“It’s all one, Miss Jasmine,” she
exclaimed; “if it was my dying breath, I’d
have to own that London is not what we pictered it—vanities
there is, and troubles there is, and disappointments
most numerous and most biting. But for the one
happy day I spent out with you dear young ladies,
I hasn’t known no happiness in London. Oh,
Miss Jasmine,” drawing up short and looking
her young lady full in the face—“what
dreadful lies them novels tells! I read them afore
I came, and I made up such wonderful picters; but
I will own that what with the ladies in this mansion,
as worrit me almost past bearing, and what with you
going away all secret like, and what with me being
no longer Poppy the tare, but Sarah Jane the drudge,
even if I was to get one of the bonnets that they
show in the shop windows in Bond Street, why, it wouldn’t
draw a smile from me Miss Jasmine!”
HOW TO PAINT CHINA AND HOW TO FORM STYLE.
Mrs. Dove had a great many lodgers—she
let rooms on each of her floors, and she called her
lodgers by the name of the floor they occupied—first
floor, second floor, third floor came and went to 10,
Eden Street. The girls were known as “the
attics,” and Jasmine felt very indignant at
the name.
“It’s almost as bad as being a tare,”
she said to Primrose. “Dear, dear!
I never thought I should turn into an attic! What
an unpleasant place London is! I begin to think
Poppy is quite right in what she says of it.”
“I begin to suspect,” said Primrose, “that
London, like all places, has its shady side and its
bright side. We are in the shady side at present,
dear Jasmine—that is all.”
Mrs. Dove had not only lodgers who seemed to worry
her from morning to night—for, unlike her
name, she was always fretting or scolding somebody—but
she also had a husband, and this husband made his
presence felt by every lodger in the house. He
was often away for a whole week at a time, and then
comparative peace reigned in No. 10; but he would
come back at unexpected moments—he would
enter the house, singing out, in a loud rasping voice—
“Mrs. Dove,
My only love!”
And then poor Mrs. Dove would get flushed and uncomfortable
and lose what little self-possession she ever had,
and would own in confidence to the first floor, or
the second floor, or the attics, just as they happened
to be present, that Mr. Dove’s honeyed phrases
were only words after all, and meant quite the contrary.
The girls were not a week at No. 10, Eden Street,
before it became very apparent to them that there
was little of the real Eden to be found in the place.
They kept themselves, however, quite apart from the
other lodgers; they began to get out their books and
their employments, and what with housekeeping, and
what with cleaning their rooms, and going out for
long rambling walks in all directions, they were busy
