word and a
home look.

[Illustration: THE DOWAGER AND TALL FOOTMAN.]

Many years were passed in the Rue Millevoye by Mrs. Rowe and her niece,
without more incident than the packing and unpacking of luggage, and
genteel disputes over items in the bills conducted with icy politeness
on both sides, and concluded by Mrs. Rowe invariably with the withering
observation, that it was the first remark of the kind which had ever
been made on one of her little notes. People usually came to a
settlement with complimentary expressions of surprise at the
extreme--almost reckless--moderation of her charges; and expressed
themselves as at a loss to understand how she could make it worth her
while to do so very much for so very little. The people who came and
went were alike in the mass. The reader is requested to bear in mind
that Mrs. Rowe had a connexion of her own. She was seldom angry; but
when an advertising agent made his way to her business parlour, and took
the liberty of submitting the value of a Western States paper as a
medium for making her establishment known, she confessed that the
impertinence was too much for her temper. Mrs. Rowe advertise! Mrs. Rowe
would just as soon throw herself off the Pont Neuf, or--miss church next
Sunday.

"They don't come a second time!" Mrs. Rowe would say to me, with a
fierce compression of the lip, that might lead a nervous person to
imagine she made away with them in the cellars.

When Mrs. Rowe took you into her confidence--a slow and tedious
admission--she was pleased, usually, to fortify your stock of knowledge
with a comprehensive view of her family connexions; intended to set the
Whytes of Battersea (from whom she derived, before the vulgar Park was
there) upon an eminence of glory, with a circle of cringing and
designing Rowes at the base. How she--Whyte on both sides, for her
father married his first cousin--ever came to marry Joshua Rowe, was
something her mother never understood to her dying day. She was
graciously open to consolation in the reflection that nobles and princes
had made humble matches before her; and particularly in this, that the
Prince Regent married Mrs. Fitzherbert.

Lucy Rowe was favoured with these observations, heightened by occasional
hits at her own misfortune in that she was a Rowe, and could not boast
one thimbleful of Whyte blood in her veins.

It was the almost daily care of Mrs. Rowe to impress the people with
whom her business brought her in