To
JOHN FREDERICK FARRAR
M.R.C.S., L.R.C.P.
MY COLLABORATOR
IN THIS AND MANY OTHER BOOKS
A GRATEFUL EXPRESSION
OF OLD-ESTABLISHED REGARD
The peculiar angle of the earth's axis to the plane of theecliptic--that angle which is chiefly responsible for our geography andtherefore for our history--had caused the phenomenon known in London assummer. The whizzing globe happened to have turned its most civilized faceaway from the sun, thus producing night in Selwood Terrace, SouthKensington. In No. 91 Selwood Terrace two lights, on the ground-floor andon the first-floor, were silently proving that man's ingenuity can outwitnature's. No. 91 was one of about ten thousand similar houses between SouthKensington Station and North End Road. With its grimy stucco front, itscellar kitchen, its hundred stairs and steps, its perfect inconvenience,and its conscience heavy with the doing to death of sundry generalservants, it uplifted tin chimney-cowls to heaven and gloomily awaited theday of judgment for London houses, sublimely ignoring the axial and orbitalvelocities of the earth and even the reckless flight of the whole solarsystem through space. You felt that No. 91 was unhappy, and that it couldonly be rendered happy by a 'To let' standard in its front patch and a 'Nobottles' card in its cellar-windows. It possessed neither of thesespecifics. Though of late generally empty, it was never untenanted. In theentire course of its genteel and commodious career it had never once beento let.
Go inside, and breathe its atmosphere of a bored house that is generallyempty yet never untenanted. All its twelve rooms dark and forlorn, savetwo; its cellar kitchen dark and forlorn; just these two rooms, one on thetop of the other like boxes, pitifully struggling against the inveterategloom of the remaining ten! Stand in the dark hall and get this atmosphereinto your lungs.
The principal, the startling thing in the illuminated room on theground-floor was a dressing-gown, of the colour, between heliotrope andpurple, known to a previous generation as puce; a quilted garment stuffedwith swansdown, light as hydrogen--nearly, and warm as the smile of a kindheart; old, perhaps, possibly worn in its outlying regions and allowingfluffs of feathery white to escape through its satin pores; but adressing-gown to dream of. It dominated the unkempt, naked apartment, itsvoluptuous folds glittering crudely under the sun-replacing oil lamp whichwas set on a cigar-box on the stained deal table. The oil lamp had a glassreservoir, a chipped chimney, and a cardboard shade, and had probably costless than a florin; five florins would have purchased the table; and all