*

"I'm late this mornin', I am," she says, in her shrill fashion, standing
right against the fire like a demon that no flame can consume, and
vigorously rubbing at the grate with her black-lead brush. "The cause is
_'im_," she continues, turning to point the brush at the cat sleeping
on her bed, after she has rubbed the red tip of her long nose with a
portion of her knuckles and a portion of the brush. "Oh, he's a villain,
a dreadful villain he is," she cries, with exasperation, returning to
her work; "he worries my life out, he do, the 'orrid varmint. Last night
he didn't come home, he didn't. I set up for him, but he didn't come.
'Oh,' I says, 'if you're keepin' low company again,' I says, 'you can
stop out all night,' I says, 'for I'll sit up for you no longer; so
there, my ugly beauty.' And then in the middle of the night I wake up, I
do, feeling that cold, and sneezin' and snuffin', and irritatin' I was
from top to toe; and blest if Master Tom hadn't got upon the
window-sill, bust open that there piece of brown paper I had pasted over
the broken pane, I had, and let hisself in Yankee-doodle fashion, and
left me to perish with the cold."

Her lined and wrinkled face, when she turns it to us, is not without the
vestiges of attraction. The head, with its grey hair parted down the
centre, is well-shaped; the forlorn-looking eyes are a pale-blue, like
faded forget-me-nots; the thin, flexible nose, which is always moist,
and the long, firm chin incline towards the formation known as the
nut-cracker. But for her abbreviated trunk, and those few pathetic
inches of twisted leg--chiefly feet--she might have passed for a
matronly-looking and rather handsome old harridan, half Scotch and half
Irish.

"What with the cat," she says, and then, letting her voice run up to a
screech, she proceeds furiously, "and that devil of a woman downstairs!
Oh! she's a wicked woman, she is, a _wicked_ woman, a _very_ wicked
woman; she's got some of my things because I'm behind-hand in my rent,
and she says she won't give them up; but she _shall_. I'll see that she
do. Ah! I'll have the law on her--the nasty, swearing, beastly--Oh!
she's a _wicked_ woman."

* * * * *

Think of the majesty of the English law which enables this pathetic yard
of twisted womanhood to hold her own in a foul court against "a wicked
woman" with arms like a bluejacket! But Miss Stipps is used to fighting
her own battles. When c