Coal was as yet so remote that we would have agreed to anything in our impatience to look out of the windows, and, reassured by us, she became the obsequious housekeeper again, getting the keys, toiling with us up the three flights of stairs, unlocking the double door,--for, as I have said, there is an "oak" to "sport,"--ushering us into the chambers with the Adam mantelpieces and decorations and the windows that brought us there, dropping the correct "Sir" and "Madam" into her talk, accepting without a tremor the shilling we were ashamed to offer, and realizing so entirely our idea of what a housekeeper in London chambers ought to be, that her outbreak over the coal we had not ordered, and might never order, was the more perplexing. I understood it before we were settled in our chambers, for they were not really ours until after a long delay over the legal formalities with which the English love to entangle their simplest transactions at somebody else's expense, and a longer one in proving our personal and financial qualifications, the landlord being disturbed by a suspicion that, like the Housekeeper's daughter, we were in _the_ profession and spent most of our time "resting," a suspicion confirmed by the escape of the last tenant, also in _the_ profession, with a year's rent still to pay. And then came much the longest delay of all over the British Workman, who, once he got in, threatened never to get out. In the mean while we saw the Housekeeper almost every day. We did not have to see her often to discover that she was born a housekeeper, that she had but one thought in life, and that this was the house under her charge. I am sure she believed that she came into the world to take care of it, unless indeed it was built to be taken care of by her. She belonged to a generation in England who had not yet been taught the folly of interest in their work, and she was old-fashioned enough to feel the importance of the post she filled. She would have lost her self-respect had she failed in the slightest detail of her duty to the house. From the first, the spotless marvel she made of it divided our admiration with our windows. The hall and front steps were immaculate, the white stone stairs shone, there was not a speck of dust anywhere, and I appreciated the work this meant in an old London building, where the dirt not only filters through doors and windows, but oozes out of the walls and comes up through the floors. She did not pretend to hide her despair when our painters and paperers tramped and blundered in and out; she fretted herself ill when our furniture was brought up the three flights of her shining stairs. Painters and paperers and the bringing up of furniture were rare incidents in the life of a tenant and had to be endured. But coal, with its trail of dust, was an endless necessity, and at least could be regulated. This was why, after her daily cleaning was done, she refused to let it pass.