who did that.  I’ve never met Harrod personally, but I’d like to, just to ask him if that’s his idea of cementing amiable business relations.  He knows just as well as anyone else that without credit commerce has no elasticity.  It’s an elementary rule.  I’ll bet he’d have been sick if chappies had refused to let him have tick when he was starting his store.  Do you suppose Harrod, when he started in business, paid cash down on the nail for everything?  Not a bit of it.  He went about taking people by the coat-button and asking them to be good chaps and wait till Wednesday week.  Trifling!  Why, those thirteen eggs were absolutely all we had over after Mrs. Beale had taken what she wanted for the kitchen.  As a matter of fact, if it’s anybody’s fault, it’s Mrs. Beale’s.  That woman literally eats eggs.”

“The habit is not confined to her,” I said.

“Well, what I mean to say is, she seems to bathe in them.”

“She says she needs so many for puddings, dear,” said Mrs. Ukridge.  “I spoke to her about it yesterday.  And of course, we often have omelettes.”

“She can’t make omelettes without breaking eggs,” I urged.

“She can’t make them without breaking us, dammit,” said Ukridge.  “One or two more omelettes, and we’re done for.  No fortune on earth could stand it.  We mustn’t have any more omelettes, Millie.  We must economise.  Millions of people get on all right without omelettes.  I suppose there are families where, if you suddenly produced an omelette, the whole strength of the company would get up and cheer, led by father.  Cancel the omelettes, old girl, from now onward.”

“Yes, dear.  But—­”

“Well?”

“I don’t think Mrs. Beale would like that very much, dear.  She has been complaining a good deal about chicken at every meal.  She says that the omelettes are the only things that give her a chance.  She says there are always possibilities in an omelette.”

“In short,” I said, “what you propose to do is deliberately to remove from this excellent lady’s life the one remaining element of poetry.  You mustn’t do it.  Give Mrs. Beale her omelettes, and let’s hope for a larger supply of eggs.”

“Another thing,” said Ukridge.  “It isn’t only that there’s a shortage of eggs.  That wouldn’t matter so much if only we kept hatching out fresh squads of chickens.  I’m not saying the hens aren’t doing their best.  I take off my hat to the hens.  As nice a hard-working lot as I ever want to meet, full of vigour and earnestness.  It’s that damned incubator that’s letting us down all the time.  The rotten thing won’t work. I don’t know what’s the matter with it.  The long and the short of it is that it simply declines to incubate.”

“Perhaps it’s your dodge of letting down the temperature.  You remember, you were telling me?  I forget the details.”

“My dear old boy,” he said earnestly, “there’s nothing wrong with my figures.  It’s a mathematical certainty.  What’s the good of mathematics if not to help you work out that sort of thing?  No, there’s something deuced wrong with the machine itself, and I shall probably make a complaint to the people I got it from.  Where did we get the incubator, old girl?”