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attempted infringement of it.
    Having waggled her hand in the direction of Mr Pettit, she went straight to the dining room, where the dinner table was being laid. There was to be a company of eight tonight, and accordingly she took three little cardboard slips from the top left-hand drawer of her writing table, on each of which was printed:
PLEASE TAKE IN TO DINNER.
    These were presented in the hall to the men before dinner (it was unnecessary to write one for her husband), each folded, with the name of the guest in question being written on the back, while the name of the woman he was to take in filled the second line. Thus there were no separate and hurried communications to be made in the drawing room, as everything was arranged already. This was not so original as the other parlour trick, but at present nobody else in Riseborough had attempted it. Then out of the same drawer she took - what she took requires a fresh paragraph.
    Printed menu cards. There were a dozen packets of them, each packet advertising a different dinner: an astounding device, requiring enlargement of explanation. She discovered them by chance in the Military Stores in London, selected a dozen packets containing fifty copies each, and kept thesecret to herself. The parlour maids had orders to tweak them away as soon as the last course was served, so that no menu collector, if there was such retrospective glutton in Riseborough, could appropriate them, and thus, perhaps, ultimately get a clue which might lead him to the solution. For by a portent of ill luck, it might then conceivably happen that a certain guest would find himself bidden for the third or fourth time to eat precisely the same dinner as his odious collection told him that he had eaten six months before. But the tweaking parlourmaids obviated that risk, and if the menu cards were still absolutely ‘unsoiled’, Mrs Ames used them again. There was one very sumptuous dinner among the twelve, there were nine dinners good enough for anybody, there were two dinners that might be described as ‘poor’. It was one of these, probably, which Mrs Altham had in her mind when she was so ruthless in respect to Mrs Ames’ food. But, poor or sumptuous, it appeared to the innocent Riseborough world that Mrs Ames had her menu cards printed as required; that, having constructed her dinner, she sent round a copy of it to the printer’s to be set up in type. Probably she corrected the proofs also. She never called attention to these menus, and seemed to take them as a matter of course. Mrs Altham had once directly questioned her about them, asking if they were not a great expense. But Mrs Ames had only shifted a bracelet on her wrist and said, ‘I am accustomed to use them.’
    Mrs Ames took four copies of one of these dinners which were good enough for anybody, and propped them up, two on each of the long sides of the table. Naturally, she did not want one herself, and her husband, also naturally, sometimes said, ‘What are you going to give us tonight, Amy?’ In which case one of them was passed to him. But he had a good retentive memory with regard to food, and with alittle effort he could remember what the rest of the dinner was going to be, when the nature of the soup had given him his cue. Occasionally he criticized, saying in his hearty voice (this would be in the autumn or winter), ‘What, what? Partridge again? Perdrix repetita, isn’t it, General, if you haven’t forgotten your Latin.’ And Amy from the other end of the table replied, ‘Well, Lyndhurst, we must eat the game our friends are so kind as to send us.’ And yet Mrs Altham declared that she had seen partridges from the poulterers delivered at Mrs Ames’ house! ‘But they are getting cheap now,’ she added to her husband, ‘particularly the old birds. I got a leg, Henry, and the bird must have roosted on it for years before Mrs Ames’ friends were so kind as