The wedding-cake was a great big war loaf stuck with flags.  Juno cut it in old-fashioned style with Portcullis’s sword.  While we were doing ourselves well with war-bread and margarine, boiled eggs and plenty of champagne, the Controller of Wedding Breakfasts blew in (it’s a new post, and he’s two hundred and fifty able-bodied young assistants).  He was curious to see what we were having, and cautioned us against throwing any rice after our bride and ’groom.  “But how absurd, you ricky person!” chipped in Popsy, Lady Ramsgate, who, of course, is Juno’s great-aunt. “We never throw rice at our wedding-people! That’s only done by the outlying tribes of barbarians.”  It was a pity she attracted his notice, for he was down on her directly for having on a toque almost entirely made of young turnips and carrots.  He said it was “an infraction of rule 150, cap. 4,500 of the Safety of the Empire Act, forbidding the use of the people’s food for personal adornment.”

The Allotment expression, which is the correct one now, is a look of interest and expectation, because what one’s planted is coming up. Some people rather spoil their Allotment expression by a puzzled look. Et pourquoi? dear, they’ve quite forgotten what they planted, and, though they pretend they know exactly what it is that’s coming up, they really haven’t the slightest!

My last photo is considered to show the Allotment expression in utter perfection. (It’s been in People of Position, Mayfair Murmurs, and several other weeklies.) I’m standing in my potato-patch (my Allotment toilette is finished off by a pair of enthralling little hob-nailed boots!) and I’m holding a rake and a hoe and a digging-fork in one hand and a garden-hose in the other; there’s a wheel-barrow beside me, and I’m looking at the potato-plants with the true Allotment smile, my dearest.  I sent a copy of this picky to Norty, and under it I wrote those famous last words of some celebrated Frenchman (I forget whether it was MOLIERE or MIRABEAU or NAPOLEON):  “Je vais chercher un grand peut-etre!”

Wee-Wee is frightfully worried about Bo-Bo being so overworked.  He used to be at the head of the Department for Telling People What to Do, and he and his five hundred assistants were worked half dead; and now he’s at the head of a still newer department, the one for Telling People What They’re Not to Do, and, though he’s eight hundred clerks to help him, Wee-Wee says the strain is too great for words.  He goes to Whitehall at ten every day and comes back at three!  And then he has the Long-Ago treatment that’s being used so much now for war-frayed nerves.  The idea is to get people as far away from the present as poss.  So when Bo-Bo comes in from Whitehall he lies down on a fearful old worm-eaten oak settle in a dim room hung with moth-eaten tapestry, and Wee-Wee reads CHAUCER to him, and sings ghastly little folk-songs, accompanying herself on a thing called a crwth—­(it’s a tremendously primitive sort of harp, but I can’t believe that even a crwth meant to make such a horrible noise as Wee-Wee makes on it!).  Myself, I don’t consider Bo-Bo a bit the better for the Long-Ago treatment, and there’s certainly a wild look in his eyes that wasn’t there before!