The tall lady had the habit of speaking at great speed and of repeating her questions irritably before there had been a moment’s pause in which they might be answered. Prunesquallor had in moments of whimsy often amused himself by trying to wedge an answer to her less complex queries between the initial question and its sharp echo.

‘Upstairs, my dear?’ repeated her brother.

‘I said “upstairs”, I think,’ said Irma Prunesquallor sharply. ‘I think I said “upstairs”. Have you, or he, or anyone been upstairs a quarter of an hour ago? Have you? Have you?’

‘Surely not! surely not!’ said the Doctor. ‘We have all been downstairs, I think. Don’t you?’ he said, turning to Steerpike.

‘I do,’ said Steerpike. The Doctor began to like the way the youth answered quietly and neatly.

Irma Prunesquallor drew herself together. Her long tightly fitting black dress gave peculiar emphasis to such major bone formations as the iliac crest, and indeed the entire pelvis; the shoulder blades, and in certain angles, as she stood in the lamplight, to the ribs themselves. Her neck was long and the Prunesquallors’ head sat upon it surrounded by the same grey thatch like hair as that adopted by her brother, but in her case knotted in a low bun at the neck.

‘The servant is out, OUT,’ she said. ‘It is his evening out. Isn’t it? Isn’t it?’

She seemed to be addressing Steerpike, so he answered: ‘I have no knowledge of the arrangements you have made, madam. But he was in the Doctor’s room a few minutes ago, so I expect it was he whom you heard outside your door.’

‘Who said I heard anything outside my door?’ said Irma Prunesquallor, a trifle less rapidly than usual. ‘Who?’

‘Were you not within your room, madam?’

‘What of it? what of it?’

‘I gathered from what you said that you thought that there was someone walking about upstairs,’ answered Steerpike obliquely; ‘and if, as you say, you were inside your room, then you must have heard the footsteps outside your room. That is what I attempted to make clear, madam.’

‘You seem to know too much about it. Don’t you? don’t you?’ She bent forward and her opaque-looking glasses stared flatly at Steerpike.

‘I know nothing, madam,’ said Steerpike.

‘What, Irma dear, is all this? What in the name of all that’s circuitous is all this?’

‘I heard feet. That is all. Feet,’ said his sister; and then, after a pause she added with renewed emphasis: ‘Feet.’