Mr Swiveller, assenting, armed himself with his stool and the large ruler, and repaired with his employer to the scene of action, where Miss Brass was already ringing a hand-bell with all her might, and yet without producing the smallest effect upon their mysterious lodger.
While Mr Brass, with his eye curiously twisted into the keyhole, uttered these sounds as a means of attracting the lodger's attention, and while Miss Brass plied the hand-bell, Mr Swiveller put his stool close against the wall by the side of the door, and mounting on the top and standing bolt upright, so that if the lodger did make a rush, he would most probably pass him in its onward fury, began a violent battery with the ruler upon the upper panels of the door.
She was too deeply materialized, poor woman, by her long and enforced bondage to that arithmetical demon Profit-and-Loss, to retain much curiousity for its own sake, and apart from possible
lodgers' pockets.
We have no secrets from each other where
lodgers are concerned.
'A little too much, I think,' Miss Bella reflected scornfully, 'to have Pa's
lodger laying claim to me, and keeping eligible people off!
"A nice come-down for you, I must say, that was raised straight an' right, a-cuttin' up didoes with a
lodger."
There are tales of a mysterious tall man in a silk hat, who once came out of the sea-mists and apparently out of the sea, stepping softly across the sandy fields and through the small back garden at twilight, till he was heard talking to the
lodger at his open window.
Krook addresses a crazy little woman who is his female
lodger, who appears and vanishes in a breath, who soon returns accompanied by a testy medical man brought from his dinner, with a broad, snuffy upper lip and a broad Scotch tongue.
Bardell, colouring up to the very border of her cap, as she fancied she observed a species of matrimonial twinkle in the eyes of her
lodger; 'La, Mr.
Even the table-cloth was nearly clean; the crockery, knives, forks and glasses were, of course, of all shapes and patterns, lent by different
lodgers, but the table was properly laid at the time fixed, and Amalia Ivanovna, feeling she had done her work well, had put on a black silk dress and a cap with new mourning ribbons and met the returning party with some pride.
and where are the--the
lodgers? You do take in
lodgers, don't you?"
To the door of this, the twelfth house whose bell he had rung, came a housekeeper who made him think of an unwholesome, surfeited worm that had eaten its nut to a hollow shell and now sought to fill the vacancy with edible
lodgers.
Winnie had also other charms: her youth; her full, rounded form; her clear complexion; the provocation of her unfathomable reserve, which never went so far as to prevent conversation, carried on on the
lodgers' part with animation, and on hers with an equable amiability.
These rooms are tenanted by different people--by one, by two, or by three
lodgers as the case may be, but in this arrangement there is no sort of system, and the place is a perfect Noah's Ark.
Imagine my surprise and indignation when I saw the floor occupied by at least a dozen other
lodgers! I sat up, earnestly damning the management of that unthinkable hotel, and was about to spring from the bed to go and make trouble for the night- clerk--him of the apologetic manner and the tallow candle--when something in the situation affected me with a strange indisposition to move.
