ting over the fire there gossiping with the young, mauve-clad
monthly nurse.

"Must I go down? Oh, what a nuisance; now I'll have to change," began my
mistress, but I was firm.

"You'll go down in your garden tweeds and your brown boots as you are,"
I said, "so as not to keep the people waiting."

"What style of people are they? What do they look like, dear?" put in Vi
Vassity eagerly. She has been strangling yawns all the morning, and I am
sure she was only too delighted at the idea of seeing a fresh face. "Any
nice boys with them?"

"No. No men at all----"

"Never are, in the country. Yet people wonder nobody takes any notice of
being told to get back to the land!" said London's Love, rising to her
tiny kid-shod feet, and refastening a suspender through the slit in her
skirt. "What are the women like? Country rectory?"

"Yes, one lot were," I reported. "The others that came in the motor wore
sort of very French hats and feather boas, and look as if they never
walked."

"Charity matinee," commented England's Premier Comedienne, bustling to
the door. "It's a shame not to dress for 'em. I shan't be long, Nellie.
You and Ag go down first."

"How can I go down to the company until I've given my little Basil his
four o'clock feed?" protested the ventriloquist's wife. She held out her
arms for the long white bundle of shawls that Olive, the young nurse,
lifted from the cradle set on two chairs in the corner of the room.
"Nellie'll have to make her entrance alone."

And she did.

The confidence in herself that was first inspired by the Honourable Jim
has been greatly fostered by Mr. Hiram P. Jessop. So I was not afraid
that Miss Million would be really overpoweringly shy, even on entering a
drawing-room full of strange callers.

I left her at the drawing-room door, and was hastening kitchenwards
again to bring out the tea when the front-door bell rang once more. I
opened it to two very tall girls in Burberry mackintoshes.

They were both young; one had a long black plait down her back. Both of
them wore the same expression of suppressed and gleeful, giggling
excitement as I told them that Miss Million was at home.

"Then, now for it!" breathed the flapper with the plait, in a gale of a
whisper, as I took her mackintosh. Both girls were in blue serge
underneath, of a cut more chastened than their arrogantly young voices.
"I wonder what on earth she's going to be like!"

"Alice! Do shut up!" muttered the elder