Page:The Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, a Book for an Idle Holiday - Jerome (1886).djvu/145

 a broom, whereupon "mother" expatiates upon the unreliability of servant girls, and bawls over the balusters for Sarah to come and take them away at once. When you get outside the rooms, she pauses, with her hand upon the door, to explain to you that they are rather untidy just at present, as the last lodger left only yesterday; and she also adds that this is their cleaning day—it always is. With this understanding, you enter, and both stand solemnly feasting your eyes upon the scene before you. The rooms cannot be said to appear inviting. Even "mother's" face betrays no admiration. Untenanted "furnished apartments," viewed in the morning sunlight, do not inspire cheery sensations. There is a lifeless air about them. It is a very different thing when you have settled down and are living in them. With your old familiar household gods to greet your gaze whenever you glance up, and all your little nick-nacks spread around you—with the photos of all the girls that you have loved and lost ranged upon the mantel-piece, and half-a-dozen disreputable-looking pipes scattered about in painfully prominent positions—with one carpet slipper peeping from beneath the coal-box, and the other perched on the top of the piano—with the well-known pictures to hide the dingy walls, and those dear old friends, your books, higgledy-piggledy all over the place with the bits of old blue china that your mother prized, and the screen she worked in those far