He replied, marvellously schooling his voice to a similar tone of
cheerful abruptness:

"Difficult to say, off-hand."

"Not at all. It's your beard."

That was her greeting to him. He knew she was recalling an old
declined suggestion of hers that he should part with his beard. The
parlour-maid practised an admirable deafness, faithfully to confirm
Concepcion, who always presumed deafness in all servants. G.J. looked
up the narrow well of the staircase. He could vaguely see Concepcion
on high, leaning over the banisters; he thought she was rather
fluffilly dressed, for her.

Concepcion inhabited an upper part in a street largely devoted to the
sale of grand pianos. Her front door was immediately at the top of a
long, straight, narrow stairway; so that whoever opened the door stood
one step higher than the person desiring entrance. Within the abode,
which was fairly spacious, more and more stairs went up and up. "My
motto is," she would say, "'One room, one staircase.'" The life of the
abode was on the busy stairs. She called it also her Alpine Club. She
had made upper-parts in that street popular among the select, and had
therefore caused rents to rise. In the drawing-room she had hung
a horrible enlarged photographic portrait of herself, with a
chocolate-coloured mount, the whole framed in German gilt, and under
it she had inscribed, "Presented to Miss Concepcion Iquist by the
grateful landlords of the neighbourhood as a slight token of esteem
and regard."