“Well,” contended Dolly, “and what is wrong with that? Enamelling is easy. Look at the way I enamelled that little table in the drawing-room.”
“Yes,” said Phyl, “but you didn’t say anything [249] ]about taking the old wall-paper off first, and you didn’t allow any of your three pounds for it. Mrs. Ellerton says a tin would only do about two yards, and it’s a shilling a tin, so it would cost a frightful lot, pounds and pounds.”
Dolly looked discomfited,—then she revived a little.
“It’s not worse than the time you wrote ‘How to Furnish a House on £100 for a Newly Married Couple,’ and only left two pounds for all the kitchen and laundry,” she said.
Phyl went on writing. When she finished Marston, she seized a Cookery Book and hastily made up an article on “Over the Kitchen Fire.”
“We’ll have to do Answers to Correspondents between us,” said Dolly, “there’s a whole page, and we must fill it.”
No correspondents ever wrote and asked a question of any sort, but the editors would not have considered it possible for a Magazine to be produced without such a page, so they were obliged to make it up, with the help of an Encyclopædia.
Some of this month’s answers ran like this—
Ximenes.—The quotation you ask for is from Browning, “The Last Ride together.” Lest you should not have the book at hand, we give you the context. Here followed twenty favourite lines.
Forget-me-not.—(1) We are sorry to hear your hair is coming out. Have you tried ammonia for it? Wash [250] ]it once a week, and do not use curling-tongs. (2) The books you refer to are Alton Locke and the Essays of Elia. (3) No.