"It’s a nice old house," the elder lady smiled, with her brave air of having to overcome agony before being able to speak at all. "It’s old-fashioned, of course, and horribly in the wrong part of the city nowadays; but my sister and I love it. We’ve always lived here, and our dear father before us. He was Doctor Smith, quite a famous oculist in his day; you may have heard of him?" "I’ve heard the name," I admitted, politely. "We’ve two good rooms vacant at present; but if you can’t give references"—a wan smile deprecated the unladylike suggestion—"I’m afraid we should have to ask you for a week’s rent in advance. I shouldn’t speak of it if it was not our rule." When I had agreed to this she led the way over the frayed cocoanut matting of the staircase to an upper hallway, also carpeted in pulverized oilcloth. With one sister ahead of me, and the other shepherding me behind, I was ushered into a large prow-shaped room immediately over the provision dealer, and smelling faintly of raw meat. I could have borne the odor if the rent had not been six a week. "We’ve another room just over this," the spokeswoman informed me, "but it’s only half this size." "If it’s only half this rent—" "It’s just half this rent." So, marshaled as before, I mounted another stairway in cocoanut matting to a slit of a room shaped like half a ship’s prow, with its single window placed squintwise. As the smell of raw meat was less noticeable here, the squint of the window out into Meeting-House Green, and the rent so low, I made my bargain promptly. In the days of the famous oculist the room must have been a maid’s. It was still furnished like a maid’s in a house of the second order. A rickety iron bedstead supported a sagging mattress covered with a cotton counterpane in imitated crochet-work. A table, a washstand, a chair, and a chest of drawers were perhaps drearier than they might have been, because of the sick light of the gas-jet. On a drab wooden mantelpiece, which enshrined a board covered with a piece of cretonne where once had been a fireplace, stood the only decoration in the room, three large fungi, painted with landscapes. The fungi were of the triangular sort which grow about the trunks of trees. There was a big one in the middle of the mantelpiece, and smaller ones at each end, giving glimpses of rivers and bays, with castles on headlands, to one tired of the prospect of Meeting-House Green. Taking the initiatory three dollars from my purse, I bent to study these objects of art. Once more the act was ingratiating to my hostesses. "That’s my work," said the little woman who had admitted me to the house. Her tone was one of shy pride, of a kind of fluttered boastfulness.