← I wondered who the "young woman" was and what she had made of it all. 🔊
← I sadly suspect that Soames could not have made more of it than she. 🔊
← I don't think it lived long enough to justify its name; but at that time there it still was, in Greek Street, a few doors from Soho Square, and almost opposite to that house where, in the first years of the century, a little girl, and with her a boy named De Quincey, made nightly encampment in darkness and hunger among dust and rats and old legal parchments. 🔊
← I gathered that this was his first visit to the Vingtième; but Berthe was offhand in her manner to him: he had not made a good impression. 🔊
← He waved her away with his cigar, and in another moment had seated himself beside me, commanding a full view of Soames. 🔊
← I explained to her that Mr. Soames had been called away, and that both he and I would be dining here. 🔊
← I asked her to get some wine—Burgundy—and whatever food might be ready. 🔊
← I remember pausing before a wide door-step and wondering if perchance it was on this very one that the young De Quincey lay ill and faint while poor Ann flew as fast as her feet would carry her to Oxford Street, the "stony-hearted stepmother" of them both, and came back bearing that "glass of port wine and spices" but for which he might, so he thought, actually have died. 🔊
← I pondered Ann's fate, the cause of her sudden vanishing from the ken of her boy friend; 🔊
← As for his landlady in Dyott Street, no doubt he had paid her weekly, and what possessions he may have had in his rooms were enough to save her from fretting. 🔊