"Now then, Miss Wickham, what's the matter? You just look as if you were ready to burst into tears. What's up? Don't you think our first dinner was very successful—a good long table all surrounded with people pleased with their dinner, and in high good humour, and you were the cause of the success, let me tell you, dear. They will talk of you right and left. This boarding-house will never be empty from this night out, mark my words; and I never was wrong yet in a matter of plain common-sense."
"But oh, dear!" I cried, and I sank into a chair, and I am sure the tears filled my eyes; "the company are so mixed, Miss Mullins, so terribly mixed."
"It takes a lot of mixing to make a good cake," was Jane's somewhat ambiguous answer.
"Now, what do you mean?"
"Well, any one can see with half an eye that you object to Mrs. and Miss Armstrong, and I will own they are not the sort of folks a young lady like yourself is accustomed to associate with; but all the same, if we stay here and turn this house into a good commercial success, we must put up with those sort of people, they are, so to speak, the support of an establishment of this sort. I call them the flour of the cake. Now, flour is not interesting stuff, at least uncombined with other things; but you cannot make a cake without it. People of that sort will go to the attics, and if we don't let the attics, my dear Miss Wickham, the thing won't pay. Every attic in the place must be let, and to people who will pay their weekly accounts regularly, and not run up bills. It's not folks like your grand Captain Furlong, nor even like Mr. Randolph, who make these sort of places 'hum,' so to speak. This establishment shall hum, my dear, and hum right merrily, and be one of the most popular boarding-houses in London. But you leave people like the Armstrongs to me. To-morrow you shall sit right away from them."
"No, I will not," I said stoutly, "why should you have all the burden, and mother and I all the pleasure? You are brave, Miss Mullins."
"If you love me, dear, call me Jane, I can't bear the name of Mullins. From the time I could speak I hated it, and three times in my youth I hoped to change it, and three times was I disappointed. The first man jilted me, dear, and the second died, and the third went into an asylum. I'm Mullins now, and Mullins I'll be to the end. I never had much looks to boast of, and what I had have gone, so don't fret me with the knowledge that I am an old maid, but call me Jane."
"Jane you shall be," I said. She really was a darling, and I loved her.
I found after my interview with Jane that the time in the drawing-room passed off extremely well, and this I quickly discovered was owing to Mr. Randolph, who, without making the smallest effort to conciliate the Armstrongs, or the Cousinses, or any of the other attic strata, as Jane called them, kept them all more or less in order. He told a few good stories for the benefit of the company, and then he sat down to the piano and sang one or two songs. He had a nice voice, not brilliant, but sweet and a real tenor, and he pronounced his words distinctly, and every one could listen, and every one did listen with pleasure. As to Mrs. and Miss Armstrong they held their lips apart in their amazement and delight. Altogether, I felt that Mr. Randolph had made the evening a success, and that without him, notwithstanding Jane's cheery words, the thing would have been an absolute failure.
Just towards the close of the evening he came up to my side.