"Good-morning, mem," said the child cheerily, making the same respectful courtesy she had made to me. "I'm just showin' the lady what nice lodgin's we've 'ere in the court."
"Humph," said the old woman gruffly, as she tottered out, leaving her door wide open; "they're nothin' to boast of."
Her own lodging certainly was not. It was literally little more than a chamber in the wall: it had no window, except one small square pane above the door. You could hardly stand upright in it, and not much more than turn around. The walls were hung full: household utensils, clothes, even her two or three books, were hung up by strings; there being only room for one tiny table, besides the stove. In one corner stood a step-ladder, which led up through a hole in the ceiling to the cranny overhead in which she slept. This was all the old woman had. She lived here alone, and she paid to the Duke of Westminster two shillings and sixpence a week for the rent of the place. "It's dear at the rent," she said; "but it's a respectable place, an' I think a deal o' that." And she sighed.
The name of the Duke of Westminster and the value of that two and sixpence to his grace meant more to me that morning than it would have done twenty-four hours earlier; for on the previous afternoon we had visited his palace, the famous Eaton Hall. We had walked there for weary hours over marble floors, under frescoed domes, through long lines of statues, of pictures, of stained-glass windows, hangings, carvings, and rare relics and trophies innumerable. We had seen the duchess's window balcony, one waving mass of yellow musk. "Her ladyship is very fond of musk. It is always to be kept flowering at her window," we were told.
We had walked also through a glass corridor three hundred and seventy-five yards long, draped with white clematis and heliotrope on one side, and on the other banked high with geraniums, carnations, and all manner of flowers. Opening at intervals in these banks of flowers were doors into other conservatories: one was filled chiefly with rare orchids, like an enchanted aviary of hummingbirds, arrested on the wing; gold and white, purple and white, brown and gold, green, snowy white, orange; some of them as large as a fleur-de-lis. Another house was filled with ferns and palms, green, luxuriant, like a bit of tropical forest brought across seas for his grace's pleasure. The most superb sight of all was the lotus house. Cleopatra herself might have flushed with pleasure at beholding it. A deep tank, sixty feet long, and twenty wide, filled with white and blue and pink blossoms, floating, swaying, lolling on the dark water; while, seemingly to uphold the glass roof canopying this lotus-decked sea, rose slender columns, wreathed with thunbergia vines in full bloom, yellow, orange, and white; the glass walls of the building were set thick and high with maiden-hair and other rare ferns, interspersed at irregular intervals with solid masses of purple or white flowers. The spell of the place, of its warm, languid air, was beyond words: it was bewildering.
