s.

"Heaven be merciful!" was her inward cry. "It's a footman, as I live.
I've been reading about them all my life, and now I've met one. But I
never suspected that there was really anything of the kind in _this_
town!"

She left the contemplation of the servant's pumps and stockings, and
began to grapple fiercely with the catch of her hand-bag.

The man in the meanwhile studied her with a searching gravity, and as
it seemed, with some disapproval. The splendor of the front that his
master presented to the world had indeed intimidated poor Jane; but
there were many others upon whom it had no deterring effect at all.
Some of these brought art-books in monthly parts; others brought
polish for the piano legs. Many of them were quite as prepossessing in
appearance as Jane was; some of them were much less plain and dowdy;
few of them were so recklessly indiscreet as to betray themselves at
the threshold by exhibiting a black leather bag.

"There!" remarked Jane to the footman, "I knew I should get at it
eventually." She smiled at him with a friendly good-will: she
acknowledged him as a human being, and she hoped to propitiate him
into the concession that she herself was nothing less.

The man took her card, which was fortunately as correct as the most
discreet and contemporaneous stationer could fashion. He decided that
he was running no risk with his mistress, and "Miss Jane Marshall" was
permitted to pass the gate.

She was ushered into a small reception-room. The hard-wood floor was
partly covered by a meagre Persian rug. There was a plain sofa of
forbidding angles, and a scantily upholstered chair which insisted
upon nobody's remaining longer than necessary. But through the narrow
door Jane caught branching vistas of room after room heaped up with
the pillage of a sacked and ravaged globe, and a stairway which led
with a wide sweep to regions of unimaginable glories above.

"Did you ever!" exclaimed Jane. It was of the footman that she was
speaking; he in fact loomed up, to the practical eclipse of all this
luxury and display. "Only eighty years from the Massacre, and hardly
eight hundred feet from the Monument!"

Presently she heard a tapping and a rustling without. She thought that
she might lean a few inches to one side with no risk of being detected
in an impropriety, and she was rewarded by seeing the splendid vacuity
of the grand stairway finally filled--filled more completely, more
amply, than she could