and sits down on the hero's breakfast-table and cleans them over the
poor fellow's food. She comes into the drawing-room cleaning boots.

She has her own method of cleaning them, too. She rubs off the mud,
puts on the blacking, and polishes up all with the same brush. They
take an enormous amount of polishing. She seems to do nothing else
all day long but walk about shining one boot, and she breathes on it
and rubs it till you wonder there is any leather left, yet it never
seems to get any brighter, nor, indeed, can you expect it to, for when
you look close you see it is a patent-leather boot that she has been
throwing herself away upon all this time.

Somebody has been having a lark with the poor girl.

The lodging-house slavey brushes her hair with the boot brush and
blacks the end of her nose with it.

We were acquainted with a lodging-house slavey once--a real one, we
mean. She was the handmaiden at a house in Bloomsbury where we once
hung out. She was untidy in her dress, it is true, but she had not
quite that castaway and gone-to-sleep-in-a-dust-bin appearance that
we, an earnest student of the drama, felt she ought to present, and we
questioned her one day on the subject.

"How is it, Sophronia," we said, "that you distantly resemble a human
being instead of giving one the idea of an animated rag-shop? Don't
you ever polish your nose with the blacking-brush, or rub coal into
your head, or wash your face in treacle, or put skewers into your
hair, or anything of that sort, like they do on the stage?"