er."

"Miss Louise has been upstairs all the afternoon, ma'am, reading to the
second kitchenmaid, who has the neuralgia. I took up tea to Miss Louise
at a quarter to five o'clock, ma'am."

"Of course, how silly of me. I remember now, I asked her to read the
_Faerie Queene_ to poor Emma, to try to send her to sleep. I always get
some one to read the _Faerie Queene_ to me when I have neuralgia, and it
usually sends me to sleep. Louise doesn't seem to have been successful,
but one can't say she hasn't tried. I expect after the first hour or so
the kitchenmaid would rather have been left alone with her neuralgia, but
of course Louise wouldn't leave off till some one told her to. Anyhow,
you can ring up Mornay's, Robert, and ask whether I left two theatre
tickets there. Except for your silk, Susan, those seem to be the only
things I've forgotten this afternoon. Quite wonderful for me."

TEA

James Cushat-Prinkly was a young man who had always had a settled
conviction that one of these days he would marry; up to the age of thirty-
four he had done nothing to justify that conviction. He liked and
admired a great many women collectively and dispassionately without
singling out one for especial matrimonial consideration, just as one
might admire the Alps without feeling that one wanted any particular peak
as one's own private property. His lack of initiative in this matter
aroused a certain amount of impatience among the sentimentally-minded
women-folk of his home circle; his mother, his sisters, an
aunt-in-residence, and two or three intimate matronly friends regarded
his dilatory approach to the married state with a disapproval that was
far from being inarticulate. His most innocent flirtations were watched
with the straining eagerness which a group of unexercised terriers
concentrates on the slightest movements of a human being who may be
reasonably considered likely to take them for a walk. No decent-souled
mortal can long resist the pleading of several pairs of walk-beseeching
dog-eyes; James Cushat-Prinkly was not sufficiently obstinate or
indifferent to home influences to disregard the obviously expressed wish
of his family that he should become enamoured of some nice marriageable
girl, and when his Uncle Jules departed this life and bequeathed him a
comfortable little legacy it really seemed the correct thing to do to set
about discovering some one to share it with him. The process of
discovery w