“How can you be so silly!” Janet protested. “You’ll like them awfully, and they’ll love you.”

“I like Miss Haines very much already, but I was brought up only to eat with people I could ask back without feeling uncomfortable.”

“Well, you can ask Barbara Haines here; you could ask the colonel, only I don’t think he goes out yet.”

Maggie looked stubborn.

“All the same, I’m not going, and that’s flat.”

They were talking in the kitchen. Janet pretended to dust a shelf in order to turn her face from Maggie.

“All right, I’ll let them know. I don’t see why you should bother if you don’t feel like it, but I’m sorry for them. Barbara Haines is young and inexperienced, and I don’t think she’s clever about all that milk the colonel has to drink. I think it’s given him just as it is, or perhaps hot one time and cold the next, and he hates it. I don’t suppose there is any better way of serving it, but I just thought you might be able to help. Still, it’s unimportant.” Maggie was mixing a pudding. She stopped and leant on the wooden spoon in her hands. Her voice was indignant.

“Of course there’s a better way. It’s duodenal, isn’t it? Mrs. Rose’s husband, he was a bus conductor, you remember, and the jolting upset him, well, he had one. When Mrs. Rose was working in the house with me she told me a lot about it. She told me at first she got so that she dreamed about milk, from the fuss he made taking it you would have thought it was poison. Then she got clever, flavoured it with this and flavoured it with that, and made milk puddings, milk soups and junkets. She told me she had got so milk-minded that she reckoned he never had it served twice alike in any week.”

Janet went on dusting.

“Barbara Haines is young, and I don’t suppose she can cook, and it’s left to the maids to fix, and I don’t expect they have ideas. Still, I suppose it doesn’t matter if it bores him. Drinking pure milk is probably the best way to take it.”

“Nonsense! I’ll have a talk with Miss Haines. I can put her up to a lot of little tips. Come to that, I could make one of my milk jellies with the cinnamon, and take it along. Things often go down easier when they’re made in somebody else’s kitchen.”