“O, I don’t know!” he said. “She was rather an attractive young lady. But we had to discontinue our patronage. She developed the most extraordinary—but it’s no business of mine. She was one of the submerged tenth; and she’s gone under for good, I suppose.”
I made my way to the other address—a little lodging in a shabby-genteel street. A bitter-faced landlady, one of the “preordained” sort, greeted me with resignation when she thought I came for rooms, and with acerbity when she heard that my sole mission was to inquire about a Miss Lucy Rivers.
“I won’t deceive you, sir,” she said. “When it come to receiving gentlemen privately, I told her she must go.”
“Gentlemen!”
“I won’t do Miss Rivers an injustice,” she said. “It was ha gentleman.”
“Was that latterly?”
“It was not latterly, sir. But it was the effects of its not being latterly which made her take to things.”
“What things?”
“Well, sir, she grew strange company, and took to the roof.”
“What on earth do you mean?”