It was a custom to which I was determined to cling with grim resolution.  If I allowed his treatment of me to become too casual we might continue to drift apart even when we had some one to do the washing-up.

Henry came over to me and bestowed a labial salute.  It is the only adequate description I can give of the performance.  Then I went to the kitchen and got out the cookery-book.

It is a remarkable thing that I am never able to cook anything without the aid of the book.  Even if I prepare the same dish seven times a week I must have the printed instructions constantly before me, or I am lost.  This is especially strange, because I have a retentive memory for other things.  My mind is crammed with odd facts retained from casual reading.  If you asked me, the date of the Tai-ping Rebellion (though you’re not likely to) I could tell you at once that it originated in 1850 and was not suppressed until 1864, for I remember reading about it in a dentist’s waiting-room when I was fifteen.  Yet although I prepared scrambled eggs one hundred times in six months (Henry said it was much oftener than that) I had to pore over the instructions as earnestly when doing my ‘century’ as on the first occasion.

The subsequent meal was taken in silence.  The hay-fever from which I am prone to suffer at all seasons of the year was particularly persistent that evening.  A rising irritability, engendered by leathery eggs and fostered by Henry’s expression, was taking possession of me.  Quite suddenly I discovered that the way he held his knife annoyed me.  Further, his manner of eating soup maddened me.  But I restrained myself.  I merely remarked:  ’You have finished your soup, I hear, love.’  We had not yet reached the stage of open rupture when I could exclaim:  ‘For goodness’ sake stop swilling down soup like a grampus!’ I have never heard a grampus take soup.  But the expression seems picturesque.

Henry, too, had not quite lost his fortitude.  My hay-fever was obviously annoying him, but he only commented:  ’Don’t you think you ought to go to a doctor—­a really reliable man—­with that distressing nasal complaint of yours, my dear?’ I knew, however, that he was longing to bark out:  ’Can’t you do something to stop that everlasting sniffing?  It’s driving me mad, woman.’

How long would it be before we reached this stage of debacle?  I brooded.  Then the front door bell rang.

‘You go,’ I said to Henry.

‘No, you go,’ he replied.  ’It looks bad for a man if he is master of the house to answer the door.’

I do not know why it should look bad for a man to answer his own door unless he is a bad man.  But there are some things in our English social system which will ever remain unquestioned.  I rose and went to open the front door.  The light from the hall lamp fell dimly on a lank female form which stood on the doorstep.  Out of the dusk a voice spoke to me.  It said, ‘I think you’re wantin’ a cook-general?’