The drawing-room and bedroom communicated with folding-doors. There was a little third room—a mere hole—with a window looking northward, which would do for Jack to paint in. That convenience reconciled Jack to the shabby finery of the sitting-room, the doubtful purity of the bedroom, the woe-begone air of the street, with its half-dozen dingy shops sprinkled among the private houses, like an eruption.
‘How it is ugly, your London!’ exclaimed La Chicot. ‘Is it that all the city resembles this, by example?’
‘No,’ answered Jack, with his cynical air. ‘There are brighter-looking streets, where the respectable people live.’
‘What do you call respectable people?’
‘The people who pay income-tax on two or three thousand a year.’
Jack inquired as to the other lodgers. It was as well to find out what kind of neighbours they were to have.
‘I am not particular,’ said Jack, in French, to his wife, ‘but I should not like to find myself living cheek by jowl with a burglar.’
‘Or a spy,’ suggested Zaïre.
‘We have no spies in London. That is a profession which has never found a footing on this side of the Channel.’
The landlady was a lean-looking widow, with a false front of gingery curls, and a cap that quivered all over with artificial flowers on corkscrew wires. Her long nose was tinted at the extremity, and her eyes had a luminous yet glassy look, suggestive of ardent spirits.