"It is so untidy," murmured Bee.
"Well, who will see it?"
I am one of those who cleanse the outside of the desk and the bureau.
"Now, Billy, my precious, if you will keep away from Tattah all the morning, I will give you some candy directly after dinner. You will find it on the sconce just where I always put it," I said.
The sconce is where Billy and I put things for each other. He is only three and a half—"thrippence, ha'penny," he says if you ask him, but beguiling—oh, as beguiling as Cleopatra, or the serpent in the Garden of Eden, or—or as his mother!
Billy and I went to look at the sconce on my way up-stairs, and he called me back twice, saying, "Tattah, I want to kiss you," which I could but feel was something due to the promised candy on the sconce.
I sat down and began to write:
Mr. and Mrs. Jimmie at Canterbury.
Mrs. Jimmie, having been presented at the Court of St. James, always has more to do in London than she can attend to. As Jimmie hates functions with all the hatred of the American business man who looks upon gloves as for warmth only, this leaves Jimmie and me to roam around London at will. Mrs. Jimmie loathes the top of a "'bus" and absolutely draws the line at "The Cheshire Cheese." She lunches at Scott's and dines at the Savoy, while Jimmie and I are never so happy as in the grill-room at the Trocadero or in a hansom, threading the mazes of the City, bound for a plate of beefsteak pie at "The Cheshire Cheese" or on top of a 'bus on Saturday night, going through the Whitechapel region, creepy with horrors of "Jack the Ripper."
"What in all the world is a beefsteak pie?" she asked us, when she heard our unctuous exclamations.