Perhaps you trace in all this a certain bitterness, a veiled antagonism on my part towards Henry; you may even imagine that we are a bickering sort of couple, constantly trying to get the better of each other.  If so, you are mistaken.  Up to six months before this story opens our married life had been ideal—­for which reason I didn’t open the story earlier.  Ideal marriages (to any one except the contracting parties) are uninteresting affairs.  It is such a pity that the good, the laudable, things in life generally are.

One of the reasons why our union was ideal (up to six months before this story opens) was that we shared identical tastes.  Comradeship is the true basis of—­but perhaps you have read my articles on the subject on the Woman’s Page of the Daily Trail.  I always advise girls to marry men of their own temperament.  As a matter of fact, I expect they marry the men who are easiest to land, but you’re not allowed to say things like that (on the Woman’s Page).  We have pure and noble ideals, we are tender, motherly and housewifely (on the Woman’s Page).

Henry and I were of the same temperament.  For one thing, we were equally incompetent at golf.  Perhaps I foozled my drive rather worse than Henry, but then he never took fewer than five strokes on the green, whereas I have occasionally done it in four.  Then we mutually detested gramophones.  But when we discovered that we could both play ‘Caller Herrin’’ on the piano with one finger (entirely by ear) we felt that we were affinities, and got married shortly afterwards.

Stevenson once said, ’Marriage is not a bed of roses; it is a field of battle.’  At the epoch of which I write Henry and I had not got to turning machine-guns on each other.  At the most we only had diplomatic unpleasantnesses.  The position, however, was getting strained.  I realized quite clearly that if we didn’t obtain domestic help of some sort very soon it might come to open hostilities.  Isn’t it surprising how the petty annoyances of life can wear away the strong bulwarks of trust and friendship formed by years of understanding?  Our particular bulwarks were becoming quite shaky through nothing else but having to muddle through the dull sordid grind of cooking and housework by ourselves.  We were getting disillusioned with each other.  No ‘jaundiced eye that casts discolouration’ could look more jaundiced than Henry’s when I asked him to dry up the dinner things.

Having explained all this, you will now understand something of my feelings when, on going to answer a knock at the door, I was confronted by a solid female who said she had been sent from the Registry Office.  Oh, thrice blessed Registry Office that had answered my call.

‘Come in,’ I said eagerly, and, leading the way into the dining-room, I seated myself before her.  With lowered eyes and modest mien I was, of course, waiting for her to speak first.  I did not wait long.  Her voice, concise and direct, rapped out:  ‘So you require a cook-general?’