La Chicot was delighted at being engaged by a London manager, who offered her a better salary than she was getting at the students’ theatre. She did not like the idea of London, which she imagined a city given over to fog and lung disease, but she was very glad to leave the scene where she felt that her laurels were fast withering. She gave her husband no thanks for his intervention, and went on railing at him for not having got her an engagement on the boulevard. ‘It is to bury myself to go to your dismal London,’ she exclaimed; ‘but anything is better than to dance to an assembly of idiots and cretins.’ ‘London is not half a bad place,’ answered Jack Chicot, with his listless air, as of a man long wearied of life, and needing a stimulant as strong as aquafortis to rouse him to animation. ‘It is a big crowd in which one may lose one’s identity. Nobody knows one, one knows nobody. A man’s sense of shame gets comfortably deadened in London. He can walk the streets without feeling that fingers are being pointed at him. It is all the same to the herd whether he has just come out of a penitentiary or a palace. Nobody cares.’ The Chicots crossed the Channel, and took lodgings in a street in the neighbourhood of Leicester Square, near which, as everyone knows, the Prince Frederick is situated. It was a dingy street, offering scanty attractions to the stranger, but it was a street which from the days of Garrick and Woffington had been favoured by actors and actresses, and Mr. Smolendo recommended the Chicots to seek a lodging there. He gave them the names of three or four householders who let lodgings to ‘the profession,’ and among these Madame Chicot made her choice. The apartments which pleased her best were two fair-sized rooms on a first floor, furnished with a tawdry pretentiousness which would have been odious to a refined eye, and which was particularly offensive to Jack’s artistic taste. The cheap velvet on the chairs, the gaudy tapestry curtains, the tarnished ormolu clock and candelabra, delighted La Chicot. It was almost Parisian, she told her husband. The drawing-room and bedroom communicated with folding-doors. There was a little third room--a mere hole--with a window looking northward, which would do for Jack to paint in. That convenience reconciled Jack to the shabby finery of the sitting-room, the doubtful purity of the bedroom, the woe-begone air of the street, with its half-dozen dingy shops sprinkled among the private houses, like an eruption. ‘How it is ugly, your London!’ exclaimed La Chicot. ‘Is it that all the city resembles this, by example?’ ‘No,’ answered Jack, with his cynical air. ‘There are brighter-looking streets, where the respectable people live.’ ‘What do you call respectable people?’ ‘The people who pay income-tax on two or three thousand a year.’ Jack inquired as to the other lodgers. It was as well to find out what kind of neighbours they were to have.