Tempted by the stories about Mr. Thompson being a gentleman of independent means, a girl once offered herself as domestic servant.
“She saw a man,” she says, “who told her he did not believe in servants, as they were always gossiping.”
Probably Peace had too much experience of the information to be got from servants’ loose tongues to have one about his own premises.
That girl did not get the place. Mrs. Ward, I find, acted as a kind of working housekeeper.
She is described to me as having usually the appearance of a cross between a washerwoman and a monthly nurse, wearing an apron, her arms akimbo, and altogether a slattenly, unlovable, unclean-looking personage.
Mrs. Thompson, on the other hand, was a likely lady for a companion. She was much taller than Peace, walked in a firm manner, carrying her head with a somewhat jaunty air, until latterly, when Peace’s cruelties “took it out of her,” as a neighbour put it to me.
She was a good figure, inclined to full habit, had pleasing brown hair, which she sometimes wore in curls; a good, fresh complexion, dark eyes, Grecian nose (but no snub), and altogether, as I have said, a person of a rather attractive appearance.
She dressed well, and never appeared to want for anything, Mrs. Long and other neighbours telling me that her wardrobe must have been very rich, and extensive, as she never wanted for changes of dresses—appearing sometimes in tightly-fitting costumes, and at others in richly trimmed and fashionably-cut jackets, donning for the afternoon drives a superb sealskin paletot.
The neighbours say that Mrs. Thompson’s weakness was drink.
The boy who piloted me about Peckham told me that the first week they came he fetched 4s. worth of whiskey for Mrs. Thompson, “who,” he added, “was a very nice person when she was herself,” meaning when she was sober.