“She goes off to market, and buys up all kinds of rubbish, which I wouldn’t touch. She boards ’em cheap, and is a regular vixen, my dear; a perfect ‘hurricane’ as my poor, lost sailor husband used to say.
“But then, of course, there is no comparison between me and such a woman as that. How she gets along with the Germans, and French, and others who live in her place, I can’t see.
“They are always having rows there, but no one can even whisper, and say that anything of the kind ever happened to my house, except once, when two of the lodgers, young city clerks, fell out about a servant girl, who was rather good-looking, and knocked each other down stairs.
“You have no notion, my dear, of my troubles.
“If I have mutton as the principal dish some one grumbles, if I have beef another sniffs and says he’s dined already.
“Then Mistress this is too lazy to come down to breakfast, and almost pulls the bell down for Sarah to take it up to her.
“Then Miss the other, her daughter, don’t like tea nor coffee and must have chocolate and toast; while two or three others eat hot cakes faster than we can make ’em; and then there’s more grumbling and threatening to leave, until it worries my very life out almost.
“I don’t care much about how the men talk, you know, because I can manage them.
“If their boots and hot water aren’t ready I can plead an excuse of some kind, and even if they do ‘burst out’ like, and tell you what they think, and threaten to go, I don’t dislike ’em, because, as my poor husband used to say, ‘after the storm there’s always a calm,’ and then my turn comes.
“If they owe anything I talks like a sensible woman to ’em, and ‘rides a high horse,’ but if they don’t I only smiles, and takes no notice.