t keep back the key
of a closet or two? I think of a lovely reader laying down the page and
looking over at her unconscious husband, asleep, perhaps, after dinner.
Yes, madam, a closet he hath: and you, who pry into everything, shall
never have the key of it. I think of some honest Othello pausing over
this very sentence in a railroad carriage, and stealthily gazing at
Desdemona opposite to him, innocently administering sandwiches to their
little boy--I am trying to turn off the sentence with a joke, you see--I
feel it is growing too dreadful, too serious.

And to what, pray, do these serious, these disagreeable, these almost
personal observations tend? To this simply, that Charles Honeyman, the
beloved and popular preacher, the elegant divine to whom Miss Blanche
writes sonnets, and whom Miss Beatrice invites to tea; who comes with
smiles on his lip, gentle sympathy in his tones, innocent gaiety in his
accent; who melts, rouses, terrifies in the pulpit; who charms over the
tea-urn and the bland bread-and-butter: Charles Honeyman has one or two
skeleton closets in his lodgings, Walpole Street, Mayfair; and many a
wakeful night, whilst Mrs. Ridley, his landlady, and her tired husband,
the nobleman's major-domo, whilst the lodger on the first floor, whilst
the cook and housemaid and weary little bootboy are at rest (mind
you, they have all got their closets, which they open with their
skeleton-keys); he wakes up, and looks at the ghastly occupant of that
receptacle. One of the Reverend Charles Honeyman's grisly night-haunters
is--but stop; let us give a little account of the lodgings, and of some
of the people frequenting the same.

First floor, Mr. Bagshot, Member for a Norfolk borough. Stout jolly
gentleman;--dines at the Carlton Club; greatly addicted to Greenwich
and Richmond, in the season: bets in a moderate way: does not go into
society, except now and again to the chiefs of his party, when they give
great entertainments; and once or twice to the houses of great country
dons who dwell near him in the country. Is not of very good family;
was, in fact, an apothecary: married a woman with money, much older than
himself, who does not like London, and stops at home at Hummingham, not
much to the displeasure of Bagshot; gives every now and then nice little
quiet dinners, which Mrs. Ridley cooks admirably, to exceedingly stupid
jolly old Parliamentary fogies, who absorb, with much silence and
cheerfulness, a vast quantit