370 FL UTTER-D UCK.
Flutter-Duck's husband was a furrier — a master- furrier, for did he not run a workshop ? This workshop was also his living-room, and this living-room was also his bedroom. It was a large front room on the first floor, over a chandler's shop in an old-fashioned house in Montague Street, White- chapel. Its shape was peculiar — an oblong stretching streetwards, interrupted in one of the longer walls by a square projection that might have been accounted a room in itself (by the landlord), and was, indeed, used as a kitchen. That the fireplace had been built in this corner was thus an advantage. Entering through the door on the grand staircase, you found yourself nearest the window with the bulk of the room on your left, and the square recess at the other end of your wall, so that you could not see it at first. At the window, which, of course, gave on Montague Street, was the bare wooden table at which the " hands " — man, woman, and boy — sat and stitched. The finished work — a confusion of fur caps, boas, tippets, and trimmings — hung over the dirty wainscot between the door and the recess. The middle of the room was quite bare, to give the workers freedom of movement, but the wall facing you was a back- ground for luxurious furniture. First — nearest the window — came a sofa, on which even in the first years of marriage Flutter- Duck's husband sometimes lay prone, too unwell to do more than superintend the operations, for he was of a consumptive habit. Over the sofa hung a large gilt-framed mirror, the gilt protected by muslin drapings, in the corners of which flyblown paper flowers grew. Next to the sofa was a high chest of drawers crowned with dusty decanters, and after an interval filled up with the Sabbath clothes hanging on pegs and covered by a white sheet ; the bed used up the rest of the space, its head and one side touching the walls, and its foot stretching towards the kitchen fire. On
