It was the first time Lord Alistair had ever visited this part of the house, and the whole spectacle depressed him. He found himself pitying the departed servants who had had to occupy such mean and desolate quarters. Why should it be necessary for these fellow-creatures to pass their lives so shabbily? Why should one man be worse off than another? And that sensation of a spiritual kinship between himself and all the underlings of the world, which had first come to him as he stood on Westminster Bridge, returned like a wave of melancholy over his heart. Instead of going downstairs again, he went to the window of the attic in which he happened to find himself, and looked out. It was a glimpse of back-door London--that unknown London which hides behind the stately squares and fashionable terraces and busy rows of shops. At that hour a mist breathed on the roofs and gables of the houses, making them beautiful. Each particular chimney was invested with a romantic air, and had a character of its own. There were two, a tall one with a little one beside it, at the end of a long roof-comb, and the group suggested a stately lady leading her child by the hand. Behind them came a short squat chimney that might have been the maid carrying a bundle. Farther along a pair of slender, crooked chimney-pots bent towards each other, like two beaux of the eighteenth-century meeting and bowing on the Pantiles. Looking lower down, another world revealed itself. Here were small yards in which a little grass grew of its own accord, and tall, gaunt clothes-props were the substitutes for trees. Strange barrels that could have nothing in them were stacked against a wall to rot away. The backs of the next row of houses were divided from these yards by a mysterious lane that led nowhere. To the right there was just visible a little branch street, with houses on only one side of it. Such small houses they were, with a door and three windows to each, and yet in the ground-floor window of one of them there was actually a card, as if it had lodgings to let. More interesting than the houses in the side-street were those just opposite, across the mysterious lane. By looking closely it was possible to see something of the life that went on in them. People came out of their back-doors into the little yards which opened into the lane. Watching these people was like watching the inhabitants of another planet; they might live there for years, and you live in your house for years, and you might watch each other every day all that time, and yet you would never become anything to them, nor they to you. They might be born, and grow up, and marry, and die, and you would never know so much as their names.