en had to think by now.
She had the housemaid's mind.

Everything in the little garden suburb home--for Hubert, capitulating
to Kenneth Boyd all along the whole line, had settled out at
Hampstead--every smallest detail was ordered to one end: the Work.

This, he reminded her so soon as they returned to England, was not just
his pride or hobby: it was their existence. She had her three hundred
pounds a year, which he wished her to keep, whilst his fixed income was
a trifle less--his father had been that fatal sort of mongrel, half a
cleric, half a City man--and for the rest they must depend upon his
writing. How important then, but how essential, that he should be left
free to do his very best.

"You're my little housekeeper," he told her playfully the first
evening, always loving to treat her as a child. "You'll get new cooks
about every other day and try new dishes out of shilling books with
them, and I shall say: 'My dear, this isn't edible'--like that--and
then you'll cry----"

"Oh no, I shan't!" she laughed back, for they got on extremely well in
an unsentimental way. It was almost as though Hubert had merely
exchanged his sister for a younger one.

"Well, I like to think you will," he answered. "I shall be hurt if you
don't mind in the least when I'm cross.... But what I was going to say
is: whatever domestic tragedies there are--and kitchens are the last
home in England of poor Tragedy--don't bring them round to me. I don't
mind _what_ I eat, I'm very tame that way really; but I don't want to
know who cooked the chop or where the large woman who cooked the last
one is. Those details don't inspire an author, even with a realistic
novel!" The which she thought great fun. She loved to hear him talk.

None the less, it was not easy just at first. There was a hideous lot
to remember for any one not good at lessons. The kitchen with its rows
of plates, and all the currants and things you served out from
tins--this was quite splendid. The hours and what you mustn't do were
the real worries.

Hubert Brett, in the old days of city life, had never breakfasted till
half-past nine. "They sleep in the city, and more is the pity, but you
on the hills, awake!" exhorts the Harrow song. But Hubert did not see
it in that light at all. Nine-thirty had been his hour down in London;
nine-thirty seemed quite good enough up on the Hampstead hills. So
nine-thirty it was--when it was not nine-forty-five.

This w