… By the way, isn't Furnished Rooms a good title for a story which plays in the Redcliffe Road? I can't resist it.

page 85

Come and look over shoulder. The meeting on the dark stairs, you know,—someone is coming down and someone is coming up. Is someone there? The fright, the pause—the unknown in each other glaring through the dark and then passing (which is almost too terrifying to be borne). Then the whole street. And for backcloth— the whole line of the street—and the dressmakers calling to the cat, the Chinamen, the dark gentlemen, the babies playing, the coal cart, the line of the sky above the houses, the little stone figure in one of the gardens who carries a stone tray on his head, which in summer is filled with flowers and in winter is heaped with snow, the lamenting piano, and all those faces hiding behind the windows, and the one who is always on the watch. I see the heroine very small, like a child, with high-heeled boots and a tiny muff of false astrachan, and then the restless despairing hero for whom all is over. She cannot understand what is the matter with him. Does she ever know? And what happens?

It is the extreme coldness of my room and the brown paper wagging over the sooty fireplace which gives me such a veine. Nothing will go up the chimney while this tempest lasts. And I begin to feel ‘The blighted Mongol’ stir and clamour in me.