"Come—none of that gammon!" shouted the landlady of the house, for the behoof of all her neighbours who were lounging at their doors. "Have you brought me one pound seventeen and sixpence—yes or no? 'Cos, if you haven't, I shall just put up a bill to let my lodgings—and you may go about your business."
"But, Mrs. Brown——"
"Don't Mrs. Brown me!" interrupted the woman, hanging half way out of the window, and gesticulating violently. "It's my opinion as you wants to do me brown—and that's all about it."
"What is it, dear Mrs. Brown?" inquired a woman, with a child in her arms, stepping from the door of the adjoining dwelling to the kerb-stone, and looking up at the window.
"What is it?" vociferated Greenwood's landlady, who only required such a question as the one just put to her in order to work herself into a towering passion: "what is it? Why, would you believe it, Mrs. Sugden, that this here swindling feller as tries to look so much like the gentleman, but isn't nothink more than a Swell-Mob's-man—and that was my rale opinion of him all along—comes here, as you know, Mrs. Sugden, and hires my one-pair back for seven and sixpence a-week——"
"Shameful!" cried Mrs. Sugden, darting a look of fierce indignation upon the miserable Greenwood.
"So it were, ma'am," continued Mrs. Brown, now literally foaming at the mouth: "and though he had his clean pair of calico sheets every fortnight and a linen piller-case which my husband took out o' pawn on purpose to make him comfortable——".
"Dis-graceful!" ejaculated Mrs. Sugden, casting up her eyes to heaven, as if she could not have thought the world capable of such an atrocity.
"And then arter all, that feller there runs up one pound seventeen and six in no time—going tick even for the blacking of his boots and his lucifers——"
Greenwood stayed to hear no more: he perceived that all hope of obtaining admission to his lodging was useless; and he accordingly stole off, followed by the abuse of Mrs. Brown, the opprobrious epithets of Mrs. Sugden, and the scoffs of half-a-dozen of the neighbours.