For my own part, I like to be mixed up with every good work that's going on in my neighbourhood.

I'm the soup-kitchen, you know, and I'm visitor at the workhouse; and I'm the Dorcas Society, and the Mutual Improvement Class; and the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and to Children, and I'm sure I don't know how much else; so that, what with all that, and what with dear Hugo and the darling children"-- she glanced affectionately at Maisie and Ettie, who sat bolt upright, very mute and still, in their best and stiffest frocks, on two stools in the corner--"I can hardly find time for my social duties." "Oh, dear Mrs.Le Geyt," one of her visitors said with effusion, from beneath a nodding bonnet--she was the wife of a rural dean from Staffordshire--"EVERYBODY is agreed that YOUR social duties are performed to a marvel.

They are the envy of Kensington.

We all of us wonder, indeed, how one woman can find time for all of it!" Our hostess looked pleased.

"Well, yes," she answered, gazing down at her fawn-coloured dress with a half-suppressed smile of self-satisfaction, "I flatter myself I CAN get through about as much work in a day as anybody!" Her eye wandered round her rooms with a modest air of placid self-approval which was almost comic.