“I’ve a young lady coming here this afternoon to tea; the young lady—hum, hum—that I am going to marry. Can you stay a couple of hours later? I’ll make it worth your while.”
Mrs. Neaves said condescendingly that she’d come back in time to get the tray ready, after she’d “done for the gent at 6.” As for Arnold’s remark about marrying the young lady visitor, no doubt she put her own valuation on it—being seasoned to remarks of that sort from giddy tenants. The laundress is a true skeptic. She does not believe in married couples in the Inn—this land of ephemeral affections—doesn’t approve of them. I knew a sensitive fellow who had his marriage certificate framed and hung up in the sitting room.
At four o’clock Arnold and Clarissa came in. Mrs. Neaves had just arrived. She was in a state of much disorder, as a protest against Clarissa. There was a warm, sour smell of dishwater; a dustpan half full of flue tripped Arnold up on the threshold.
“This is my bedroom,” he said to Clarissa. “And that is my sitting room. And here’s a little den for Sol—he’s allowed to have bones there—and there’s the kitchen.”
“Oh! that’s the kitchen.”
Clarissa looked in and Mrs. Neaves looked up.
“I’ll go and take my hat off,” the girl said suddenly, slipping in at the open bedroom door—it was exactly opposite the kitchen.
Arnold went into the sitting room at the end of the passage. There was a cupboard. He used it as a hanging closet. At the back of this cupboard there was a tiny window which looked into the kitchen. The sets are full of oddities, surprises like that; windows, ledges, steps, in the most unlikely places.
Some sets have a dunscope. It is a little grating, opening out of a cupboard in the passage. You steal into the cupboard, shut the door, and peep onto the staircase. The same idea is carried out in places where polite people live. In that case it is a looking-glass which reflects into the dining room the figure of the caller on the door-step. When people have a good balance at the bank, and no particular skeleton, the idea is snobbish; when a man in the Inn hasn’t a penny it is pathetic. He looks out, sees his washerwoman, the tax collector, the man who lent him a fiver—and keeps the oak rigorously sported.
The dunscope was often used by industrious students, who looked out to see if the visitor would be helpful to their studies or the reverse.