The breakfasts in Great Walpole-street, looked upon as meals, were neither satisfactory nor satisfying. Of all social gatherings a breakfast is perhaps the one most difficult to make agreeable to yourself and your guests. There are men, at other periods of the day bright, sociable, and chatty, who insist upon breakfasting by themselves, who glower over their tea and toast, and growl audibly if their solitude is broken in upon; there are women capable of everything in the way of self-sacrifice and devotion except getting up to breakfast. A breakfast after the Scotch fashion, with enormous quantities of Finnan-haddy, chops, steaks, eggs and ham, jam and marmalade, tea and coffee, is a good thing; so is a French breakfast with two delicate cutlets, or a succulent filet, a savoury omelette, a pint bottle of Nuits, a chasse, and a cigarette. But the morning meals in Great Walpole-street were not after either of these fashions. After the servants had risen from their knees, and shuffled out of the room in Indian file at the conclusion of morning prayers, the butler re-entered bearing a hissing silver urn, behind which Mrs. Calverley took up her position, and proceeded to brew a tepid amber-coloured fluid, which she afterwards dispensed to her guests. The footman had followed the butler, bearing, in his turn, a dish containing four thin greasy strips of bacon, laid out side by side in meek resignation, with a portion of kidney keeping guard over them at either end. There was a rack filled with dry toast, which looked and tasted like the cover of an old Latin dictionary; there was a huge bread-platter, with a scriptural text round its margin, and a huge bread-knife with a scriptural text on its blade; and on the sideboard, far away in the distance, was the shadowy outline of what had once been a ham, and a mountain and a promontory of flesh, with the connecting link between them almost cut away, representing what had once been a tongue. On two or three occasions, shortly after Madame Du Tertre had first joined the household, she mentioned to Mrs. Calverley that she was subject to headaches, which were only to be gotten rid of by taking a sharp half-hour's walk in the air immediately after breakfast; the fact being that Pauline was simply starved, and that if she had been followed she would have been found in the small room of Monsieur Verrey's café in Regent-street engaged with a cutlet, a pint of Beaune, and the _Siècle_ newspaper. To John Calverley, also, these gruesome repasts were most detestable, but he made up for his enforced starvation by a substantial and early luncheon in the City.