The house in Poland Street was scarce alive with the sound of footsteps on the stairs, or the opening and shutting of doors, until the day was well on towards noon. The cry of the sweep and the small coal man, the baker with his rolls, and Irish Molly with her clattering milk-pails, passed over the sleeping household, and was scarce heard dimly in a dream by any member of that strangely compacted family. The lodgers were for the most part such gentlemen as only began to think of their morning tea or chocolate when it was afternoon by the sundial. The landlord and his wife, being always among the last to retire, rose late in the morning with a struggle, lamenting the brevity of the night. Your bad sleeper is ever the most reluctant to rise, for his one chance of slumber comes generally in that fatal hour when business or duty compels him to leave his bed. Fétis, who passed most of his nights in feverish unrest, was apt after sunrise to sink into the deep sleep of mental and bodily exhaustion; but he must needs rise at ten in order to wait upon his master in Soho Square, whose toilet generally began at eleven. Madame Fétis coiled herself round like a dormouse, and would have slept twelve hours at a stretch if permitted; but as she rarely went to bed before three o'clock in the morning, so much indulgence was impossible. The house must be in order soon after noon, and delicate dainty little breakfasts must be served up for any distinguished patrons who might have spent the night upon the premises. And neither cook nor underlings could be trusted unless Madame was there with her keen bright eyes overlooking everything. It was Madame who made my lord Duke's chocolate, and buttered my lord Marquis's toast. She was the moving principle of grace and order in the household. At one o'clock on the day after Lord Lavendale's supper-party, at an hour when the sober jog-trot citizens of London had dined or were in the act of dining, Madame sat sipping her chocolate, in a morning _négligé_ of dove-coloured tabinet--a material which Dr. Swift had done his best to make popular, through the Queen and Princesses, for the benefit of the Irish weavers. Her lace ruffles at neck and wrist were of the finest Buckinghamshire, and she wore a little mob-cap upon her piled-up tresses of unpowdered hair, which was vastly becoming. At her side lay an open ledger, and a brace of bills, which were to be delivered to his Grace and the Marquis later in the afternoon. As she sipped and munched, the lady compared the items in the bills with the figures in the ledger, and with this reading solaced her morning meal. She stopped occasionally to make a calculation with the aid of her roseate finger-tips, laboriously counted, for she resembled the great Duchess Sarah alike in being an excellent woman of business, and completely ignorant of the simplest rules of arithmetic.