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-four at the beck and call of landlady, lodgers, and quarrelling children; seventeen hours at least out of the twenty-four drudging in that horrible kitchen, running up stairs with coals and breakfasts and cans of hot water; down on your knees before a grate, pulling out the cinders with those hands—­can I call them hands?  The lodgers sometimes threw you a kind word, but never one that recognised that you were akin to us, only the pity that might be extended to a dog.  And I used to ask you all sorts of cruel questions, I was curious to know the depth of animalism you had sunk to, or rather out of which you had never been raised.  And you generally answered innocently and naively enough.  But sometimes my words were too crude, and they struck through the thick hide into the quick, into the human, and you winced a little; but this was rarely, for you were very nearly, oh, very nearly an animal:  your temperament and intelligence was just that of a dog that has picked up a master, not a real master, but a makeshift master who may turn it out at any moment.  Dickens would sentimentalise or laugh over you; I do neither.  I merely recognise you as one of the facts of civilisation.  You looked—­well, to be candid,—­you looked neither young nor old; hard work had obliterated the delicate markings of the years, and left you in round numbers something over thirty.  Your hair was reddish brown, and your face wore that plain honest look that is so essentially English.  The rest of you was a mass of stuffy clothes, and when you rushed up stairs I saw something that did not look like legs; a horrible rush that