In a bowl lay an appetising salad, ready for mingling; a fragment of Camembert cheese was relieved upon a setting of green leafage; a bottle of ale, with adjacent corkscrew, stood beside the plate; the very loaf seemed to come from no ordinary baker's, or was made to look better than its kin by the fringed white cloth in which it nestled.
The custom of four years had accustomed Peak to take these things as a matter of course, yet he would readily have admitted that they were extraordinary enough.

Indeed, he even now occasionally contrasted this state of comfort with the hateful experiences of his first six years in London.

The subject of lodgings was one of those on which (often intemperate of speech) he spoke least temperately.

For six years he had shifted from quarter to quarter, from house to house, driven away each time by the hateful contact of vulgarity in every form,--by foulness and dishonesty, by lying, slandering, quarrelling, by drunkenness, by brutal vice,--by all abominations that distinguish the lodging-letter of the metropolis.

Obliged to practise extreme economy, he could not take refuge among self-respecting people, or at all events had no luck in endeavouring to find such among the poorer working-class.