This lady had secured me for a month.  My rights extended over the lantern-windowed sitting-room and the bedroom above it.  They were to include, moreover, board of a select quality.

“Select” represented Miss Whiffle’s brazen mean of morality; and, indeed, it is an elastic and accommodating word.  One, for instance, may select an aged gander for its wisdom, knowing that the youthful gosling is proverbially “green.”  Miss Whiffle selected the aged gander for me, and I gnawed its sinewy limbs without a protest.  On a similar principle she appeared to ransack the town shops for prehistoric joints (the locality was rich in fossils), and vegetables that, like eggs, only grew harder the more they were boiled.

I submitted, of course; and should have done no less by a landlady not so obstreperously constituted.  But this terrible person gauged and took me in hand from the very morning following my arrival.

She came to receive my orders after breakfast (tepid chicory and an omelette like a fragment of scorched blanket) with her head wrapped up in a towel.  Thus habited she had the effrontery to trust the meal had been to my liking.  I gave myself away at once by weakly answering, “Oh, certainly!”

“As to dinner, sir,” she said faintly, “it is agreed, no kitching fire in the hevening.  That is understood.”

I said, “Oh, certainly!” again.

“What I should recommend,” she said—­and she winced obtrusively at every sixth word—­“is an ’arty meal at one, and a light supper at height.”

“That will suit me admirably,” I said.

She tapped her fingers together indulgently.

“So I thought,” she murmured.  “Now, what do you fancy, sir?”

“Dear me!” I exclaimed, for her face was horribly contorted.  “Are you in pain?”

“Agonies!” said Miss Whiffle.

“Toothache?”

“Neuralgia, sir, for my sins.”

“Is there—­is there no remedy?”

She was taken with a sharp spasm of laughter, mirthless, but consciously expressive of all the familiar processes of self-effacement under torture.

“I arks nothing but my duty, sir,” she said.  “That is the myrrh and balsam to a racking ’ed.  Not but what I owns to a shrinking like unto death over the thought of what lays before me this very morning.  Rest and quiet is needful, but it’s little I shall get of either out of a kitching fire in the dog days.  And what would you fancy for your dinner, sir?”

“I am sorry,” I murmured, “that you should suffer on my account.  I suppose there is nothing cold—­”

“Not enough, sir, in all the ’ouse to bait a mousetrap.  Nor would I inconvenience you, if not for your own kind suggestion.  But potted meats is ’andy and ever sweet, and if I might make bold to propose a tin—­”

“Very well.  Get me what you like, Miss Whiffle.”

“I must arks your pardin, sir.  But to walk out in this ’eat, and every rolling pebble under my foot a knife through my ’ed—­no, sir.  I make bold to claim that consideration for myself.”