When the Kerrs had been housekeeping for a week, the butcher and baker and the rest of the clan each dropped through the letter-slit in the front door of No. 30 a very clean, spruce, new book, and the young wife gathered them up with eager trepidation.  She had been washing up, when the books arrived, all the dinner things left over from the night before, and the breakfast things of this morning, and from the kitchen she heard and recognised the blunt thump as each record of her housekeeping talents or failings dropped upon the hall floor.  She rushed out, collected them, and retired to the dining-room hearthrug to meet her responsibilities.

She knew the sum total was all wrong; her mother’s tradesmen’s books never reached this figure.  Yet people must eat, mustn’t they?  And wash with soap?  And have boot polish, and cleaning things, and candles for their dinner-table?

She asked herself, as so many young wives have done, half-sorrowing, half-injured:  “But what have we had?  I’ve been awf’ly careful.  I couldn’t have managed with less.  I shall tell Osborn that it simply can’t be done for less—­”

She shut the books one by one.  “But it must,” she said to herself.  “Our income is—­”

She figured out, with pencil and paper and much distaste, their weekly income; she compared it with the sum total of the tradesmen’s books, and to that one must add rent, and travel, and holidays and doctor’s expenses.

Doctor’s expenses?  Cut that item out.  One must never be ill, that’s all.

She was glad she was going to meet Osborn that afternoon, and have tea with him in the West End; he was to beg off early specially for it.

The flat seemed very silent.  What a deserted place!  It would be nice to go out and see someone, speak to someone.

She went to lie down.

She lay on her pink quilt, and began on that castle again.  It was a fine place, a real family seat.  While she built, she manicured her finger nails, looking at them critically.  She had not begun to spoil them yet, thanks to the rubber gloves and the housemaid’s gloves with which Osborn had declared his eternal readiness to provide her.  No one would feel it more deeply than Osborn if one of those slim fingers were burned or soiled or roughened ever so little.

She had a few coppers only in her private purse, but they would carry her to Osborn, the legal fount of supply.  Out into a fine afternoon she stepped lightly, and the admiring hall porter watched her go.  He was not so certain of her, though, for he had seen many young brides pass through his portals, in and out every day, ridden always by some small fretting care till they trembled at the sight of someone who was always looking, through their ageing clothes, at the ill-kept secrets of their pockets.  He had entered in his memoranda that the Kerrs rented only a forty-pound flat.

Heedless of the hall porter, Marie was away upon her joyous errand.  She was very young, very healthy, and she looked ravishing.  These things she knew, and they were enough.  She went upon the top of an omnibus to the City street where was her rendezvous, but in her gala suit, her gala hat, and the furs which had nearly broken Mrs. Amber, she felt immensely superior to such humble mode of travel.