h deal, and the deal was painted a
light brown; behind it there was a large bedroom: the floor was covered
with a ragged carpet, and a big bed stood in the middle of the floor. But
next to the sitting-room was a small bedroom which was let for ten
shillings a week; and the partition wall was so thin that I could hear
every movement the occupant made. This proximity was intolerable, and
eventually I decided on adding ten shillings to my rent, and I became the
possessor of the entire flat. In the room above me lived a pretty young
woman, an actress at the Savoy Theatre. She had a piano, and she used to
play and sing in the mornings, and in the afternoon, friends--girls from
the theatre--used to come and see her; and Emma, the maid-of-all-work, used
to take them up their tea; and, oh! the chattering and the laughter. Poor
Miss L----; she had only two pounds a week to live on, but she was always
in high spirits except when she could not pay the hire of her piano; and I
am sure that she now looks back with pleasure and thinks of those days as
very happy ones.

She was a tall girl, a thin figure, and she had large brown eyes; she liked
young men, and she hoped that Mr. Gilbert would give her a line or two in
his next opera. Often have I come out on the landing to meet her; we used
to sit on those stairs talking, long after midnight, of what?--of our
landlady, of the theatre, of the most suitable ways of enjoying ourselves
in life. One night she told me she was married; it was a solemn moment. I
asked in a sympathetic voice why she was not living with her husband. She
told me, but the reason of the separation I have forgotten in the many
similar reasons for separations and partings which have since been confided
to me. The landlady bitterly resented our intimacy, and I believe Miss
L---- was charged indirectly for her conversations with me in the bill. On
the first floor there was a large sitting-room and bedroom, solitary rooms
that were nearly always unlet. The landlady's parlour was on the ground
floor, her bedroom was next to it, and further on was the entrance to the
kitchen stairs, whence ascended Mrs. S----'s brood of children, and Emma,
the awful servant, with tea things, many various smells, that of ham and
eggs predominating.

Emma, I remember you--you are not to be forgotten--up at five o'clock every
morning, scouring, washing, cooking, dressing those infamous children;
seventeen hours at least out of the twenty-fou