Mrs Genevieve Branningham watches the tall woman leave in the mirror with sourness. Her mouth twists, and she pours herself another cup of tea. This one has brewed too long in the pot; it is bitter. She pours it out on the slops plate and orders herself another pot of tea and a plate of Mrs Ruddle's excellent shortbread.

"It's not her fault," said Elsie Crossley-Hammond, who looks almost camellia-pink from heat now.

"A dog," says Mrs Branningham. "I said I'd need to see it with my own eyes, but I still can't believe it. Perhaps not everyone is a cat person, or perhaps can attune themselves to the feline mystical energies in a way I can -"

"I've always admired the way you can work with twelve cats," says Elsie Crossley-Hammond. "I have no idea how you can keep your focus so well! There's just me and Tiddles when I do a working. And it took me three months to get used to having a helper! But now I have no idea what I'd do without her!"

"Cats may work for some," says Miss Twitterby. "But I'm sure that my Mr Callow works just as well. He's very patient. Cats are so flighty."

"Well, toads have a long history of witchcraft," says Mrs Branningham. She crunched a piece of shortbread. Small crystals of sugar dusted themselves across her bosom. "My grandmother swore by a little slip of dried toadskin just under the edge of the tongue before working on a particularly complicated spell. Cats and toads are creatures of the night, and so keep just a little of the powers of Selene and Hekate. But dogs are only good for hunting ducks. They are filled with solar, masculine energies, and even the oldest wizard wouldn't use a dog. Magic is just naturally a feminine occupation. For all the blither men give about star charts and magic circles, they have to draw on some of the feminine mystique."

"It's that university education of hers," sniffs Miss Twitterby, who is as thin as a leek. "I'm not a one to judge other people, but I said right from the beginning that women's colleges were a bad idea. Thaumaturgy! The very idea. It only goes to show what fools for men women are that we abandon the traditional teachings of our mothers for men's magic, to become mere magicians."

"A women's college," says Mrs Appleton. She is a very full-figured woman, so in her black silk dress she rather resembles Theseus' ship at full sail, triumphantly returning to Athens. "I told my Brian, whatever you do, don't go to Oxford. Go to Cambridge, where they don't tolerate that nonsense."

"I believe the University Board at Cambridge is proposing to accept female scholars next year," says Elsie Crossley-Hammond, who at forty-seven is the youngest of the four. "And I believe the girls can study other things there, too. Literature, history, divination ..."

"I always found a teacup and a good, hot pot of tea to be sufficient divination tools for most circumstances," says Miss Twitterby with a sniff. "In any case, I thought your Brian wasn't going to university."

"He's destined for higher things, is Brian," says Mrs Appleton with the cock-eyed pride of a mother. "I got him a nice apprenticeship with Michael Baker, the hedge wizard."

"I don't know, I almost wish they'd had a women's college in my day," says Elsie Crossley-Hammond wistfully. She sips her milky three-sugar tea and sighs. "Old Mother Gammidge was a terrible tartar."

"For shame, Elsie Crossley-Hammond," says Mrs Branningham. "I would not wish a university education on my daughter. It's unnatural; it suppresses a woman's natural ability for witchcraft for mere book learning. If women were meant to be magicians, they'd be born men."

"They're hermeticists," mumbles Elsie Crossley-Hammond miserably.

"Hermeticists, indeed," says Miss Twitterby.

"They're good at looking after the poor," says Mrs Appleton. "With those Societies of theirs. When there was that fire in Whitechapel last month, they arranged housing for all the poor souls."

"Charity, I grant you," says Mrs Branningham. "But they're no good at magic."

"We had one lodging in our spare room for awhile," says Mrs Appleton.

"I expect he got chalk dust in all the cracks of your floorboards," says Miss Twitterby. "No thought, these men. It's the very devil to get out, chalk dust. You get it damp and it smears itself just everywhere."

"No, no chalk circles at all," says Mrs Appleton. "That was the strange part. I wouldn't have minded a chalk circle. You know where you stand, then. But he didn't even have a small stuffed dragon. I said, I could get one for you half-price. We have a whole shipment in the shop from Greece, and you'd hardly notice the scorch marks. I'll even have a couple in from China, if your fancy runs that way. And he says he doesn't need any of that, he can do it with numbers, he says."

"Numbers, bah," says Mrs Branningham. "I knew a financial wizard once. Couldn't even do the simplest fate spell. Made his wife wash his socks for him by hand."

"Anyway," says Mrs Appleton, annoyed at losing control of the conversation, "he was staying with me during the time we were having all that trouble with the Lancashire witches. One week they cursed my kitchen, and turned all my food rotten. You need an extra bit of oomph in times like those, so I asked him to help me do a teensy counter-spell with a nice little curse attached. And do you know, he refused? Went quite white and said that he couldn't do such a thing. I had Brian give me a hand in the end, though he doesn't have quite the right touch for the fiddly bits. The hermeticist packed his bags and was gone within the week. Good job, too. If there's one thing I can't stand, it's shilly-shallying."

"Quite right," says Mrs Branningham. "Now, I have to hustle off home. I have a whole still of compulsion potion that won't brew itself. See you on the morrow, ladies."

The four go their separate ways, leaving the tea shop quiet once more. Amid the detritus of the empty teacups, the crumbs and fallen sugar cubes lies a small handmade charm, made of a carved Solomon's seal, of the sort sold from any market barrow, strung on a piece of fine thread made of plaited grey human hair.