g by two. Mrs. Perch was fond of saying she had
lived in nineteen houses "in her time", and Sabre had the belief that
the previous eighteen had all been separately furnished and the entire
accumulation, together with every newspaper taken in during their
occupation, brought to Puncher's. Half the rooms of Puncher's were so
filled with furniture that no more furniture, and scarcely a living
person, could be got in; and half the rooms were so filled with boxes,
packages, bundles, trunks, crates, and stacks of newspapers that no
furniture at all could be got in. Every room was known to Mrs. Perch and
to Young Perch by the name of some article it contained and Mrs. Perch
was forever "going to sort the room with your Uncle Henry's couch in
it", or "the room with the big blue box with the funny top in it", or
some other room similarly described.

Mrs. Perch was always "going to", but as the task was always contingent
upon either "when I have got a servant into the house", or "when I have
turned the servant out of the house"--these two states representing Mrs.
Perch's occupation with the servant problem--the couch of Uncle Henry,
the big blue box with the funny top, and all the other denizens of the
choked rooms remained, like threatened men, precariously but securely.

But not unvisited!

Sabre once spent a week in the house, terminating a summer holiday a
little earlier than Mabel, and he had formed the opinion that mother and
son never went to bed at night and never got up in the morning. In
remote hours and in remote quarters of the house mysterious sounds
disturbed his sleep. Eerily peering over the banisters, he discerned the
pair moving, like lost souls, about the passages, Mrs. Perch with the
skirts of a red dressing-gown in one hand and a candle in the other,
Young Perch disconsolately in her wake, yawning, with another candle.
Young Perch called this "Prowling about the infernal house all night";
and one office of the prowl appeared to Sabre to be the attendance of
pans of milk warming in a row on oil stoves and suggesting, with the
glimmer of the stoves and the steam of the pans, mysterious oblations to
midnight gods.

VII

Mrs. Perch believed her son could do anything and, in the matter of his
capabilities, had the strange conviction that he had only to write and
ask anybody, from Mr. Asquith downwards, for employment in the highest
offices in order to obtain it. Young Perch--who used to protest, "Well,
but