"In that case," she said, "I think I know something that will suit you
exactly."
It was a quiet boarding establishment in Bloomsbury--comfortable house,
reasonable terms, and, above all, perfectly respectable. In fact, it was
kept by her own sister, and if I liked she would take me along in her
cab and drop me at the door. Should she?
Looking back at that moment I cannot but wonder that after what I had
heard I did not fear discovery. But during the silence of the last hour
I had been feeling more than ever weak and helpless, so that when my
companion offered me a shelter in that great, noisy, bewildering city in
which I had intended to hide myself, but now feared I might be submerged
and lost, with a willing if not a cheerful heart I accepted.
Half an hour afterwards our cab drew up in a street off Russell Square
at a rather grimy-looking house which stood at the corner of another and
smaller square that was shut off by an iron railing.
The door was opened by a young waiter of sixteen or seventeen years,
who was wearing a greasy dress-suit and a soiled shirt front.
My companion pushed into the hall, I followed her, and almost at the
same moment a still larger and perhaps grosser woman than my friend,
with the same features and complexion, came out of a room to the left
with, a serviette in her hand.
"Sophie!"
"Jane!" cried my companion, and pointing to me she said:
"I've brought you a new boarder."
Then followed a rapid account of where she had met me, who and what I
was, and why I had come up to London.
"I've promised you'll take her in and not charge her too much, you
know."
"Why, no, certainly not," said the sister.
At the next moment the boy waiter was bringing, my trunk into the house
on his shoulder and my travelling companion was bidding me good-bye and
saying she would look me up later.
When the door was closed I found the house full of the smell of hot
food, chiefly roast beef and green vegetables, and I could hear the
clink of knives and forks and the clatter of dishes in the room the
landlady had come from.
"You'd like to go up to your bedroom at once, wouldn't you?" she said.
We went up two flights of stairs covered with rather dirty druggeting,
along a corridor that had a thin strip of linoleum, and finally up a
third flight that was bare to the boards, until we came to a room which
seemed to be at the top of the house and situated in its remotest
corner.
It was a very small apartment, hardly larger than the room over the hall
at home in which Aunt Bridget had made me sleep when I was a child, and
it was nearly as cold and cheerless.
The wall-paper, which had once been a flowery pink, was now pale and
patternless; the Venetian blind over the window (which looked out on the
smaller square) had lost one of its cords and hung at an irregular
angle; there was a mirror over the mantelpiece with the silvering much
mottled, and a leather-covered easy chair whereof the spring was broken
and the seat heavily indented.
"I dare say this will do for the present," said my landlady, and though
my heart was in my mouth I compelled myself to agree.
"My terms, including meals and all extras, will be a pound a week," she
added, and to that also, with a lump in my throat I assented, whereupon
my landlady left me, saying luncheon was on and I could come downstairs
when I was ready.
A talkative cockney chambermaid, with a good little face, brought me a
fat blue jug of hot water, and after I had washed and combed I found my
way down to the dining-room.
What I expected to find there I hardly know. What I did find was a large
chamber, as dingy as the rest of the house, and as much in need of
refreshing, with a long table down the middle, at which some twenty
persons sat eating, with the landlady presiding at the top.
The company, who were of both sexes and chiefly elderly, seemed to me at
that first sight to be dressed in every variety of out-of-date clothes,
many of them rather shabby and some almost grotesque.
Raising their faces from their plates they looked at me as I entered,
and I was so confused that I stood hesitating near the door until the
landlady called to me.
"Come up here," she said, and when I had done so, and taken the seat by
her side, which had evidently been reserved for me, she whispered:
"I don't think my sister mentioned your name, my dear. What is it?"