She was a clear-headed young woman, with simple tastes and an innate propensity for saving money; so that when her apprenticeship expired she had a sum laid by--small indeed, but still something--with which she determined to try her fortune in England. She had picked up a little of the language, and had obtained a few introductions to compatriots living in London; so that when she arrived, she was not wholly friendless or utterly dependent. Mademoiselle Anatole--born in Lyons, but long resident in London--wanted a partner; and after a very sharp wrangle, conducted by the ladies on each side with great skill and diplomacy, a portion of Mademoiselle Clarisse's savings was transferred to her countrywoman, and a limp and ill-printed circular informed Mademoiselle Anatole's patronesses that she had just received into partnership the celebrated Mademoiselle Clarisse from Paris, and that they hoped henceforth, etc. Mademoiselle Anatole lived on the first floor of an old house in the Bloomsbury district, which had once been a fashionable mansion, but which was now let out in lodgings. Under the French milliner, a German importer of pipes and pictures and Bohemian glass had his rooms, and his name, "Korb," shone out truculently from the street-door jamb, towering above the milliner's more modest announcement of her residence. The entire neighbourhood had a foreign and Bohemian flavour. In an otherwise modest and British-looking house, Malmédie Frères announced in black-and-gold letters, much too slim and upright, that they kept an hotel "À la Boule d'Or." From the open windows in the summer-time poured forth, mixed with clouds of tobacco-smoke, waitings and roarings of the human voice, and poundings and grindings of pianos. The artists-colourmen had the street on their books (keeping it there as little as possible), canvases and millboards were perpetually arriving at one or other of the houses where the windows looking northward were run up into the next floor, and bearded men smoking short pipes pervaded the neighbourhood night and day.