And at dinner there are the cold mutton and salad all right; but to your horror you are asked first to eat a slice of salmon with two boiled potatoes.

“Good heavens!” you say, “what’s this?”

“Well, Sir [or ’M], the fishmonger called, and as I felt sure the cold meat couldn’t be enough for you....”

Summoning all your courage you protest again, adding, “And another thing, Mrs. Legion; you mustn’t make any more pastry.  The flour can’t be spared.  It’s not only bread we’ve got to be careful about, but everything made with flour.”

“Then what’s the flour for?”

“That’s all right.  But it’s got to be saved.”

“I don’t understand, Sir [or ’M].  I can’t see why it shouldn’t be used if we have it.”

“No.  The idea is that every one should go without flour as much as possible, and then there will be more and it will last longer.  More for other people.”

“My duty is to this house, Sir [or ’M].  But the flour’s so coarse and brown it’s hardly worth using, anyhow.  I never saw such stuff.  It’s a scandal.  But I’m truly sorry if I’ve disappointed you.  All I want to do is my duty.”

“You have, Mrs. Legion, you have.  You’ve been splendid; but the time has come now to eat less and to eat more simply.  Is that clear?”

“Well, I hear you right enough, Sir [or ’M], but I can’t say I understand it.  War or no war, I don’t hold with folks being starved.”

And there it breaks off, only, of course, to begin again.

That is Mrs. Legion!—­one of the hardest nuts that Lord DEVONPORT has to crack.  She doesn’t hold with Lords poking their noses into people’s kitchens, anyway.  That’s not her idea of how Lords ought to behave.  Lords not only ought to be gentlefolk, and be fed and waited upon and live in affluent idleness, but super-gentlefolk.  But then she doesn’t hold with many modern things.  She doesn’t (for one) hold with the War.

* * * * *

[Illustration:  Sergeant-Major.  “AIN’T YOU GOT THAT BIVVY BUILT YET, ME LAD?  GAWD BLESS MY SOUL, I COULD HA’ KNITTED IT IN HALF THE TIME.”]

* * * * *

AT THE PLAY.

“WANTED A HUSBAND.”

You will easily guess that a comedy (or farce) in which a woman is reduced to advertising in the Press for a husband belongs to the ante-bellum era, before the glad eye of the flapper became a permanent feature of the landscape.  Indeed Mr. CYRIL HARCOURT’S play might belong to just any year since the time when women first began to write those purple tales of passion that are so bad for the morals of the servants’ hall.  It was simply to get copy for this kind of stuff that Mabel Vere (most improbably pretty in the person of Miss GLADYS COOPER) advertised for a husband, for this post had already been assigned to the dullest and stuffiest of fiances.  I dare not think how the theme might have been treated in French hands, but Mr. HARCOURT is very firm about the proprieties.  My only fear was that the gallery might mistake his rather second-rate people for gentlefolk.  In what kind of club, I wonder, do members reply to matrimonial advertisements and make bets about the result of their applications?  I should be sorry to think that anybody attributes such conduct to the habitues of the Athenaeum.