d Florence''s house for her and cooked her supper; I think I even felt like her, the second day I did it. By the third day, however - the third day of waiting in the street for the stand-pipe to spit out its bit of cloudy water, of black-leading the fireplaces and the stove, of whitening the step, of scouring out the privy - I was ready to hang up my crook and return to my palace. But the palace doors, of course, had been closed on me; I must work, now, in earnest. And I must work, too, with a baby squirming on my arm - or rolling about the floor, cracking his head against the furniture - or, more usually, shrieking out, from his crib upstairs, for milk and bread-and-butter. For''} all my promises to Florence, if there had been gin in the house,''
I think I would have given it to him - or else, I might have swallowed some of it myself, to make the chores a little gayer. But there was no gin; and Cyril stayed lively, and the chores remained hard. And I could not complain, not even to myself: for I knew that, dreary as they were, they were not so dreary as the habits I should have to learn if I left Bethnal Green to try my luck, all friendless and in winter, upon the streets.
So, I did not complain; but I did think, often, of Felicity Place. I thought of how quiet and how handsome that square was; of how grand Diana''s villa was, how pleasant its chambers, how light, how warm, how perfumed, how polished -how different, in short, to Florence''s house, which was set in one of the poorest, noisiest quarters of the city; had one dark room to do duty as bed-chamber, dining-room, library and parlour; had windows that rattled and chimneys that smoked, and a door that was continually opening, shutting, or being banged by a fist. The whole street, it seemed to me, might as well be made of India rubber - there was such a passage of shouts and laughter and people and smells and dogs, from one house to its neighbours. I should not have minded it -after all, I had grown up in a street that was similar, in a house where cousins thundered up and down the stairs, and the parlour might be full, on any night of the week, with people drinking beer and playing cards and sometimes quarrelling. But I had lost the habit of enduring it; and now it only made me weary.