s at home to finish my
list of Coleoptera, and get some dissecting and mounting done. But
to-day, Mrs. Minchin brought her work directly after breakfast, and that
empty-headed fellow Elliott dropped in for lunch, and we had callers all
the afternoon, and a _coterie_ for tea, and Mrs. St. John (who seems to
get through life somehow without the most indefinite notion of how time
passes) came in just when tea was over, and you had to order a fresh
supply when we should have been dressing for dinner, and the dinner was
spoilt by waiting till she discovered that she had no idea (whoever did
know her have an idea?) how late it was, and that Mr. St. John would be
so angry. And now you want me to go in a cab to a concert at the Rooms
to meet all these people over again!"

"I'm sure I don't care for Mrs. St. John a bit more than you do," said
Mrs. Buller. "And really she does repeat such things sometimes--without
ever looking round to see if the girls are in the room. She told me a
thing to-day that old Lady Watford had told her."

"My dear, her ladyship's stories are well known. Cremorne's wife hears
them from her, and tells them to her husband, and he tells them to the
other fellows. I can always hear them if I wish. But I do not care to.
But if you don't like Mrs. St. John, Theresa, what on earth made you
ask her to come and sit with you in the morning?"

"Well, my dear, what can I do?" said Mrs. Buller. "She's always saying
that everybody is so unsociable, and that she is so dull, she doesn't
know what to do with herself, and begging me to take my work and go and
sit with her in a morning. How can I go and leave the children and the
servants, just at the time of day when everything wants to be set going?
So I thought I'd better ask her to come here instead. It's a great bore,
but I can keep an eye over the house, and if any one else drops in I can
leave them together. It's not me that she wants, it's something to amuse
her.

"You talk about my having nothing to do," Aunt Theresa plaintively
continued. "But I'm sure I can hardly sleep at night sometimes for
thinking of all I ought to do and haven't done. Mrs. Jerrold, you know,
made me promise faithfully when we were coming away to write to her
every mail, and I never find time. Every week, as it comes round, I
think I will, and can't. I used to think that one good thing about
coming home would be the no more writing for the English mail; but the
Indian mail is quite as b