Many years were passed in the Rue Millevoye by Mrs. Rowe and her niece, without more incident than the packing and unpacking of luggage, and genteel disputes over items in the bills conducted with icy politeness on both sides, and concluded by Mrs. Rowe invariably with the withering observation, that it was the first remark of the kind which had ever been made on one of her little notes.  People usually came to a settlement with complimentary expressions of surprise at the extreme—­almost reckless—­moderation of her charges; and expressed themselves as at a loss to understand how she could make it worth her while to do so very much for so very little.  The people who came and went were alike in the mass.  The reader is requested to bear in mind that Mrs. Rowe had a connexion of her own.  She was seldom angry; but when an advertising agent made his way to her business parlour, and took the liberty of submitting the value of a Western States paper as a medium for making her establishment known, she confessed that the impertinence was too much for her temper.  Mrs. Rowe advertise!  Mrs. Rowe would just as soon throw herself off the Pont Neuf, or—­miss church next Sunday.

“They don’t come a second time!” Mrs. Rowe would say to me, with a fierce compression of the lip, that might lead a nervous person to imagine she made away with them in the cellars.

When Mrs. Rowe took you into her confidence—­a slow and tedious admission—­she was pleased, usually, to fortify your stock of knowledge with a comprehensive view of her family connexions; intended to set the Whytes of Battersea (from whom she derived, before the vulgar Park was there) upon an eminence of glory, with a circle of cringing and designing Rowes at the base.  How she—­Whyte on both sides, for her father married his first cousin—­ever came to marry Joshua Rowe, was something her mother never understood to her dying day.  She was graciously open to consolation in the reflection that nobles and princes had made humble matches before her; and particularly in this, that the Prince Regent married Mrs. Fitzherbert.

Lucy Rowe was favoured with these observations, heightened by occasional hits at her own misfortune in that she was a Rowe, and could not boast one thimbleful of Whyte blood in her veins.

It was the almost daily care of Mrs. Rowe to impress the people with whom her business brought her in contact, with the gulf that lay between her and her niece; although, through the early and inexplicable condescension of a Miss Harriet Whyte, of Battersea, they bore the same name, Miss Rowe was no blood relation whatever.