There is a pump in the back yard.  There is no telephone, no electric light, no hot water system, no attendance, and no modern comfort whatever.  Tradesmen are forbidden to call.  There is no charge for residence in this house.

“It certainly sounds an unusual place,” admitted Sarah Brown.  “Is the house always full?”

“Never,” said the witch.  “A lot of people can swallow everything but the last clause.  We have at present one guest, called Peony.”

She replaced the prospectus in the drawer, which she then tried to shut.  While she was engaged in this thundering endeavour, Sarah Brown noticed that the drawer was full of the little paper packets which she had seen the day before in the witch’s possession.

“What do you do with your magic?” she asked.

“Oh, many things.  Chiefly I use it as an ingredient for happiness, sometimes to remind people, and sometimes to make them forget.  It seems to me that some people take happiness rather tragically.”

“I find,” said Sarah Brown, rather sententiously, “that I always owe my happiness to earth, never to heaven.”

“How d’you mean heaven?” said the witch.  “I know nothing about heaven.  When I used to work in the City, I bought a little book about heaven to read in the Tube every morning.  I thought I should grow daily better.  But I couldn’t see that I did.”

Sarah Brown was naturally astonished to meet any one who did not know all about heaven.  But she continued the pursuit of her ideas on happiness.  Sarah Brown meant to write a book some day, if she could find a really inspiring exercise-book to start in.  She thought herself rather good at ideas—­poor Sarah Brown, she simply had to be confident about something.  She was only inwardly articulate, I think, not outwardly at all, but sometimes she could talk about herself.

“Heaven has given me wretched health, but never gave me youth enough to make the wretchedness adventurous,” she went on.  “Heaven gave me a thin skin, but never gave me the natural and comforting affections.  Heaven probably meant to make a noble woman of me by encrusting me in disabilities, but it left out the necessary nobility at the last moment; it left out, in fact, all the compensations.  But luckily I have found the compensations for myself; I just had to find something.  Men and women have given me everything that such as I could expect.  I have never met with reasonless enmity, never met with meanness, never met with anything more unbearable than natural indifference, from any man or woman.  I have been, I may say, a burden and a bore all over the world; I have been an ill and fretful stranger within all men’s gates; I have asked much and given nothing; I have never been a friend.  Nobody has ever expected any return from me, yet nothing was grudged.  Landladies, policemen, chorus girls, social bounders, prostitutes, the natural enemies, one would say, of such as I, have given me kindness, and often much that they could not easily spare, and always amusement and distraction....”