I could spare half an hour to look in at him he would take it as a
rare honour.

I went the next day--his messenger had given me a new address--and
found my friend lodged in a short sordid street in Marylebone, one
of those corners of London that wear the last expression of sickly
meanness. The room into which I was shown was above the small
establishment of a dyer and cleaner who had inflated kid gloves and
discoloured shawls in his shop-front. There was a great deal of
grimy infant life up and down the place, and there was a hot moist
smell within, as of the "boiling" of dirty linen. Brooksmith sat
with a blanket over his legs at a clean little window where, from
behind stiff bluish-white curtains, he could look across at a
huckster's and a tinsmith's and a small greasy public-house. He
had passed through an illness and was convalescent, and his mother,
as well as his aunt, was in attendance on him. I liked the nearer
relative, who was bland and intensely humble, but I had my doubts
of the remoter, whom I connected perhaps unjustly with the opposite
public-house--she seemed somehow greasy with the same grease--and
whose furtive eye followed every movement of my hand as to see if
it weren't going into my pocket. It didn't take this direction--I
couldn't, unsolicited, put myself at that sort of ease with
Brooksmith. Several times the door of the room opened and
mysterious old women peeped in and shuffled back again. I don't
know who they were; poor Brooksmith seemed encompassed with vague
prying beery females.

He was vague himself, and evidently weak, and much embarrassed, and
not an allusion was made between us to Mansfield Street. The
vision of the salon of which he had been an ornament hovered before