To a lady with a patch over her eye with lodgings to let in Broome Street I one time stated, by way of being communicative, that I was often in my room a good deal doing some work there. Ah! With many ogles and grimaces, she whispered hoarsely, with an effort at a sly effect, that "that was all right here. She understood," she said. Perfectly "safe place for that," it was. "The gentlemen who had the room before were something of the same kind."
As you know, "references" frequently are demanded of one hunting lodgings. To get into a really nice place one must really be a very nice person. "You know, I have a daughter," sighs the really nice landlady.
To obtain lodgings in Kensington one must be very well-to-do, particularly if one would be on the "drawing room floor." "I like these rooms very much," I said to a prim person there, and I hesitated.
"But I suppose they are too dear for you," she said.
How careful one must be hunting lodgings in England about "extras." Lodgings made in the U.S.A. are all ready to live in, when you have paid your rent. But over on the other side, you recall, the rent, so amazingly cheap, is merely an item. Light, "coals," linen, and "attendance" are all "extra."
I met an interesting person letting lodgings in Whitechapel. She was not attractive physically. Her chief drapery was an apron. This, indeed, was fairly adequate before. But—I think she was like the ostrich who sticks his head in the sand.
My sister-in-law, a highly intelligent woman——— There are, by the way, people who will think anything. Some may say that I am ending this article rather abruptly.
My sister-in-law, a highly intelligent woman, used to say, in compositions at school when stumped by material too much for her, that she had in her eye, so to say, things "too numerous to mention."
Anybody who would chronicle his adventures in hunting lodgings is confronted by incidents, humorous, wild, bizarre, queer, strange, peculiar, sentimental, touching, tragic, weird, and so on and so forth, "too numerous to mention."