I cried out in a loud voice, saying, ‘I am.’

’Well, I’m Elizabeth Renshaw.  You wrote to me.  I got your letter sent on from the Registry Office along with ninety others.  But I liked yours the best, so I thought there’d be no ‘arm in coming to see——­’

‘Come in, Elizabeth,’ I said earnestly.  ‘I’m glad you liked my letter.’

I began to wonder if I was not a great writer after all.

CHAPTER II

I piloted Elizabeth in and bade her be seated.  Strangely enough, my usual hopeful expectations entirely deserted me at that moment.  I felt that the interview would be fruitless.  They say hope springs eternal in the human breast, but my breast didn’t feel human just then.  It was throbbing with savage and sanguinary thoughts.  Perhaps it was the eggs.  Many animals are rendered ferocious by an over-diet of meat.  I can testify (so can Henry) that an over-diet of eggs has exactly the same effect on human beings.  I think they stimulate the wrong kind of phagocytes.  They can make the mildest and most forgiving person wild and vindictive.  Henry always declares, when he reads of a man murdering his wife under exceptionally brutal circumstances, that she must have been giving him too many scrambled eggs.  In fact, he wrote articles about it, entitled ‘The Psychology of Diet,’ in the Sunday papers, signed ‘By a Physician.’

Henry is not a physician.  Neither is he ‘An Eminent Surgeon,’ ’A Harley Street Expert,’ an ‘Ex-M.P.,’ ‘A Special Crime Investigator,’ or ‘A Well-known Bishop,’ although he has written under all these pseudonyms.  Do not blame Henry.  In private life he seeks the truth as one who seeks the light, but by profession he is a journalist.  Not being an expert in anything, he can write about everything—­which is the true test of the born journalist.

But to return to Elizabeth.  With the remembrance of the similar interview of only a few hours before still rankling in my mind, I looked at her a little austerely.  This time it was I who began the causerie.

‘First of all I must tell you,’ I said, ’that we have no hot water circulator.’

‘Carn’t abide them things,’ commented Elizabeth; ’they bust sometimes and blows folks up.’

‘We have no outside help,’ I continued.

‘An’ a good thing, too.  One place I was in the char ’elped ’erself to things an’ it was me who was blamed fer it.’

‘We have no gas-cooker.’

’Well, that’s all right, then.  Don’t understand ’em.  Give me a proper kitchen range, that’s all I ask.’

I looked up hopefully.  If all she asked for was a kitchen range I should be glad enough to give her a little thing like that.  But the supreme test was yet to come.  ’We don’t send everything to the laundry,’ I began.

’I ‘ope you don’t,’ she broke in, ’leastways my clothes.  The state they send ’em back, ’arf torn to ribbons.  A girl never ’as ’er ’and out of ‘er pocket buying new things.  Besides, I like a bit o’ washin’—­makes a change, I always say.’