As a rule, in Paradise Rents, front doors stand open to the street, but the door of Number 5, the abode of Bill's grandmother, was shut. On tip-toe and with a strenuous effort Bill reached the latch. The door opened and Bill shouted through it, by way of introduction:—
"She says she kin write a letter in ten minutes."
The person addressed, whom I understood to be the grandmother, was engaged in scrubbing with a duster a deal table already clean enough to make Bill's face much ashamed of itself. She was a large heavy old woman, with a round colourless visage that suggested the full moon by daylight, and wispy grey locks like a nimbus about it.
"Lor bless the child, Mum!" she exclaimed. "Bill, whatever d'yer mean by it?"
"Says she kin write a letter in ten minutes," Bill repeated, with the emphasis of grave doubt on the "says."
"Bless the child, Mum! I don't know whatever 'e's been saying. It's truth as I did say as I wished I 'ad someone as could write a letter for me to my son Frank, it being 'is birthday Tuesday and 'im out at the Front. But there, it's not to say, as I can't write a letter myself if I'm so minded, but I'm no great scholard and it do take me a long time to finish—each day a word or two. About a week it take me to write a letter, such a letter as I'd wish to write to Frank out at the Front, for 'is birthday, to cheer 'im up."
"Frank's Bill's father, I suppose?" I said, by way of filling an asthmatic pause.
"Lor bless yer, no, Mum. Bill's father wouldn't never go into no more danger than what 'e'd find at the Red Lion. Married my pore daughter 'e did, as died—a mercy for 'er, pore thing! That's 'ow it is Bill's living along o' me."
"I see," I said. "Well, now—about the letter?"
A space more liberal than the operation strictly needed was cleared for me on the polished deal table; a penny ink-bottle and a pen with a rusty but still useful nib set upon it, and from a special drawer, with a solemnity that of the character of sacred ritual, Mrs. Watt, as Bill's grandmother informed me she was called, drew forth a single sheet of notepaper. Its dimensions had been heavily curtailed by the deepest border of mourning black that I ever had seen on English writing-paper. Other nations surpass us in this evidence of respect, but Mrs. Watt's paper was calculated to raise the national standard.