"I think it only right to inform you that I can see the young gentlemen performing their ablutions and dressing and undressing both when the light is on and in the morning. Such publicity is most distressing, and I venture to suggest that blinds or curtains should be affixed in their room without delay.
"Yours faithfully,
"SELINA BROOKS."
Mr. Wycherly sank back in his chair with a groan. "I quite forgot curtains and blinds," he exclaimed in bitter self-reproach. "There are none in my room either; do you suppose the people in the next house can see me?"
"Sure to!" cried Edmund gleefully; "they'll be writing next that they can see an old gentleman 'paforming his ablutions'; but I can't see how they do for we all wash in the bath-room, and that's at the back. I suppose they see us washing our teeth and you shaving. I wonder if that's more depressing or they don't mind so much?"
"But what can we do?" Mr. Wycherly exclaimed despairingly. "It is already Saturday evening and we ought to have blinds or something now, to-night. How do they fix blinds, by the way?"
Montagu went and stood at the window and gloomily surveyed the houses opposite.
"You can't see a thing in her house," he said sadly. "There's white curtains with frills downstairs and a straight thing right across the windows upstairs, and a looking-glass in one window shows just above the straight thing. You've got that, you know, for shaving; we might put ours there too; it would fill up a bit. It's against the wall just now because we liked to see out."
"Oh! they'd just peek round it," said Edmund. "We'd best nail a sheet across for to-night."
"But won't that look funny from outside?" Montagu objected.