Page:The Specimen Case.djvu/207



HE Bartletts led a nomadic existence within that radius of Charing Cross that business requirements imposed upon Mr. Bartlett. As a result the Dead Letter Office dealt with no inconsiderable portion of their correspondence and comparatively intimate friends had been known to address them through the "Personal" column of the daily press.

It now being July they had taken up their quarters in a furnished cottage at Sunbury, migrating thither from Hampstead apartments, themselves the successors of a bijou flat in Chelsea, to which they had moved from a Bayswater boarding-house, after spending Christmas at a Brighton hotel.

"The system has its advantages," Mrs. Bartlett would admit to her friends, "but I should not advise you to give up your pretty houses to try it. Why? Oh, well, during the nine years that we have been married I have had the experience of twenty-seven different servants. I was tempted to make a list of them the other day. Twenty-seven, my dears!"

"In any case that is the nuisance nowadays," one of the friends replied. "But what a red-cheeked, pleasant-looking country girl you have now. She did not come to you with the recommendation of County Council School 'accomplishments,' I should imagine?"

"Indeed no," agreed Mrs. Bartlett.

"Norfolk?" suggested the friend.