chats on the stairs. I suppose
you likes talking to 'er."

"I like talking to everybody, Emma; I like talking to you."

"Yes, but not as you talks to 'er; I 'ears you jes do 'ave fine times. She
said this morning that she had not seen you for this last two nights--that
you had forgotten 'er, and I was to tell yer."

"Very well, I'll come out to-night and speak to her."

"And missus is so wild about it, and she daren't say nothing 'cause she
thinks yer might go."

* * * * *

A young man in a house full of women must be almost supernaturally
unpleasant if he does not occupy a great deal of their attention. Certain
at least it is that I was the point of interest in that house; and I found
there that the practice of virtue is not so disagreeable as many young men
think it. The fat landlady hovered round my doors, and I obtained perfectly
fresh eggs by merely keeping her at her distance; the pretty actress, with
whom I used to sympathise with on the stairs at midnight, loved me better,
and our intimacy was more strange and subtle, because it was pure, and it
was not quite unpleasant to know that the awful servant dreamed of me as
she might of a star, or something equally unattainable; but the landlady's
daughter, a nasty girl of fifteen, annoyed me with her ogling, which was a
little revolting, but the rest was, and I speak quite candidly, not wholly
unpleasant. It was not aristocratic, it is true, but, I repeat, it was not
unpleasant, nor do I believe that any young man, however refined, would
have found it unpleasant.

But if I was offered a choice between a chop and steak in the evening, in
the morning I had to decide between eggs and bacon and bacon and eggs. A
knocking at the door, "Nine o'clock, sir; 'ot water sir; what will you have
for breakfast?" "What can I have?" "Anything you like, sir. You can have
bacon and eggs, or--" "Anything else?"--Pause.--"Well, sir, you can have
eggs and bacon, or--" "Well, I'll have eggs and bacon."

The streets seemed to me like rat holes, dark and wandering as chance
directed, with just an occasional rift of sky, seen as if through an
occasional crevice, so different from the boulevards widening out into
bright space with fountains and clouds of green foliage. The modes of life
were so essentially opposed. I am thinking now of intellectual rather than
physical comforts. I could put up with even lodging-house food, but I found
it difficult to fore