Through sheer
inability to spend his income he has been obliged to hoard in
self-defence. He still lives in the Temple in the same rooms I took
for him when he gave up his shop, for no one has been able to induce
him to take a house. His house, he says, is wherever there is a good
hotel. When he is in town he likes to work and to be quiet. When out
of town he feels that he has left little behind him that can go wrong,
and he would not like to be tied to a single locality. "I know no
exception," he says, "to the rule that it is cheaper to buy milk
than to keep a cow."
As I have mentioned Mrs. Jupp, I may as well say here the little
that remains to be said about her. She is a very old woman now, but no
one now living, as she says triumphantly, can say how old, for the
woman in the Old Kent Road is dead, and presumably has carried her
secret to the grave. Old, however, though she is, she lives in the
same house, and finds it hard work to make the two ends meet, but I do
not know that she minds this very much, and it has prevented her
from getting more to drink than would be good for her. It is no use
trying to do anything for her beyond paying her allowance weekly,
and absolutely refusing to let her anticipate it.
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