Miss Laura (who claims to be the older by half an hour, and has will power to justify the claim), although she has been in the lodging-house business for years and years, still affects to be ashamed of it. "I can't think what father would say if he could know what we were doing," is the burden of her life-song. "It's the last thing he would ever have wished his girls to do--keep a lodging-house." The paternal Packer, it seems, was related distantly but sufficiently to a City Sheriff, and himself was for many years a highly respected messenger in one of the older London banks. In their more daring moments his daughters have, I believe, referred to him quite easily as a banker, or at any rate have permitted the impression that he had charge of huge sums of money (as indeed he had) to go uncorrected, with the suggestion added that events were at last too much for him, and, owing to financial depression, due to vague causes, of which an iniquitous Government was the chief, he came upon heavy losses and poverty. For anyone may have a father who was a business failure; but no real lady would confess to springing from a bank messenger's loins. Miss Emma, although less assertive than her sister (as becomes one born so long after), bleats a sympathetic chorus to the lament; and to her sister's amazement at what father would say could he only see his girls in their degrading situation, has been known to remark, "But who knows?--perhaps he does see us!" thus calling up a picture of the vigilant bank messenger at one of heaven's loopholes with but this drop of bitterness--his daughters' decline from perfect ladyhood--in an eternal cup of bliss. They are, however, good women, the Packer sisters, and one of them cooks excellently, and if some of God's creatures have brains like dried peas and no imagination at all, the best of us are not so very wonderful. CHAPTER II IN WHICH THE FOUR GENTLEMEN ABOVE US OBTAIN THEIR CHARACTERS AND PRIMROSE TERRACE IS RUDELY DISTURBED One of the first questions which I put to Mrs. Wiles referred very naturally to the other residents of the house. The twins had severally and collectively assured us that they offered hospitality to none but gentlemen, and that four of the nicest gentlemen living were at present under their roof; but the twins have no discrimination. To them a gentleman is a gentleman--that is to say, a trousered creature who lives on bacon, makes (compared with a lady) no trouble at all, and pays his rent. Mrs. Wiles has a more observant eye, and to her, therefore, I resorted for the finer shades. The house, it appears, has three floors and a basement. The first floor is ours; above are four rooms, two of which, at the back, belong to Mr. Lacey and the two in front to Mr. Furley; above these is the top floor with four more rooms, two of which in front belong to Mr. Carstairs and two at the back to Mr. Spanton.