“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 forego the glitter and artistic enthusiasm of the cafe.  The tavern, I had heard of the tavern.

Some seventy years ago the Club superseded the Tavern, and since then all literary intercourse has ceased in London.  Literary clubs have been founded, and their leather arm-chairs have begotten Mr. Gosse; but the tavern gave the world Villon and Marlowe.  Nor is this to be wondered at.  What is wanted is enthusiasm and devil-may-careism; and the very aspect of a tavern is a snort of defiance at the hearth, the leather arm-chairs are so many salaams to it.