‘That’s a very good idea. I’ll order one from Batwick’s tomorrow,’ and Auntie Loo, who had been subterraneanly at work putting the idea of the oil stove into Uncle Preston’s mind for the last three months, and overcoming his objections to smell, expense and dirt by a masterly policy of silence, went back to attend to the fish pie.

It is fortunate that the telephone cannot transmit smells as well as sounds; if it could, it would certainly have conveyed to Uncle Preston the smell of Aunt Maxine’s flat.

His own small, neat house in Forest Hill did not smell; Auntie Loo saw to that. Aunt Maxine’s flat in Earl’s Court smelt a great deal. Aunt Maxine did not mind because she did not notice. She had too many other things to think about.

Aunt Maxine had been on the stage. She had played second leads in musical and straight No. 2 companies (for she had a bit of a voice, and more than a bit of a figure) in the palmy days before the War, and though she was not now likely to make a crashing comeback (for her age was fifty-two, her charms were ill preserved and she had neither personality nor intelligence) she clung to the stage with affection. As the saying is, she took an interest.

All her friends were on, or off, the stage; she frequented those small snack bars in the back streets round Leicester Square where stage people meet to eat waffles, and she faithfully read the Stage and the Era. She seldom missed queueing for the pit on an important first night. She spoke of Marie and Gertie, of Noel and Cedric, and she belonged, rather surprisingly, to two dreary clubs, which performed dirty plays with no entertainment value on Sunday evenings. But no; when it is remembered that Aunt Maxine looked at life from a severely biological angle, her adherence to the Restoration Society and the Sunday Night Circle is not so surprising.

Aunt Maxine lived on four hundred pounds a year, which had been left to her by her husband, a successful stockbroker who had been killed at Mons but not before he had saved money. She had a very nice time; except that her cats and her friends were always dramatically betraying her and letting her down, Aunt Maxine had not a serious woe in this world, and what woes she had she thoroughly enjoyed, so no one need feel at all sorry for Aunt Maxine.

She was a ruin, but a handsome one who wore its dark hair wound into a suspicious sort of egg round its head and rows of curls on the forehead, and could still flash a pair of large blue-grey eyes; the fine Garden eyes, eager and full of light. Her figure was quite square, as Late Victorian figures often are, and her chest stuck out like a shelf. She bought clothes of the kind that other would-be smart women buy, but the minute she put them on they looked queer. It was partly the egg and partly the shelf, and partly just being Aunt Maxine.