uite the
best verse in it went something like this--

"Have you heard the groan of a gravelled grouse,
Or the snarl of a snaffled snail
(Husband or mother, like me, or spouse),
Have you lain a-creep in the darkened house
Where the wounded wombats wail?"

It was quite improbable that anyone had, you know, and that's where it
stimulated the imagination and took people out of their narrow, humdrum
selves. No one has ever called me narrow or humdrum, but even I felt
worked up now and then at the thought of that house with the stricken
wombats in it. It simply wasn't nice. But the editors were unanimous in
leaving it alone; they said the thing had been done before and done
worse, and that the market for that sort of work was extremely limited.

It was just on the top of that discouragement that the Duchess wanted me
to write something in her album--something Persian, you know, and just a
little bit decadent--and I thought a quatrain on an unwholesome egg would
meet the requirements of the case. So I started in with--

"Cackle, cackle, little hen,
How I wonder if and when
Once you laid the egg that I
Met, alas! too late. Amen."

The Duchess objected to the Amen, which I thought gave an air of
forgiveness and _chose jugee_ to the whole thing; also she said it wasn't
Persian enough, as though I were trying to sell her a kitten whose mother
had married for love rather than pedigree. So I recast it entirely, and
the new version read--

"The hen that laid thee moons ago, who knows
In what Dead Yesterday her shades repose;
To some election turn thy waning span
And rain thy rottenness on fiscal foes."

I thought there was enough suggestion of decay in that to satisfy a
jackal, and to me there was something infinitely pathetic and appealing
in the idea of the egg having a sort of St. Luke's summer of commercial
usefulness. But the Duchess begged me to leave out any political
allusions; she's the president of a Women's Something or other, and she
said it might be taken as an endorsement of deplorable methods. I never
can remember which Party Irene discourages with her support, but I shan't
forget an occasion when I was staying at her place and she gave me a
pamphlet to leave at the house of a doubtful voter, and some grapes and
things for a woman who was suffering from a chill on the top of a patent
medicine. I thought it much cleverer to give the grapes to the former
and the