borders of Belgravia.

The Americans I am imagining had first carried on their search in those
genteel regions, which could hardly have looked their best in the last
moments of preparation before the season began. The house-cleaning which
went on in all of them was no more hurried than the advance of the slow
English spring outside, where the buds appeared after weeks of
hesitation, and the leaves unfolded themselves at long leisure, and the
blossoms deliberated in dreamy doubt whether they had not better stay in
than come out. Day after day found the lodging-houses with their carpets
up, and their furniture inverted, and their hallways and stairways
reeking from slop-pails or smelling from paint-pots, and with no visible
promise of readiness for lodgers. They were pretty nearly all of one
type. A young German or Swiss--there for the language--came to the door
in the coat he had not always got quite into, and then summoned from the
depths below a landlord or landlady to be specific about times and
terms, to show the rooms, and conceal the extras. The entry was oftenest
dim and narrow, with a mat sunk into the floor at the threshold and worn
to the quick by the cleansing of numberless feet; and an indescribable
frowziness prevailed which imparted itself to the condition of widowhood
dug up by the young foreigner from the basement. Sometimes there
responded to his summons a clerical, an almost episcopal presence, which
was clearly that of a former butler, unctuous in manner and person from
long serving. Or sometimes there would be something much more modern, of
an alert middle-age or wary youth; in every case the lodging-keeper was
skilled far beyond the lodging-seeker in the coils of bargaining, and of
holding in the background unsurmised charges for electric lights, for
candles, for washing, for baths, for boots, and for what-know-I, after
the most explicit declaration that the first demand included everything.
Nothing definite could be evolved but the fact that when the season