[Illustration:  The menace of may.

Austen chambermaid (to John Bull). “Your tea and the morning paper,
sir.”]

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Charlady (on the subject of appearance). “Of course I don’t bother now—­but I used to be able to tread on my ’air.”]

* * * * *

Civilian flying, 1930.

“You’re late,” said Millie, as John entered the hall and shook himself free of his flying coat.

“Yes, dear; missed the 5.40 D.H. from the Battersea Park Take-off by a minute to-night.  Jones brought me home on that neat little knock-about spad he’s just bought.  Small two-seater arrangement, you know.  Then I walked from the ’drome just to stretch myself.  They don’t give you too much move space in those planettes.”

“Oh, I’d just love to have an aeroplanette like that!” exclaimed Millie.  “Mrs. Smith says she simply couldn’t do without hers now; it makes her so independent.  She can pop up to town, do her shopping and get back in a short afternoon.”

“Um—­yes,” calculated John.  “Less than seventy miles the double journey—­she’d manage that all right.”

“And that pilot of theirs,” went on Millie, “seems just as safe with the ‘pup’ as he is with that great twin-engined bus her husband is so keen on.”

“Yes,” said John; “must be quite an undertaking getting Smith’s tri-plane on the sky-way.  It’s useful for a family party, though.  I hear he packed twenty or thirty on to it for the picnic they had at John-o’-Groat’s last week.  By the way,” added John, as he moved upstairs, “aren’t the Robinsons coming to dinner?”

“Yes, you’d better hurry up and change,” advised Millie.

The Robinsons were very up-to-date people, John decided as they sat down to the meal a little later.  He hadn’t met them before.  They were Millie’s friends.

“Very glad to know such near neighbours,” he said cordially.  “Why, it’s under forty miles to your place, I should think.”

“Forty-seven kilos, to be exact,” Robinson volunteered, “and I should say we did it under twenty minutes.”

“Quite good flying,” said John.

“We came by the valley route, too,” put in Mrs. Robinson.  “John was good enough to consider my wretched air-pocket nerves rather than his petrol.”

“It’s a couple of miles further,” explained Robinson, “but my wife isn’t such a stout flier as her mother, though the old lady is over seventy.  My pilot was bringing her from Town one afternoon last week—­took the Dorking-Leith Hill air-way, you know, always bumpy over there—­and I suppose from all accounts he must have dropped her a hundred feet plumb, side-slipped and got into a spinning dive and only pulled the old bus out again when the furrows in a ploughed field below them had grown easily countable.”