"Naow," she exclaimed, "I've been awy! I'm Lizzie. 'Er niece!"
She nodded her head towards the door, and he interpreted this to mean Miss Squibb.
"Oh, yes," he said. "She told me about you. Were you very late last night?"
She laughed. "Naow," she replied, "I was very early this mornin'!"
She stood with her hand on the knob of the door. "If you want anythink else," she said, "just 'oller down, the stairs for it. An' you needn't 'urry to get up. I know wot travellin's like. I've travelled a bit myself in my time. That 'addick ain't as niffy as it smells!..."
She closed the door behind her and he could hear her quick steps all the way down the stairs to the ground floor.
"That's a queer sort of woman," he said to himself.
As he ate his breakfast, he wondered at Lizzie's lack of embarrassment as she stood in his bedroom and saw him lying in bed. She had behaved as coolly as if she had been in a dining-room and he had been completely clothed. What would his mother say if she knew that a girl had entered his bedroom as unconcernedly as if she were entering a tramcar? Never in all his life had such a thing happened to him before. He had been very conscious of his bare neck, for the collar of his night-shirt had come unfastened. He had tried to fasten it again, but in his desire to do so without drawing Lizzie's attention to his state, he had merely fumbled with it, and had, finally, to abandon the attempt. What astonished him was that Lizzie appeared to be totally unaware of anything unusual in the fact that she was in the bedroom of a strange man. She did not look like a Bad Woman ... and surely Mr. Hinde would not live in a house where Bad Women lived!... Perhaps Englishwomen were not so particular about things as Irishwomen!... Anyhow the haddock was good and the coffee tasted nice enough, although he would much rather have had tea.
He finished his meal, and then dressed himself and went downstairs to the sitting-room which he was to share with Hinde. It was less dreary than the bedroom from which he had just emerged, but what brightness it had was not due to any furnishing provided by Miss Squibb, but to a great case full of books which occupied one side of the room. "He's as great a man for books as my Uncle Matthew," John thought, examining a volume here and a volume there. He opened a book of poems by Walt Whitman. "That's the man he was telling me about last night," he said to himself, as he turned the pages. He read a passage aloud:
Come, Muse, migrate—from Greece and Ionia,
Cross out, please, those immensely overpaid accounts,
That matter of Troy and Achilles' wrath, and Aeneas',
Odysseus' wanderings,
Placard "Removed" and "To Let" on the rocks of your snowy
Parnassus,
Repeat at Jerusalem, place the notice high on Jaffa's gate and
on Mount Moriah,
The same on the walls of your German, French and Spanish castles,
and Italian collections,
For know a better, fresher, busier sphere, a wide, untried domain
awaits, demands you.