Rooms in these places are all prices, all sizes, all degrees of comfort or dinginess. Melbourne Mansions head the list; but these are really flats, beautifully appointed and proportionally dear. The drop from them is sudden indeed, chiefly marked by the washing accommodation. In Melbourne Mansions each suite, even if it consists of but two rooms, has its own bathroom attached. But the next step down in price gives two bathrooms, with hot water laid on, between the inhabitants of each floor, one floor for men, the next for women, and so on. Thus, if you live on the landing where the men’s bathroom is, and you happen to be a woman, you must walk the length of a long passage, and upstairs in your dressing-gown before you can reach your morning tub. It is all very well if you are early, before anyone else is about, but if you are late, you meet all the men coming out of their rooms on their way to work. Another drawback being that you more than occasionally forget to take your latchkey with you, and do not realize your fatal error till you return from your ablutions, when you alternately cower against your lintel and make wild dashes to the lift: entreating the lift-man to send the caretaker with his duplicate key, so that you may gain the shelter of your own apartment. There is a rule that no one shall wash clothes in these baths, but everybody does; and when I used to hear the tap running furiously, and someone singing loudly behind the locked door, it needed no particular penetration to guess that it was all done with the idea of muffling the sound of scrubbing and rinsing. Considering the incomes of the people who lived in these chambers, and the exorbitant prices charged by laundresses; also the fact that many of the tenants have only one room, and have to carry both clean and dirty water up and down stairs, this washing habit cannot be wondered at; and only when people, quite beyond the pale, wash their saucepans and frying-pans in the same manner do any but the most inveterate grumblers register a serious complaint. Though I must say a great deal of sound and fury always rages round the bathrooms; one great scandal I remember being started by a lady whose husband had seen another lady going to the bath in her _robe de nuit_ alone.