“And have you had any success with the incubator?  I love incubators.  I have always wanted to have one of my own, but we have never kept fowls.”

“The incubator has not done all that it should have done,” I said.  “Ukridge looks after it, and I fancy his methods are not the right methods.  I don’t know if I have got the figures absolutely correct, but Ukridge reasons on these lines.  He says you are supposed to keep the temperature up to a hundred and five degrees.  I think he said a hundred and five.  Then the eggs are supposed to hatch out in a week or so.  He argues that you may just as well keep the temperature at seventy-two, and wait a fortnight for your chickens.  I am certain there’s a fallacy in the system somewhere, because we never seem to get as far as the chickens.  But Ukridge says his theory is mathematically sound, and he sticks to it.”

“Are you quite sure that the way you are doing it is the best way to manage a chicken farm?”

“I should very much doubt it.  I am a child in these matters.  I had only seen a chicken in its wild state once or twice before we came down here.  I had never dreamed of being an active assistant on a real farm.  The whole thing began like Mr. George Ade’s fable of the Author.  An Author—­myself—­was sitting at his desk trying to turn out any old thing that could be converted into breakfast-food when a friend came in and sat down on the table, and told him to go right on and not mind him.”

“Did Mr. Ukridge do that?”

“Very nearly that.  He called at my rooms one beautiful morning when I was feeling desperately tired of London and overworked and dying for a holiday, and suggested that I should come to Combe Regis with him and help him farm chickens.  I have not regretted it.”

“It is a lovely place, isn’t it?”

“The loveliest I have ever seen.  How charming your garden is.”

“Shall we go and look at it?  You have not seen the whole of it.”

As she rose, I saw her book, which she had laid face downwards on the grass beside her.  It was the same much-enduring copy of the “Manoeuvres of Arthur.”  I was thrilled.  This patient perseverance must surely mean something.  She saw me looking at it.

“Did you draw Pamela from anybody?” she asked suddenly.

I was glad now that I had not done so.  The wretched Pamela, once my pride, was for some reason unpopular with the only critic about whose opinion I cared, and had fallen accordingly from her pedestal.

As we wandered down from the garden paths, she gave me her opinion of the book.  In the main it was appreciative.  I shall always associate the scent of yellow lupin with the higher criticism.

“Of course, I don’t know anything about writing books,” she said.

“Yes?” my tone implied, or I hope it did, that she was an expert on books, and that if she was not it didn’t matter.