If you had gone all over the rest of the house--and it
was a large one--you would have found nothing else remarkable, or which
did not smack of Bloomsbury. It was, indeed, nothing but a
lodging-house, and the room we have described was the private apartment
of its mistress. She might consult her own private taste, she
considered, in her own room, else the skull and the picture occasionally
rather shocked "the daintier sense" of the new lodgers, to whom the
landlady gave audience in this apartment. She is as little like a
lodging-house keeper, to look at, as can be imagined. Her cheeks are
firm and fresh-colored, her teeth white and shining, her eyes quite
bright, and her hands plump. To one who knows her age, as we do--she is
fifty-three--she looks like an old woman who has found out the secret of
perpetual youth, but has kept it for her own use, as, in such a case,
every woman probably would do. There is only one piece of deception in
her appearance; her black hair, which clusters over her forehead like a
girl's, is dyed of that color: it is in reality as white as snow. By
lamp-light, as you see her now, she might be a woman of five-and-twenty,
penning a letter to her love. But she is, in fact, writing to her son;
for it is Mrs. Yorke. Writing to him, but not thinking of him, surely,
when she frowns as now, and leans back in her chair with that menacing
and angry look.
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