What I did not find out about the tenants for myself, there was no learning from her. She disdained the gossip which was the breath of life to the other housekeepers in the street, where, in the early mornings when the fronts were being done, or in the cool of summer evenings when the day's work was over, I would see them chattering at their doors. She never joined in the talk, holding herself aloof, as if her house were on a loftier plane than theirs, and as if the number of her years in it raised her to a higher caste. Exactly how many these years had been she never presumed to say, but she looked as ancient as the house, and had she told me she remembered Bacon and Pepys, who were tenants each in his own day, or Peter the Great, who lived across the street, I should have believed her. She did not, however, claim to go further back than Etty, the Royal Academician, who spent over a quarter of a century in our chambers, and one of whose sitters she once brought up to see us,--a melancholy old man who could only shake his head, first over the changes in the house since Etty painted those wonderful Victorian nudes, so demure that "Bob" Stevenson insisted that Etty's maiden aunts must have sat for them, and then over the changes in the River, which also, it seemed, had seen better days. Really, he was so dismal a survivor of an older generation that we were glad she brought no more of his contemporaries to see us.
For so despotic a character, the Housekeeper had a surprisingly feminine capacity for hysterics, of which she made the most the night of the fire. I admit it was an agitating event for us all. The Fire of London was not so epoch-making. Afterwards the tenants used to speak of the days "Before the Fire," as we still talk at home of the days "Before the War." It happened in July, the third month of our tenancy. J. was away, and, owing to domestic complications, I was alone in our chambers at night. I do not recall the period with pride, for it proved me more of a coward than I cared to acknowledge. If I came home late, it was a struggle to make up my mind to open my front door and face the Unknown on the other side. Once or twice there was a second struggle at the dining-room door, the simple search for biscuits exaggerating itself into a perilous adventure. As I was not yet accustomed to the noises in our chambers, fear followed me to my bedroom, and when the trains on the near railroad bridge awoke me, I lay trembling, certain they were burglars or ghosts, forgetting that visitors of that kind are usually shyer in announcing themselves. Then I began to be ashamed, and there was a night when, though the noises sounded strangely like voices immediately outside my window, I managed to turn over and try to sleep again. This time the danger was real, and, the next thing I knew, somebody was ringing the front door-bell and knocking without stopping, and before I had time to be afraid I was out of bed and at the door. It was the young man from across the hall, who had come to give me the cheerful intelligence that his chambers were on fire, and to advise me to dress as fast as I knew how and get downstairs before the firemen and the hose arrived, or I might not get down at all.