d Charles, "that it is usual to offer one's guests the most
comfortable arm-chair in the messuage and not to eat all the fattest
strawberries oneself, I can't say that I do;" and he fluffed a second
mashie pitch with his cigar ash well short of the drawing-room fender.

"You don't," I insisted, "remark any unusual hiatus in the household
arrangements--anything that obviously betrays the absence of the
feminine touch? I suppose you know what this is?" and I took from the
mantelpiece a tall slender silver object.

"It seems to be a tin trumpet," replied Charles, "and why on earth you
can't keep my godson's toys in the nursery, instead of littering them
about----"

"Tin trumpet," I said cleverly, "be blowed! It is a vase--variously
pronounced to rhyme with 'parse' or 'pause,' according to one's
pretensions to gentility. It is a flower-vase, Chawles, and, what is
more, there ought to be flowers in it. The whole house, let me tell you,
should be a very garden of fragrant and luscious blooms. Instead of
which it is full of mocking cenotaphs such as this. When Araminta went
away she flung over her shoulder a parasol and a Parthian taunt. She
said, 'I'm certain there'll be no flowers in the house while I'm away,'
and now it seems she was jolly well right."

"Why ever can't the servants attend to the flowers?" said Charles
lazily. "They seem to be fairly competent people. There were four
match-boxes and _The Return of Sherlock Holmes_ in my bedroom."

"There you touch one of the deeper mysteries," I explained to him.
"Probably in the most expensive and luxurious mansions they have a
flower-maid. A kind of Persephone who comes up from the underworld with
her arms full of gerania and calceolarias. 'Housemaid,' she would put it
in the advertisements, 'upper (where manservant kept); tall, of good
appearance; free; several years' experience; understands vawses.' And in
houses such as these the cinerarias would never wither or die. Every
what-not would be a riotous profusion of et-ceteras from week's-end to
week's-end. But with Jane it is different. Jane has her limitations. She
comprehends match-boxes and detective fiction, but Araminta does the
flowers."

"Well, what do you want me to do about it?" said Charles, bunkering his
cigar-stump badly to the right of the coal-scuttle.

"I want you to help me," I told him, "because I shan't have time to
attend to the matter myself. When I go out to-morrow I want you, before
you leave