“G.J., who is your oldest and dearest friend?”

He replied, marvellously schooling his voice to a similar tone of cheerful abruptness: 

“Difficult to say, off-hand.”

“Not at all.  It’s your beard.”

That was her greeting to him.  He knew she was recalling an old declined suggestion of hers that he should part with his beard.  The parlour-maid practised an admirable deafness, faithfully to confirm Concepcion, who always presumed deafness in all servants.  G.J. looked up the narrow well of the staircase.  He could vaguely see Concepcion on high, leaning over the banisters; he thought she was rather fluffilly dressed, for her.

Concepcion inhabited an upper part in a street largely devoted to the sale of grand pianos.  Her front door was immediately at the top of a long, straight, narrow stairway; so that whoever opened the door stood one step higher than the person desiring entrance.  Within the abode, which was fairly spacious, more and more stairs went up and up.  “My motto is,” she would say, “‘One room, one staircase.’” The life of the abode was on the busy stairs.  She called it also her Alpine Club.  She had made upper-parts in that street popular among the select, and had therefore caused rents to rise.  In the drawing-room she had hung a horrible enlarged photographic portrait of herself, with a chocolate-coloured mount, the whole framed in German gilt, and under it she had inscribed, “Presented to Miss Concepcion Iquist by the grateful landlords of the neighbourhood as a slight token of esteem and regard.”

She was the only daughter of Iquist’s brother, who had had a business and a palace at Lima.  At the age of eighteen, her last surviving parent being dead, she had come to London and started to keep house for the bachelor Iquist, who at that very moment, owing to a fortunate change in the Ministry, had humorously entered the Cabinet.  These two had immediately become “the most talked-of pair in London,” London in this phrase signifying the few thousand people who do talk about the doings of other people unknown to them and being neither kings, princes, statesmen, artistes, artists, jockeys, nor poisoners.  The Iquists had led the semi-intelligent, conscious-of-its-audience set which had ousted the old, quite unintelligent stately-homes-of-England set from the first place in the curiosity of the everlasting public.  Concepcion had wit.  It was stated that she furnished her uncle with the finest of his mots.  When Iquist died, of course poor Concepcion had retired to the upper part, whence, though her position was naturally weakened, she still took a hand in leading the set.