Sophia’s housekeeping methods were simple. She bought, strictly paying cash, as much food as everybody could possibly want, and cooked it. Then, whenever anyone was hungry, they could go to the larder and pick. She bought no tinned food except baked beans (they all liked baked beans heated in milk and put on buttered toast) and she never had time to learn how to make pastry, but she brought the making of stews to a fine art, putting big prunes, herbs, and cheap wine into the pot until the stews smelt paradisal and tasted ambrosial. The cottage may be said to have lived on stew, baked beans, sausages, oranges and China tea. Harry often asked for a joint on Sundays, but here Sophia struck. She liked a little peace and solitude on Sundays and she told Harry that he only wanted a joint because respectable people had joints. He could go without or cook it himself. Harry thereupon did cook a leg of mutton, so beautifully, so reverently and naturally, that he was at once established as a master. Sophia went on doing the ordinary cooking, but that was different. Whenever they had a Sunday joint, Harry cooked it.

As there was always music, much to eat, bustling gaiety or restful indolence in the cottage, it was natural that people should like going there. People popped in. They were put up on the sofa. They slept on mattresses in front of the fire. They overflowed into Celia’s house, fifteen minutes away across the Heath, and exchanged stew and China tea for Lyons’ cakes and grilled steak at half past ten in the morning. Nobody over twenty-five came near the cottage to point out that this way of living was shapeless, extravagant, and queer, and so everyone had a perfectly lovely time; even Sophia, who would sometimes have liked just a little more time to herself, and a pause in the flow of huge, majestic meals.

She had succeeded in keeping the relatives at bay, even though the three had been living in the cottage for nearly five weeks, but it was generally felt that this present state of affairs could not go on much longer, and that sooner or later the relatives must be invited to tea in a body.

Meanwhile, the life led at the cottage was exceedingly odd, but it was harmless. There is, after all, not the slightest reason why people should not stay in their dressing gowns until four in the afternoon and sleep on cushions in the bath and lie around all Sunday arguing about pacifism and God if none of them mind and none of them are drunk, drugged, unchaste or boring. And none of the people who came to the cottage in those first two months were any of these things.

Celia brought earnest young people from the London School of Economics, Sophia invited lazy, intelligent, charming young women with whom she had made friends at University College, Harry and Francis brought no one so far except a hearty chap or two from Northgate, because Francis had not yet acquired his girl, and Harry had not been long enough in ‘The Racket’ to get to know many people; Edward and Emily Sweeting were in Manchester, rehearsing for the try-out of a new Hensatt show.