At Arm’s Length – Dead Men’s Shoes

Mrs. Hazleton is one of these eminently respect- able personages. She has occupied the house in Lowther Street for the last ten years. She has gone to the sea-side every year of those ten, and at exactly the same period, has returned after the same inter-val, has given her great parties at the same seasons, and has lived a methodical and prosperous existence, with satis- faction to herself and her neighbours, and with considerable profit to the surrounding shopkeepers. When the London season is over, Mrs. Hazleton goes to the seaside not because she belongs to that flight of fashionable swallows, who follow pleasure’s summer from clime to clime, but simply because London in August is unendurable,—baking pavements, scorched verdure, dust and grime on everything, and a sense of desertion in all those regions which the upper ten thousand and a consider- able portion of the lower million inhabit.