iss Tippet's only weakness--for she was indeed a most estimable woman--
was a tendency to allow rank and position to weigh too much in her
esteem. She had also a sensitive abhorrence of everything "low and
vulgar," which would have been, of course, a very proper feeling had she
not fallen into the mistake of considering humble birth lowness, and
want of polish vulgarity--a mistake which is often (sometimes even
wilfully) made by persons who consider themselves much wiser than Miss
Tippet, but who are not wise enough to see a distinct shade of true
vulgarity in their own sentiments.

The dark, dismal lane, named Poorthing Lane, besides forming an asylum
for decayed and would-be aristocrats, and a vestibule, as it were, to
Beverly Square, was a convenient retreat for sundry green-grocers and
public-house keepers and small trades-people, who supplied the
densely-peopled surrounding district, and even some of the inhabitants
of Beverly Square itself, with the necessaries of life. It was also a
thoroughfare for the gay equipages of the square, which passed through
it daily on their way to and from the adjoining stables, thereby
endangering the lives of precocious babies who could crawl, but could
not walk away from home, as well as affording food for criticism and
scandal, not to mention the leaving behind of a species of secondhand
odour of gentility such as coachmen and footmen can give forth.

Miss Tippet's means being small, she rented a proportionately small
residence, consisting of two floors, which were the upper portion of a
house, whose ground floor was a toy-shop. The owner of the toy-shop,
David Boone, was Miss Tippet's landlord; but not the owner of the
tenement. He rented the whole, and sublet the upper portion. Miss
Tippet's parlour windows commanded a near view of the lodging opposite,
into every corner and crevice of which she could have seen, had not the
windows been encrusted with impenetrable dirt. Her own domestic
arrangements were concealed from view by small green venetian blinds,
which rose from below, and met the large venetians which descended from
above. The good lady's bedroom windows in the upper floor commanded a
near view--much too near--of a stack of chimneys, between which and
another stack, farther over, she had a glimpse of part of the gable end
of a house, and the topmost bough of a tree in Beverly Square. It was
this prospect into paradise, terrestrially speaking, that influenced