“Edwin knows as well as possible when he’s done wrong, Mr. Garnet,” said Mrs. Ukridge.  “He was so sorry after he had killed those other two.”

“Yes,” said Ukridge, “I saw to that.”

“As far as I can see,” I continued, “we’re going strong.  Chicken for breakfast, lunch, and dinner is a shade monotonous, perhaps, but look at the business we’re doing.  We sold a whole heap of eggs last week.”

“But not enough, Garny old man.  We aren’t making our presence felt.  England isn’t ringing with our name.  We sell a dozen eggs where we ought to be selling them by the hundred, carting them off in trucks for the London market and congesting the traffic.  Harrod’s and Whiteley’s and the rest of them are beginning to get on their hind legs and talk.  That’s what they’re doing.  Devilish unpleasant they’re making themselves.  You see, laddie, there’s no denying it—­we did touch them for the deuce of a lot of things on account, and they agreed to take it out in eggs.  All they’ve done so far is to take it out in apologetic letters from Millie.  Now, I don’t suppose there’s a woman alive who can write a better apologetic letter than her nibs, but, if you’re broad-minded and can face facts, you can’t help seeing that the juiciest apologetic letter is not an egg.  I meant to say, look at it from their point of view.  Harrod—­or Whiteley—­comes into his store in the morning, rubbing his hands expectantly.  ‘Well,’ he says, ’how many eggs from Combe Regis to-day?’ And instead of leading him off to a corner piled up with bursting crates, they show him a four-page letter telling him it’ll all come right in the future.  I’ve never run a store myself, but I should think that would jar a chap.  Anyhow, the blighters seem to be getting tired of waiting.”

“The last letter from Harrod’s was quite pathetic,” said Mrs. Ukridge sadly.

I had a vision of an eggless London.  I seemed to see homes rendered desolate and lives embittered by the slump, and millionaires bidding against one another for the few rare specimens which Ukridge had actually managed to despatch to Brompton and Bayswater.

Ukridge, having induced himself to be broad-minded for five minutes, now began to slip back to his own personal point of view and became once more the man with a grievance.  His fleeting sympathy with the wrongs of Mr. Harrod and Mr. Whiteley disappeared.

“What it all amounts to,” he said complainingly, “is that they’re infernally unreasonable.  I’ve done everything possible to meet them.  Nothing could have been more manly and straightforward than my attitude.  I told them in my last letter but three that I proposed to let them have the eggs on the Times instalment system, and they said I was frivolous.  They said that to send thirteen eggs as payment for goods supplied to the value of 25 pounds 1s. 8 1/2 d. was mere trifling.  Trifling, I’ll trouble you!  That’s the spirit in which they meet my suggestions.  It was Harrod