Of all these, Mr. Carstairs most perplexes Mrs. Wiles, and Mr. Lacey most pleases her. Mr. Carstairs, whom she refers to as "a nermit," I occasionally see on the doorstep--a tall, stooping man, once handsome, with a face as profoundly sad as any of Mr. Wiles's charges. "He does nothing," says Mrs. Wiles. "Retired, I suppose. And no one ever comes to see him. But he's always polite and considerate." What the gentleman has retired from, I gather, has been this many a day and night the question which has occupied the curiosity of the basement; since what is a basement without interest in floors? That there is a mystery is certain, for has he not those two damning provocations to suspicion--a profound reticence and an inner cupboard of which he keeps the key? From what Naomi tells me of what Mrs. Wiles tells her, the desire of the basement and its particular friend, Miss Cole (who drops in pretty regularly for a cup of tea), to find the key of this cupboard left by accident in the lock amounts to a passion. If they only knew it, they are foolish; for compared with a closed cupboard, all the open cupboards in the world are negligible. Speculation is as much superior to certainty as anticipation to fruition. Miss Cole, who is one of London's spinster _rentiers_, with so little life of her own that other people's lives take the first place in her thoughts, and enough of an income to make her envied by her carefully chosen friends--chosen, as is too often our way, because they are humbler and capable of envy--darkly hints at crime itself, her simple line of reasoning being that no honest person has secrets. But Mrs. Wiles has no patience with such suggestions. "A secret he may have," she says, "but there's no harm in it, I'll be bound. But that Miss Cole always thinks the worst." "Of course she does, poor woman," I said. "How would she get on if she didn't?" and was promptly rebuked by Naomi for my cynicism. But Mrs. Wiles, who is an old campaigner, only laughed. "I believe you're right, sir," she said. "We're a funny lot, aren't we?" And there, perhaps, is as true an epitaph as human nature could get. Mr. Spanton, who has the next room to Mr. Carstairs, is a young gentleman who calls himself a Socialist. "But do you think," Mrs. Wiles asks earnestly, "that Socialists ought to have silk pyjamas? And his toilet requisites: like a lady's! But quite civil and pleasant spoken, although rather too particular about his things, and sharp with you if you dust the pictures and leave them crooked, as who that is yuman can help doing?"