We got into a four-wheeled cab, Jonas on the seat with the driver, and the luggage on top. I gave the man a card with the address of the house to which we had been recommended. There was a number, the name of a street, the name of a place, the name of a square, and initials denoting the quarter of the town.
"It will confuse the poor man dreadfully," said Euphemia. "It would have been a great deal better just to have said where the house was."
The man, however, drove to the given address without mistake. The house was small, but as there were no other lodgers, there was room enough for us. Euphemia was much pleased with the establishment. The house was very well furnished, and she had expected to find things old and stuffy, as London lodgings always were in the books she had read.
"But if the landlady will only steal our tea," she said, "it will make it seem more like the real thing."
As we intended to stay some time in London, where I had business to transact for the firm with which I was engaged, we immediately began to make ourselves as much at home as possible. Pomona, assisted by Jonas, undertook at once the work of the house. To this the landlady, who kept a small servant, somewhat objected, as it had been her custom to attend to the wants of her lodgers.
"But what's the good of Jonas an' me bein' here," said Pomona to us, "if we don't do the work? Of course, if there was other lodgers, that would be different, but as there's only our own family, where's the good of that woman and her girl doin' anything?"
And so, as a sort of excuse for her being in Europe, she began to get the table ready for supper, and sent Jonas out to see if there was any place where he could buy provisions. Euphemia and I were not at all certain that the good woman of the house would be satisfied with this state of things; but still, as Jonas and Pomona were really our servants, it seemed quite proper that they should do our work. And so we did not interfere, although Euphemia found it quite sad, she said, to see the landlady standing idly about, gazing solemnly upon Pomona as she dashed from place to place engaged with her household duties.
After we had been in the house for two or three days, Pomona came into our sitting-room one evening and made a short speech.
"I've settled matters with the woman here," she said, "an' I think you'll like the way I've done it. I couldn't stand her follerin' me about, an' sayin' 'ow they did things in Hingland, while her red-faced girl was a-spendin' the days on the airy steps, a-lookin' through the railin's. 'Now, Mrs. Bowlin',' says I, 'it'll just be the ruin of you an' the death of me if you keep on makin' a picter of yourself like that lonely Indian a-sittin' on a pinnacle in the jographys, watchin' the inroads of civilization, with a locomotive an' a cog-wheel in front, an' the buffalo an' the grisly a-disappearin' in the distance. Now it'll be much better for all of us,' says I, 'if you'll git down from your peak, and try to make up your mind that the world has got to move. Aint there some place where you kin go an' be quiet an' comfortable, an' not a-woundin' your proud spirit a-watchin' me bake hot rolls for breakfast an' sich?' An' then she says she'd begun to think pretty much that way herself, an' that she had a sister a-livin' down in the Sussex Mews, back of Gresham Terrace, Camberwell Square, Hankberry Place, N.W. by N., an' she thought she might as well go there an' stay while we was here. An' so I says that was just the thing, and the sooner done the happier she'd be. An' I went up stairs and helped her pack her trunk, which is a tin one, which she calls her box, an' I got her a cab, an' she's gone."
"What!" I cried; "gone! Has she given up her house entirely to us?"