I took over the charwoman with our chambers, and a great piece of luck I thought it; for charwomen never advertise, and are unheard of in Registry Offices. It was certain I could not get into the chambers without one, and at that early stage of my housekeeping in London I should not have known where in the world to look for her. Mrs. Maxfielde was the highly respectable name of the woman who had "done" for the previous tenant, and had she heard of Mr. Shandy's theory of names she could not have been more successful in adapting her person and her manner to her own. She was well over sixty, and thin and gaunt as if she had never had enough to eat; but age and hunger had not lessened her hold upon the decencies of life. Worthiness oozed from her. Victorian was stamped all over her,--it was in her black shawl and bonnet, in the meekness of her pose, in the little curtsy she bobbed when she spoke. I remember Harold Frederic seeing her once and, with the intuition of the novelist, placing her: "Who is your old Queen Victoria?" he asked. Her presence lost nothing when she took off her shawl and bonnet. In the house and at work she wore a black dress and a white apron, surprisingly clean considering the dirt she exposed it to, and her grey hair was drawn tight back and rolled into a little hard knob, the scant supply and "the parting all too wide" painfully exposed to view. I longed for something to cover the old grey head that looked so grandmotherly and out of keeping as it bent over scrubbing-brushes and dustpans and the kitchen range, but it would have been against all the conventions for a charwoman to appear in a servant's cap. There is a rigid line in these English matters, and to attempt to step across is to face the contempt of those who draw it. The British charwoman must go capless, such is the unwritten law; also, she must remain "Miss" or "Mrs.," though the Empire would totter were the British servant called by anything but her name; and while the servant would "forget her place" were she to know how to do any work outside her own, the charwoman is expected to meet every emergency, and this was in days when housekeeping for me was little more than a long succession of emergencies.