Mrs. Meares, who kept the house in Lillie Road, was an Irishwoman whose husband had grown tired of her gentility and left her. She did not herself sum up her past so tersely as this, but Sylvia was sure that Mr. Meares had left her because he could no longer endure the stories about her royal descent. Perhaps he might have been able to endure his wife's royal descent, because, after all, he had married into the family and might have extracted some pride out of that fact; but all her friends apparently came from kings and queens, too. Ireland, if Mrs. Meares was to be believed, consisted of one large poverty-stricken royal family, which must have cheapened the alliance for Mr. Meares. It was lucky that he was still alive, for otherwise Sylvia was sure that her father would have married their new landlady, such admiration did he always express for the manner in which she struggled against misfortune without losing her dignity. This, from what Sylvia could see, consisted of wearing silk skirts that trailed in the dust of her ill-kept house and of her fanning herself in an arm-chair however cold the weather. The only thing that stirred her to action was the necessity of averting an ill-omen. Thus, she would turn back on a flight of stairs rather than pass anybody descending; although ordinarily when she went up-stairs she used to sigh and hold her heart at every step. Sylvia remembered her mother's scrupulous care of her house, even in the poorest days; she could not help contrasting her dignity with this Irish dignity that was content to see indefinite fried eggs on her table, cockroaches in the bedrooms, and her own placket always agape. Mrs. Meares used to say that she would never let any of her rooms to ladies, because ladies always fussed. "Gentlemen are so much more considerate," said Mrs. Meares. Their willingness to be imposed upon made Sylvia contemptuous of the sex she had adopted, and she tried to spur her father to protest when his bed was still unmade at four o'clock in the afternoon. "Why don't you make it?" he suggested. "I don't like to worry poor Mrs. Meares." Sylvia, however contemptuous of manhood, had no intention of relinquishing its privileges; she firmly declined to have anything to do with the making of beds.