I hadn't realised that E Nesbit wrote adult novels too and this is the last of them, published in 1922 two years before she died. Now I'm not going to claim that it's anything like as good as The Railway Children but it's silly and cheerful and optimistic and has kept me entertained all weekend. (It would be a wonderfully undemanding read for anyone feeling under the weather.)
It is 1919 and two naive girls, fresh from school, have been swindled out of their fortune by a guardian, leaving them with a delightful country cottage and £500 - so not as destitute as all that! Facing up to their situation as a lark, they set about earning a living and managing servants; first they open a charming flower stall, then get into scrapes taking in dodgy paying guests. There are hints in the background that the young men in the story, recently returned from the war, are struggling to find their feet in a world that is not offering much of a welcome home to returning heroes. But for all their independence and lack of any suitable chaperone, these girls are simply filling in time before marriage ... and to be honest, by the end I was getting the teeniest bit bored as if I'd been grazing too long in a box of sugary sweeties. The character I'd have liked more of was Miss Antrobus, the plain-looking, formerly lovelorn heiress whose war work has been the making of her.
But I do love a book with lovely clothes and fabrics and lots of flowers, and here's a taste:

They were occupied in covering two easy-chairs with bright chintz. I am sorry to say that they had cut up a pair of curtains twelve feet long by six feet wide so as to avoid the extravagance of buying new cretonne to brighten the sitting-room which they were arranging for their new guests. The curtains were beautiful, with purple birds and pink peonies and pagodas of just the right shade of yellow to be worthy to associate with the pinks and the purples. The curtains were lined and bordered with faded rose-coloured Chinese silk, and pounds could not have bought their like. Shillings, on the other hand, and not so very many of them either, could have bought the cretonne. Pity, but do not despise these inexperienced housekeepers. They did not know - how should they? Even the most charming girls do not know everything. There was a girl once who cut up a fine hand-woven linen sheet to line a dress with and thought she was being economical, but that is another, and a sadder story.