consulted merely the length of her purse and the interests of her
personal comfort, she would doubtless have found for the same rental
a far more convenient and roomy cottage in Upper Clapton or Stoke
Newington. But Lady Le Breton was a thoroughly and conscientiously
religious woman, who in all things consulted first and foremost
the esoteric interests of her ingrained creed. It was a prime
article of this cherished social faith that nobody with any shadow
of personal self-respect could endure to live under any other
postal letter than W. or S.W. Better not to be at all than to drag
out a miserable existence in the painful obscurity of N. or S.E.
Happily for people situated like Lady Le Breton, the metropolitan
house-contractor (it would be gross flattery to describe him
as a builder) has divined, with his usual practical sagacity, the
necessity for supplying this felt want for eligible family residences
at once comparatively cheap and relatively fashionable. By driving
little culs-de-sac and re-entrant alleys at the back of his larger
rows of shoddy mansions, he is enabled to run up a smaller terrace,
or crescent, or place, as the case may be, composed of tiny shallow
cottages with the narrowest possible frontage, and the tallest
possible elevation, which will yet entitle their occupiers to feel
themselves within the sacred pale of social salvation, in the blest
security of the mystic W. Narrowest, shallowest, and tallest of
these marginal Society residences is the little block of blank-faced,
stucco-fronted, porticoed rabbit-hutches, which blazons itself
forth in the Court Guide under the imposing designation of Epsilon
Terrace, Bayswater.

The interior of No. 28 in this eminently respectable back alley was
quite of a piece, it must be confessed, with the vacant Philistinism
of its naked exterior. 'Mother has really an immense amount of