station in the direction of the College, he came out into Acacia Road.
There is something about Acacia Road which inevitably suggests
furnished apartments. A child could tell at a glance that it was
bristling with bed-sitting rooms.

Mike knocked at the first door over which a card hung.

There is probably no more depressing experience in the world than the
process of engaging furnished apartments. Those who let furnished
apartments seem to take no joy in the act. Like Pooh-Bah, they do it,
but it revolts them.

In answer to Mike's knock, a female person opened the door. In
appearance she resembled a pantomime 'dame', inclining towards the
restrained melancholy of Mr Wilkie Bard rather than the joyous abandon
of Mr George Robey. Her voice she had modelled on the gramophone. Her
most recent occupation seemed to have been something with a good deal
of yellow soap in it. As a matter of fact--there are no secrets between
our readers and ourselves--she had been washing a shirt. A useful
occupation, and an honourable, but one that tends to produce a certain
homeliness in the appearance.

She wiped a pair of steaming hands on her apron, and regarded Mike with
an eye which would have been markedly expressionless in a boiled fish.

'Was there anything?' she asked.

Mike felt that he was in for it now. He had not sufficient ease of
manner to back gracefully away and disappear, so he said that there was
something. In point of fact, he wanted a bed-sitting room.