"A WILDERNESS OF CHIMNEY-POTS"
VI
THE OLD HOUSEKEEPER
No housekeeper could have been more in place than the little old white-haired woman who answered our ring the day we came to engage our windows, and, incidentally, the chambers behind them. She was venerable in appearance and scrupulously neat in her dress, and her manner had just the right touch of dignity and deference, until we explained our errand. Then she flew into a rage and told us in a tone that challenged us to dispute it, "You know, no coal is to be carried upstairs after ten o'clock in the morning."
Coal was as yet so remote that we would have agreed to anything in our impatience to look out of the windows, and, reassured by us, she became the obsequious housekeeper again, getting the keys, toiling with us up the three flights of stairs, unlocking the double door,—for, as I have said, there is an "oak" to "sport,"—ushering us into the chambers with the Adam mantelpieces and decorations and the windows that brought us there, dropping the correct "Sir" and "Madam" into her talk, accepting without a tremor the shilling we were ashamed to offer, and realizing so entirely our idea of what a housekeeper in London chambers ought to be, that her outbreak over the coal we had not ordered, and might never order, was the more perplexing.