As the cab tinkled through canyons of familiar stucco, he looked further at the Telegraph.  He was rather surprised to find more than a column of enticing palaces, each in the finest position in London; London, in fact, seemed to be one unique, glorious position.  And it was so welcome, so receptive, so wishful to make a speciality of your comfort, your food, your bath, your sanitation!  He remembered the old boarding-houses of the eighties.  Now all was changed, for the better.  The Telegraph was full of the better, crammed and packed with tight columns of it.  The better burst aspiringly from the tops of columns on the first page and outsoared the very title of the paper.  He saw there, for instance, to the left of the title, a new, refined tea-house in Piccadilly Circus, owned and managed by gentlewomen, where you had real tea and real bread-and butter and real cakes in a real drawing-room.  It was astounding.

The cab stopped.

“Is this it?” he asked the driver.

“This is 250, sir.”

And it was.  But it did not resemble even a private hotel.  It exactly resembled a private house, narrow and tall and squeezed in between its sister and its brother.  Priam Farll was puzzled, till the solution occurred to him.  “Of course,” he said to himself.  “This is the quietude, the discretion.  I shall like this.”  He jumped down.

“I’ll keep you,” he threw to the cabman, in the proper phrase (which he was proud to recall from his youth), as though the cabman had been something which he had ordered on approval.

There were two bell-knobs.  He pulled one, and waited for the portals to open on discreet vistas of luxurious furniture.  No response!  Just as he was consulting the Telegraph to make sure of the number, the door silently swung back, and disclosed the figure of a middle-aged woman in black silk, who regarded him with a stern astonishment.

“Is this——?” he began, nervous and abashed by her formidable stare.

“Were you wanting rooms?” she asked.

“Yes,” said he.  “I was.  If I could just see——­”

“Will you come in?” she said.  And her morose face, under stringent commands from her brain, began an imitation of a smile which, as an imitation, was wonderful.  It made you wonder how she had ever taught her face to do it.

Priam Farll found himself blushing on a Turkey carpet, and a sort of cathedral gloom around him.  He was disconcerted, but the Turkey carpet assured him somewhat.  As his eyes grew habituated to the light he saw that the cathedral was very narrow, and that instead of the choir was a staircase, also clothed in Turkey carpet.  On the lowest step reposed an object whose nature he could not at first determine.

“Would it be for long?” the lips opposite him muttered cautiously.

His reply—­the reply of an impulsive, shy nature—­was to rush out of the palace.  He had identified the object on the stairs.  It was a slop-pail with a wrung cloth on its head.