work to
provide a dainty meal.

"High Tea" consisted as a rule of coffee and some light dish, the
materials for which were purchased on the way home. On hungry days,
when work had been unusually trying, the butcher supplied cutlets, which
were grilled with tomatoes, or an occasional quarter of a pound of
mushrooms: on economical days the humble kipper--legendary food of all
spinsters in lodgings!--was transformed into quite a smart and
restaurant-ey dish, separated from its bones, pounded with butter and
flavouring, and served in neat little mounds on the top of hot buttered
toast. Moreover, Claire was a proficient in the making of omelettes,
and it was astonishing how large and tempting a dish could be compounded
of two eggs, and the minutest scrap of ham left over from the morning's
breakfast!

"Every luxury of the season, with the smell thrown in! In _nice_
cooking the smell is almost the best part. All the cedars in Lebanon
wouldn't smell as good at this moment as this nice ham-ey coffee-y
frizzle," Claire declared one Friday evening as she served the meal on
red-hot plates, and glowed with delight at her own sleight of hand.
"Don't you admire eggs for looking so small, when they possess such
powers of expansion? All the result of beating. Might make a simile
out of that, mightn't you?"

"Might, but won't," the English teacher replied, sipping luxuriously at
her coffee. "I'm not a teacher any more at this moment. I'm a
gourmand, pure and simple, and I'll stay a gourmand straight on till
this omelette is finished. When all trades fail, you might go out as a
missioner to women living in diggings, and teach them how to prepare
their meals, and sell chafing-dishes by instalment payments at the door,
as the touts sell sewing machines to the maids. It would be a noble
vocation!"

Claire smirked complacently. "I flatter myself I _have_ made a
difference to your material comfort! Poor we may be, but we do have
nice, dainty little meals, and there's no reason why every able-bodied
woman shouldn't have them at the same cost. I've just remembered
another nice dish. We'll have it to-morrow night." She paused, and a
wistful look came into her eyes, for the next day was Saturday, and it
was on holiday afternoons that the feeling of loneliness grew most
acute. School life was monotonous, but it was never lonely; from
morning to night one lived in a crowd, and already each class had
furnished youthful adorers