The Housekeeper, for all her deference to the tenants, was a despot, and none of us dared to rebel against her rule and disturb the order she maintained. To anybody coming in from the not too respectable little street the respectability of the house was overwhelming, and I often noticed that strangers, on entering, lowered their voices and stepped more softly. The hush of repose hung heavy on the public hall and stairs, whatever might be going on behind the two doors that faced each other on every landing. We all emulated her in the quiet and decorum of our movements. We allowed ourselves so seldom to be seen that after three months I still knew little of the others except their names on their doors, the professions of those who had offices and hung up their signs, and the frequency with which the Church League on the First Floor drank afternoon tea. On certain days, when I went out towards five o'clock, I had to push my way through a procession of bishops in aprons and gaiters, deans and ordinary parsons who were legion, dowagers and duchesses who were as sands on the stairs. I may be wrong, but I fancy that the Housekeeper would have found a way to rout this weekly invasion if, in the aprons and gaiters, she had not seen symbols of the respectability which was her pride. What I did not find out about the tenants for myself, there was no learning from her. She disdained the gossip which was the breath of life to the other housekeepers in the street, where, in the early mornings when the fronts were being done, or in the cool of summer evenings when the day's work was over, I would see them chattering at their doors. She never joined in the talk, holding herself aloof, as if her house were on a loftier plane than theirs, and as if the number of her years in it raised her to a higher caste. Exactly how many these years had been she never presumed to say, but she looked as ancient as the house, and had she told me she remembered Bacon and Pepys, who were tenants each in his own day, or Peter the Great, who lived across the street, I should have believed her. She did not, however, claim to go further back than Etty, the Royal Academician, who spent over a quarter of a century in our chambers, and one of whose sitters she once brought up to see us,--a melancholy old man who could only shake his head, first over the changes in the house since Etty painted those wonderful Victorian nudes, so demure that "Bob" Stevenson insisted that Etty's maiden aunts must have sat for them, and then over the changes in the River, which also, it seemed, had seen better days. Really, he was so dismal a survivor of an older generation that we were glad she brought no more of his contemporaries to see us.