3-074-659 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

"Our First-Floor Lodger" by H. G. Glindoni, 1883. 'The old lady...listening on the stairs outside the door, is...anxious to please the personage that rents her principal apartments...The [lodger] has the air...of a man who likes his ease, and little domestic comforts, and who is well able to pay for them. He is certainly not an early riser, for the mantel clock marks twenty minutes to eleven, and he has not yet finished his breakfast...we should say that he is an old bachelor, and - judging by the small model of a skull, and the specimens preserved in spirits - that he has been a doctor...[The landlady] sends her pretty daughter to ask if the gentleman will take a little more sugar in his tea. Shyly, but gracefully, the commission is performed; hesitatingly the lump of sugar is held in the tongs...Is the ungrateful old hunks capable of rejecting the proffer of so charming an attendant? One might almost think so, noting her attitude, and observing the sly look in the old celibate's eyes - as though he looked upon the sugar as a poisoned bait. But...if he has declined the sugar, he has, with old-fashioned gallantry, accompanied the refusal with a compliment on the far greater sweetness of the winsome Hebe, the bearer of the basin and tongs'. From "Illustrated London News", 1883.