presence, quite possibly she is as cunning with jackets. Or
perhaps she is her own seamstress, and puts in little tucks of
herself.

Figure it what you please; but I beg to inform you that I put on
my hat and five minutes afterward saw Mary and her husband emerge
from the house to which I had calculated that garden belonged.
Now am I clever, or am I not?

When they had left the street I examined the house leisurely, and
a droll house it is. Seen from the front it appears to consist
of a door and a window, though above them the trained eye may
detect another window, the air-hole of some apartment which it
would be just like Mary's grandiloquence to call her bedroom.
The houses on each side of this bandbox are tall, and I
discovered later that it had once been an open passage to the
back gardens. The story and a half of which it consists had been
knocked up cheaply, by carpenters I should say rather than
masons, and the general effect is of a brightly coloured van that
has stuck for ever on its way through the passage.

The low houses of London look so much more homely than the tall
ones that I never pass them without dropping a blessing on their
builders, but this house was ridiculous; indeed it did not call
itself a house, for over the door was a board with the
inscription "This space to be sold," and I remembered, as I rang
the bell, that this notice had been up for years. On avowing
that I wanted a space, I was admitted by an elderly, somewhat
dejected looking female, whose fine figure was not on scale with
her surroundings. Perhaps my face said so, for her first remark