The whizzing globe happened to have turned its most civilized face away
from the sun, thus producing night in Selwood Terrace, South Kensington.
In No. 91 Selwood Terrace two lights, on the ground-floor and on the
first-floor, were silently proving that man's ingenuity can outwit
nature's. No. 91 was one of about ten thousand similar houses between
South Kensington Station and North End Road. With its grimy stucco
front, its cellar kitchen, its hundred stairs and steps, its perfect
inconvenience, and its conscience heavy with the doing to death of
sundry general servants, it uplifted tin chimney-cowls to heaven and
gloomily awaited the day of judgment for London houses, sublimely
ignoring the axial and orbital velocities of the earth and even the
reckless flight of the whole solar system through space. You felt that
No. 91 was unhappy, and that it could only be rendered happy by a 'To
let' standard in its front patch and a 'No bottles' card in its
cellar-windows. It possessed neither of these specifics. Though of late
generally empty, it was never untenanted. In the entire course of its
genteel and commodious career it had never once been to let.

Go inside, and breathe its atmosphere of a bored house that is generally
empty yet never untenanted. All its twelve rooms dark and forlorn, save
two; its cellar kitchen dark and forlorn; just these two rooms, one on
the top of the other like boxes, pitifully struggling against the
inveterate gloom of the remaining ten! Stand in the dark hall and get
this atmosphere into your lungs.

The principal, the startling thing in the illuminated room on the
ground-floor was a dressing-gown, of the colour, between heliotrope and
purple, known to a previous generation as puce; a quilted garment
stuffed with swansdown, light as hydrogen--nearly, and warm as the smile
of a kind heart; old, perhaps, possibly worn in its outlying regions and