, not exactly," said Mrs. Peter, anxious to whitewash her husband a
little greyer than she was painting him. "He would never touch anything
he found lying about, but he can't resist making a raid on things that
are locked up. The doctors have a special name for it. He must have
pounced on your portmanteau the moment you went to your bath, and taken
the first thing he came across. Of course, he had no motive for taking a
cream jug; we've already got _seven_, as you know--not, of course, that
we don't value the kind of gift you and your mother--hush here's Peter
coming."

Mrs. Peter broke off in some confusion, and tripped out to meet her
husband in the hall.

"It's all right," she whispered to him; "I've explained everything. Don't
say anything more about it."

"Brave little woman," said Peter, with a gasp of relief; "I could never
have done it."

* * * * *

Diplomatic reticence does not necessarily extend to family affairs. Peter
Pigeoncote was never able to understand why Mrs. Consuelo van Bullyon,
who stayed with them in the spring, always carried two very obvious jewel-
cases with her to the bath-room, explaining them to any one she chanced
to meet in the corridor as her manicure and face-massage set.

THE OCCASIONAL GARDEN

"Don't talk to me about town gardens," said Elinor Rapsley; "which means,
of course, that I want you to listen to me for an hour or so while I talk
about nothing else. 'What a nice-sized garden you've got,' people said
to us when we first moved here. What I suppose they meant to say was
what a nice-sized site for a garden we'd got. As a matter of fact, the
size is all against it; it's too large to be ignored altogether and
treated as a yard, and it's too small to keep giraffes in. You see, if
we could keep giraffes or reindeer or some other species of browsing
animal there we could explain the general absence of vegetation by a
reference to the fauna of the garden: 'You can't have wapiti _and_ Darwin
tulips, you know, so we didn't put down any bulbs last year.' As it is,
we haven't got the wapiti, and the Darwin tulips haven't survived the
fact that most of the cats of the neighbourhood hold a parliament in the
centre of the tulip bed; that rather forlorn looking strip that we
intended to be a border of alternating geranium and spiraea has been
utilised by the cat-parliament as a division lobby. Snap divisions seem
to have been rather frequent of late, far more frequen