began, or after the first of May the rent would be doubled.

The treaty usually took place in the dishevelled drawing-room, after a
round of the widely parted chambers, where frowzy beds, covered with
frowzy white counterpanes, stood on frowzy carpets or yet frowzier
mattings, and dusty windows peered into purblind courts. A vulgar
modernity coexisted with a shabby antiquity in the appointments; a
mouldering wall showed its damp through the smart tastelessness of
recent paper; the floor reeled under a combination of pseudo-aesthetic
rugs. The drawing-room expected to be the dining-room also, and faintly
breathed the staleness of the meals served in it. If the front windows
often opened on a cheerful street, the back windows had no air but that
of the sunless spaces which successive architectural exigencies had
crowded with projecting cupboards, closets, and lattices, above basement
skylights which the sky seldom lighted. The passages and the stairs were
never visible except after dark; even then the foot rather than the eye
found the way. Yet, once settled in such a place, it developed
possibilities of comfort, of quiet, of seclusion, which the hardiest
hopefulness could not have forecast. The meals came up and could be
eaten; the coffee, which nearly all English hotels have good and nearly
all English lodgings bad, could be exchanged for tea; the service was
always well-intentioned, and often more, and except that you paid twice
as much as it all seemed worth, you were not so ill-used as you might
have been.

It is said that the whole system, if not on its last legs, is unsteady
on its feet from the competition of the great numbers of those large,
new, reasonably cheap, and admirably managed hotels. Yet the
lodging-houses remain by hundreds of thousands, almost by millions,
throughout the land, and if the English are giving them up they are