Hitherto everybody had been patient with Mrs. Haines, for the London housekeeper, though she has not got the tenants as completely in her power as the Paris _concierge_, can, if she wants, make things very disagreeable for them. Now that she was alone in the world, everybody was kind to her. The landlord overlooked his announced decision "to sack the pair," and retained her as housekeeper, though in losing her husband she had lost her principal recommendation. The tenants raised a fund to enable her to buy the mourning which is often a consolation in widowhood. Work was offered to her in chambers which she had never entered before, and I added to the tasks in ours. The housekeepers in the street with families to support must have envied her. She had her rooms rent free, wages from the landlord, plenty of extra work, and though this might not seem affluence to people who do not measure their income by pence or scramble for the odd shilling, it was wealth in housekeeping circles. Mrs. Haines, however, did not see her position in that light. She had complained when work was not offered to her, she complained more bitterly when it was. Perhaps her husband had had some restraining influence upon her. I cannot say; but certainly once he was gone, she gave up all pretence of controlling her temper. She would sweep like a hurricane through the house, raging and raving, on the slightest provocation. She led us a worse life than ever over the drain-pipe. She left the house more and more to take care of itself, dust lying thick wherever dust could lie, the stairs turned to a dingy grey, the walls blackened with London smoke and grime. Once in a while she hired a forlorn, ragged old woman to wash the stairs and brush the front-door mat, for in London, more than anywhere else, "poverty is a comparative thing," and every degree has one below to "soothe" it. No matter how hard up Mrs. Haines was, she managed to scrape together a few pennies to pay to have the work done for her rather than do it herself. The greater part of her leisure she spent out of the house, and when I passed her door I would see pinned up on it a bit of paper stating in neat, even elegant, writing, "Apply on the First Floor for the Housekeeper," or "Gone out. Back in ten minutes"; and hours, sometimes days, later the same notice would still be there. She became as neglectful of herself as of the house: her one dress grew shabbier and shabbier, her apron was discarded, no detail of her toilet was attended to except the frizzing of her coarse black hair. All this came about not at once, but step by step, and things were very bad before J. and I admitted, even to each other, that she was a disgrace to the house. We would admit it to nobody else, and to my surprise the other tenants were as forbearing. I suppose it was because they understood, as well as we did, that at a word to the landlord she would be adrift in London, where for one vacant post of