The summer had gone and much even of the autumn, and Miss Grey and her companion were settled in London. Minola had had everything planned out in her mind before they left Dukes-Keeton, and little Miss Blanchet was positively awed by her leader's energy, knowledge, and fearlessness. The first night of their arrival in town they went to a quiet, respectable, old-fashioned hotel, well known of Keeton folk, where Miss Grey's father used to stay during his visits to London for many years, and where his name was still well remembered. Then the two strangers from the country set out to look for lodgings, and Miss Grey was able to test her knowledge of London, and satisfy her pride of learning, by conducting her friend straightway to the region in which she had resolved to make a home for herself. She had been greatly divided in mind for a while between Kensington and the West Centre; between the neighborhood of the South Kensington Museum, the glades of the gardens, and all the charms of the old court suburb, and the temptations of the National Gallery, the British Museum, and the old-fashioned squares and houses around the latter. She decided for the British Museum quarter. Miss Blanchet would have preferred the brightness and air of fashion which belonged to Kensington, but Miss Grey ruled that to live somewhere near the British Museum was more like living in London, and she energetically declared that she would rather live in Seven Dials than out of London. To find a pleasant and suitable lodging would ordinarily have been a difficulty; for the regular London lodging-house keeper detests the sight of women, and only likes the gentleman who disappears in the morning and returns late at night. But luckily there are Keeton folk everywhere. As a rule nobody is born in London, "except children," as a lady once remarked. Come up to London from whatever little Keeton you will, you can find your compatriots settled everywhere in the metropolis. Miss Grey obtained from the kindly landlady of the hotel--who had herself been born in Keeton, and was married to a Glasgow man--a choice of Keeton folk willing to receive respectable and well-recommended lodgers--"real ladies" especially. Miss Grey, being cordially vouched for by the landlady as a real lady, found out a Keeton woman in the West Centre who had a drawing-room and two bedrooms to let.