you to it.'

And so Henrietta began the work which kept her amazingly happy, fed
and sheltered her mother, who sat all day slowly making beautiful baby
linen for one of the big shops, and cemented Henrietta's friendship
with the lachrymose Mrs. Banks. To be faced with a mutton bone and a
few vegetables, to have to wrest from these poor materials an
appetizing meal, was like an exciting game, and she played it with
zest and with success. She had the dubious pleasure of hearing Mr.
Jenkins smack his lips and seeing him distend his nostrils with
anticipation; the unalloyed one of watching the pale face of little
Miss Stubb, the typist, grow delicately pink and less dangerously
thin, under the stimulus of good food; the amusement of congratulating
Mrs. Banks, in public, on her new cook, and seeing Mrs. Banks, at the
head of the supper table, nod her head with important secrecy.

'I've made out,' she told Henrietta, 'that I've a daily girl, without
a character, that's how I can afford her, in the basement, but I must
say it's made that Jenkins mighty keen on fetching his own boots of a
morning, but no lodgers below-stairs is my rule. You look out for
Jenkins, my dear. He's no good. I know his sort.'

'Oh, I can manage Mr. Jenkins, too,' Henrietta said, and indeed she
made a point of bringing him to the hardly manageable state for the
amusement of proving her capacity. She despised him, but not for
nothing was she Reginald Mallett's daughter; and Mr. Jenkins and the
butcher and a gloomy old gentleman who emerged from his bedroom to
eat, and locked himself up between meals, were the only men she knew.
No doubt Mrs. Mallett, placidly sewing, was alive to the attentions
and frustrations of Mr. Jenkins and had planned her letter to her