"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 was the one fixed meal of the day.... Now work put in its claim.
At breakfast, he told people, was the only time that he could skim the daily; he was so intensely busy; and certainly he propped the Telegraph before him on the table every morning (this shocked Helena at first, for she had not seen any farces and had no notion it was ever done); but somehow or other he appeared never to have quite finished just the paragraph that he was reading when the meal concluded. There was an armchair temptingly near alike to table, fire, and cigarettes.
Helena's first important duty was to steer him tactfully from this chair to the harder one whereon he sat to write. She must not jar him, must not hurry him, or he lost every one of his ideas, and it was all her fault at lunch.... But, on the other hand, she must not let him sit there, gazing at a thrice-read page—"thinking out my day's work," he called it—till too late. This she certainly did not desire to do, for Lily never was allowed to come and clear the meal away till he had gone into his study (that upset him, too), so that delay bred chaos in the household.
When once, however, he was safely at his writing-table, all was quiet, must be, until lunch-time. These were his best hours for work. The small house brooded under a funereal silence.
Lunch was a movable affair.