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Updated: June 29, 2025
I only have it on hire, and I I " He felt himself blushing. "Oh, what a pity!" interrupted Mrs. Leadbatter. "You might as well let me go on payin' the hinstalments, instead of lettin' all you've paid go for nothing. Rosie ain't got much time, but I could allow 'er a 'our a day if it was my own pianner." Lancelot explained "hire" did not mean the "hire system."
Leadbatter doesn't reckon it an extra." "Oh, no, sir," said Mary Ann, seriously. "I'll tell her. Besides, she will be glad, because she don't like the canary she says its singing disturbs her. Her room is next to mine, you know, Mr. Lancelot." "But you said it doesn't sing much." "Please, sir, I I mean in summer," explained Mary Ann, in rosy confusion; "and and it'll soon be summer, sir."
"Did you ring, sir?" said a wheezy voice at last. Mrs. Leadbatter had got tired of waiting. Lancelot started violently Mrs. Leadbatter had latterly left him entirely to Mary Ann. "It's my hastmer," she had explained to him apologetically, meeting him casually in the passage. "I can't trollop up and down stairs as I used to when I fust took this house five-an'-twenty year ago, and pore Mr.
Reviewing the bargain, when Mrs. Leadbatter was gone, Lancelot did not think it at all bad for him. "Use of the piano. Gas," he murmured, with a pathetic smile, recalling the advertisements he had read before lighting on Mrs. Leadbatter's. "And five shillings a week it's a considerable relief! There's no loss of dignity either for nobody will know. But I wonder what the governor would have said!"
Leadbatter paused and turned her head. "His there anything the matter!" she echoed, looking down upon him. "A nice thing when a woman's troubled with hastmer and brought 'ome 'er daughter to take 'er place, that she should 'ave to start 'untin' afresh!" "Why, is Rosie going away?" he said, immeasurably relieved. "My Rosie! She's the best girl breathing. It's that there Mary Ann!"
"I don't know exactly what houris from heaven are, but I have a kind of feeling any sort of frock would be out of harmony !" Lancelot lit his pipe. "If you begin to say that sort of thing we must smoke," he said, laughing between the puffs. "I can offer you lots of tobacco I'm sorry I've got no cigars. Wait till you see Mrs. Leadbatter my landlady then you'll talk about houris.
Leadbatter was a garrulous body, who suffered from the delusion that small-talk is a form of politeness, and that her conversation was a part of the "all inclusive" her lodgers stipulated for.
Leadbatter, whose experience of life was wider than Mary Ann's, considered his vagaries almost unchristian, though to the highest degree gentlemanly. Sometimes, too, he sported the swallow-tail and the starched breast-plate, which was a wonder to Mary Ann, who knew that waiters were connected only with the most stylish establishments. Baker's Terrace did not wear evening dress.
But the climax of the horror was the attendance of Mrs. Leadbatter at the lessons, for, to Lancelot's consternation, she took it for granted that her presence was part of the contract. She marched into the room in her best cap, and sat, smiling, in the easy chair, wheezing complacently and beating time with her foot. Occasionally she would supplement Lancelot's critical observations.
"Not another stroke of work do you do in my house, Mary Ann!" Then there was silence, save for the thumping of his own heart. What had happened? He heard Mrs. Leadbatter mounting the kitchen stairs, wheezing and grumbling: "Well, of all the sly little things!" Mary Ann had been discovered. His blood ran cold at the thought. The silly creature had been unable to keep the secret.
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