attendant je m'en mordrais peut etre les poings plus d'une fois._" I was unmoved. I had spent too much emotion already upon Clementine; also a neat little French girl had replaced her. She gave up when she found me proof against an argument that had hitherto always disarmed me. This was the last time she put herself at my service; though once afterwards she gave me the pleasure of hearing from her. Not many weeks had passed when I received a pictorial post-card that almost reconciled me to a fashion I deplore. The picture that adorned it was a photograph of an ordinary three-storey London house, the windows draped with lace curtains of a quality and design not common in the Lower Marsh. But the extraordinary thing about it was that in the open doorway--apronless, her arms akimbo, the wave of hair low on her forehead--stood Clementine, giggling in triumph. A few words accompanied this astonishing vision. "_Je n'oublierais jamais la bonne maison de Madame_" and the kind message was signed "Mrs. Johnson." Whether the eighteen shillings of her _petit Anglais_ ran to so imposing a home, or to what she owed the post-card prominence usually reserved for the monuments of London, she did not condescend to explain. Probably she only wanted to show that, though she had achieved this distinction, she could be magnanimous enough to forget the past and think of us kindly. That was the last I ever heard from Clementine, the last I hope I ever shall hear. The pictorial post-card told me the one thing I cared to know. She did not leave me for a bed on the Embankment by night and a round of the soup-kitchens by day. If ever she does see life in this way and so completes her experience, the responsibility will not be mine for having driven her to it. _The Old Housekeeper_ [Illustration: "A WILDERNESS OF CHIMNEY-POTS"] VI THE OLD HOUSEKEEPER No housekeeper could have been more in place than the little old white-haired woman who answered our ring the day we came to engage our windows, and, incidentally, the chambers behind them. She was venerable in appearance and scrupulously neat in her dress, and her manner had just the right touch of dignity and deference, until we explained our errand. Then she flew into a rage and told us in a tone that challenged us to dispute it, "You know, no coal is to be carried upstairs after ten o'clock in the morning."