Chapter 9: IX

IX For on the topmost tier of the hotel verandah, after being carried up the steps in an armchair amid a bevy of footmen, maidservants, and other menials of the hotel, headed by the landlord (that functionary had actually run out to meet a visitor who arrived with so much stir and din, attended by her own retinue, and accompanied by so great a pile of trunks and portmanteaux)—on the topmost tier of the verandah, I say, there was sitting—the Grandmother! Yes, it was she—rich, and imposing, …