Recipes

"I may as well know first as last," said Harriet, "do you like your eggs boiled or scrambled?"

"Boiled ," he said, "four minutes."

"We will dip our bread and butter in them she said, settling the parcels in her arms as if they were a baby."

... she looked a little disconsolate, as if she had divined that though he might believe it he would not like it.  "Let us have tea first!"  she begged rather sadly; but smiled brilliantly under her lashes ...

... she had opened for him a new pot of the quince jelly and the apple jelly flavoured with orange, though only the other day he had heard her lamenting that such conserves lose their flavour almost as soon as they are exposed to the air.

Prattling not too intelligently about India and elephants and Nabobs’ jewels, she fiddled about her garden cutting lavender-flowers till the basket she had slung on her forearm was full, and then fluttered indoors to put them on her windowsills to dry; and then she sat behind her silver equipage and gave him very good homemade scones and country butter, and giggled a great deal.

“I will take a china plate from my dresser, and I will carry it alone to the pastrycook at the end of the street, and will bring it domed with a dish-cover, tarnished and with a loose knob on the top, very miserable-looking and streaked with a meagre slice cut from a bird communally roasted for the very poor. ’Twill not take me long to eat it. Not long enough. Then, for my second course, I will take from a paper-bag one of the tragic mince-pies of the very poor, that is a deal of wan pastry to two currants, a lean sultana, and a smear of sweetness. There were two in the bag once, but I ate the other on the previous night. That was my Christmas Eve”

After dinner they will sit together in one of her great chairs before the fire, and they will drink champagne from the same glass, and she will not want to drink it, but will plague him to watch the shining bubbles.

I retired to my bedroom and put on soft slippers, as women do when they form the intention of weeping for some considerable length of time, and then found that my situation was more serious than I had supposed, since there was no toffee in the house. For I would as lief not weep at all as weep without toffee.

I could find not a thing in the larder suitable for episodic eating save a jar of sweet pickles; and when I had helped myself to two or three of those I was conscious less of a broken heart than of a weak stomach, I will own I felt very pitiable for an hour or two.

Her left hand had dropped and had thrown something small in the gutter, and how she seemed to be searching in whatever it was she carried at her bosom. Now, undeniably, she was popping something into her mouth. Gad! the saucy wench was about to enter Portland Place eating cherries out of a bag. And Gad! she was Harriet Hume.

“I will take some port, if I may,” she murmured.

“Then get back to your sofa and I will pour it out,” he told her, and pulled her to him and squeezed her, as if he had been a ploughboy and she his doxy, and they had been sitting under a hedge. She rubbed against him in the way of a pleased cat, and nimbly had herself curled up on the cushions of the sofa when he came back with her glass.

... good Tarnishwing had been set down at his patriotic task in a sitting-room at the Cavendish with Rosie Lewis to bring him the champagne and orange juice that are as mother’s milk to him,