A rice-pudding, which tasted like a dry sponge wrapped up in old leaves, caused Letizia many sighs before she could swallow even a mouthful, and some bananas which looked as if the greengrocer had tried to reshape them after they had been driven over by the traffic of Covent Garden all day, did nothing to help matters. As for the coffee, it might have been smeared on a boy’s fingers to stop him from biting his nails, but it was never meant to be drunk.
One of the reasons for Miss Fewkes’s perpetual bad temper was an inclination on the part of visitors to the lower basement of the house to ring Miss Fewkes’s bell and so fetch her downstairs unnecessarily to open the front door. This being the second Sunday of the month, Louisa had been allowed to go out, and Miss Fewkes was in her tiny little bedroom in the roof of the house when her bell rang twice. The idea of going all the way downstairs only to find that a visitor had arrived for the people in the basement did not appeal to the little woman. So she opened the bedroom window and, peering out over the sill, perceived upon the steps below an exceedingly bright cerise bonnet belonging to what was apparently a respectable middle-aged woman.
“Who are you ringing for?” Miss Fewkes called down in her rasping voice.
The cerise bonnet bobbed about for a while until at last it discovered from what window it was being addressed, when it looked up and shouted back:
“What’s it got to do with you who I’m ringing for? If you’re the servant here, just you come down and open the door the same as what I would if anybody rung my front bell.”
“Do you want Mr. and Mrs. Blanchit?” Miss Fewkes called down. “Because if you do, it’s the broken bell by the area gate and kindly ring that.”
“Do I want who?” the cerise bonnet shouted back.
“Mr. and Mrs. Blanchit!”
“No, I don’t, you saucy old outandabout! What next are you going to ask? You just come down and open the door the same as I should myself.”
Miss Fewkes slammed her window down and left the cerise bonnet on the steps. After ringing about a dozen times, it went down the steps again and standing in the middle of the pavement shouted “Hi!” several times in rapid succession. A small boy blowing a mouth-organ stared at the cerise bonnet for a moment, stopped his tune, and asked it if it had lost anything.