those thirteen years I don’t suppose I bought a first-class ticket in Britain thirteen times. That was one of my many economies, enabling me to save a few pounds here and there, just as bus fares saved cab fares, and with these little savings I could enjoy the privilege of having friends to tea or dinner. We appreciate most what has caused us a little self-sacrifice, and I certainly appreciate my friends far more than any personal inconvenience, besides I had a home well filled with linen, glass, china, and silver. It is snobbish to offer what we can’t afford, and honest to give what we can. Anyone can open a restaurant, and always have it filled with diners, but it requires a little personality to make and keep a home. When a woman is poor and friends rally round, she has the intense joy of knowing it is for herself they come and not for what she can lavish on her guests. The man or woman who only comes to one’s house to be fed is no friend, merely a sponger on foolish good-nature.