Page:The Lark - E Nesbit, 1922.djvu/44

Rh when, anyhow, you have to get your own supper, and you may as well eat it where you cook it. It saves carrying trays in and out, and you get it hotter—and afterwards, why bother to move? Especially when the kitchen window looks out on the back garden, where the fruit trees are near blossom, and the parlours both look out on the front garden, the whole of whose floral splendour has just been sold for fifteen shillings and ninepence.

A very happy evening they spent over the gardening book. Lucilla made a list of the seeds that would be wanted to carry out what was really a quite brilliant scheme for a year's flower-growing.

"Perhaps you're right," she owned; "something might be done with this garden. And then there'll be all the soft fruit coming on in the summer."

"Soft fruit? Yes, that's right, it says so in the book. Currants and raspberries and gooseberries—all the squashy kinds. Hard fruit's the sort on trees—apples and pears. We might make jam, put Home Made Jam on the board."

"And New Laid Eggs if we only had fowls."

"And New Milk if we had a cow."

"And Home Cured Bacon if we had a pig."

"And everything that people do sell if only we'd got room to grow it—if this were a decent-sized house instead of a chocolate-box."

"It's the perfect house for an old maid," said Jane. "A place for everything is easy, but everything you ought to have in the place where it ought to be—that's rare, Lucy, rare as black swans. That ought to mean money. Somewhere or other there is the real right tenant gaping open-mouthed for just this bait."

"Bed gapes for me," said Lucilla, "and it's mutual."

"I suppose being in trade does make you vulgar." Jane seemed to ponder. "Even the little bit of trade we've had."