est-chamber boasted, and ran her
unoccupied needles through her interminable knitting, a thick white cotton
sofa-cover or counterpane of irritating pattern--and stood over against
her employer in an attitude of sulky submission. She was a
square-shouldered, sturdily-built young woman of twenty-five, with round
eyes of pinky-blue garnished with white eyelashes, no eyebrows, and a
superb and aggressively-brilliantined head of fair hair elaborately
dressed, waved, and curled.

The hair was all attached to Trudi's scalp. Lady Hannah had lain in bed
morning after morning, for weary weeks, and watched her "doing it," and
wondered that any young feminine creature with such arms, such skin, and
such hair should be so utterly unattractive. But she had lived all these
weeks in this one room with Trudi, had languished under her handmaid's
lack of intelligence, had seen her eat, wielding her knife with
marvellous dexterity, and, wakeful, tossed the while she snored.

And every morning, after Mevrouw Kink had brought in coffee, snorting
whenever Trudi's hair caught her virtuous eye, or whenever the German
drummer's widow struck her as being more foreign of manners and appearance
than usual, Lady Hannah would call for her boots, attire herself as for a
promenade outdoors, lift the corner of a blind, steal a glance at the
seething, stenching single street of Tweipans between the slats of the
green shutters, and--unpin her veil and take off her hat without a
word....

By eleven o'clock at night the polyglot confusion of tongues would have
ceased, the gaudily-uniformed swaggerers, the velveteen-coated,
wide-awaked loafers, the filthy tatterdemalions of all nations and their
womenkind would have turned in. Then Lady Hannah, attended by the
unwilling Trudi, was accustomed to venture out for what she called, with
some exaggeration, "A whiff of fresh air."

Except for the gnawing, prowling dogs, the pickets at either end of it,
and the sentries posted at longish intervals all down its length, the
street of new brick and tin, and old wooden houses that made Tweipans,
belonged to Lady Hannah then. Accompanied by Trudi, whose quality of being
what I have heard called "deaf-nosed" with regard to noisy smells, she
arrived at the pitch of envying, she would stumble up and down amongst the
rubbish, or wade through the slush if it had been wet, and stop at
favourable points to search with her night-glass for the greenish-blue
glow-worm twinkles