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try to be, if not generous (which, in this case, we have no opportunity

of being), just. We will not disparage this gentleman, because he is

successful in his addresses to the beautiful object of his ambition; and

we will not question her natural right to bestow her love on one whom

she finds worthy of it.'

'Maybe, my friend,' said Doyce. 'Maybe also, that she is too young and

petted, too confiding and inexperienced, to discriminate well.'

'That,' said Clennam, 'would be far beyond our power of correction.'

Daniel Doyce shook his head gravely, and rejoined, 'I fear so.'

'Therefore, in a word,' said Clennam, 'we should make up our minds that

it is not worthy of us to say any ill of Mr Gowan. It would be a poor

thing to gratify a prejudice against him. And I resolve, for my part,

not to depreciate him.'

'I am not quite so sure of myself, and therefore I reserve my privilege

of objecting to him,' returned the other. 'But, if I am not sure of

myself, I am sure of you, Clennam, and I know what an upright man you

are, and how much to be respected. Good night, MY friend and partner!'

He shook his hand in saying this, as if there had been something serious

at the bottom of their conversation; and they separated.

By this time they had visited the family on several occasions, and had

always observed that even a passing allusion to Mr Henry Gowan when

he was not among them, brought back the cloud which had obscured Mr

Meagles's sunshine on the morning of the chance encounter at the Ferry.

If Clennam had ever admitted the forbidden passion into his breast,

this period might have been a period of real trial; under the actual

circumstances, doubtless it was nothing--nothing.

Equally, if his heart had given entertainment to that prohibited guest,

his silent fighting of his way through the mental condition of this

period might have been a little meritorious. In the constant effort not

to be betrayed into a new phase of the besetting sin of his experience,

the pursuit of selfish objects by low and small means, and to hold

instead to some high principle of honour and generosity, there might

have been a little merit. In the resolution not even to avoid Mr

Meagles's house, lest, in the selfish sparing of himself, he should

bring any slight distress upon the daughter through making her the cause

of an estrangement which he believed the father would regret, there

might have been a little merit. In the modest truthfulness of always

keeping in view the greater equality of Mr Gowan's years and the greater

attractions of his person and manner, there might have been a little

merit. In doing all this and much more, in a perfectly unaffected way

and with a manful and composed constancy, while the pain within him

(peculiar as his life and history) was very sharp, there might have been

some quiet strength of character. But, after the resolution he had made,

of course he could have no such merits as these; and such a state of

mind was nobody's--nobody's.

Mr Gowan made it no concern of his whether it was nobody's or

somebody's. He preserved his perfect serenity of manner on all

occasions, as if the possibility of Clennam's presuming to have debated

the great question were too distant and ridiculous to be imagined. He

had always an affability to bestow on Clennam and an ease to treat

him with, which might of itself (in the supposititious case of his

not having taken that sagacious course) have been a very uncomfortable

element in his state of mind.

'I quite regret you were not with us yesterday,' said Mr Henry Gowan,

calling on Clennam the next morning. 'We had an agreeable day up the

river there.'

So he had heard, Arthur said.

'From your partner?' returned Henry Gowan. 'What a dear old fellow he

is!'

'I have a great regard for him.'

'By Jove, he is the finest creature!' said Gowan. 'So fresh, so green,

trusts in such wonderful things!'

Here was one of the many little rough points that had a tendency to

grate on Clennam's hearing. He put it aside by merely repeating that he

had a high regard for Mr Doyce.

'He is charming! To see him mooning along to that time of life,

laying down nothing by the way and picking up nothing by the way, is

delightful. It warms a man. So unspoilt, so simple, such a good soul!

Upon my life Mr Clennam, one feels desperately worldly and wicked in

comparison with such an innocent creature. I speak for myself, let me

add, without including you. You are genuine also.'

'Thank you for the compliment,' said Clennam, ill at ease; 'you are too,

I hope?'

'So so,' rejoined the other. 'To be candid with you, tolerably. I am

not a great impostor. Buy one of my pictures, and I assure you,

in confidence, it will not be worth the money. Buy one of another

man's--any great professor who beats me hollow--and the chances are that

the more you give him, the more he'll impose upon you. They all do it.'

'All painters?'

'Painters, writers, patriots, all the rest who have stands in the

market. Give almost any man I know ten pounds, and he will impose upon

you to a corresponding extent; a thousand pounds--to a corresponding

extent; ten thousand pounds--to a corresponding extent. So great the

success, so great the imposition. But what a capital world it is!' cried

Gowan with warm enthusiasm. 'What a jolly, excellent, lovable world it

is!'

'I had rather thought,' said Clennam, 'that the principle you mention

was chiefly acted on by--'

'By the Barnacles?' interrupted Gowan, laughing.

'By the political gentlemen who condescend to keep the Circumlocution

Office.'

'Ah! Don't be hard upon the Barnacles,' said Gowan, laughing afresh,

'they are darling fellows! Even poor little Clarence, the born idiot of

the family, is the most agreeable and most endearing blockhead! And by

Jupiter, with a kind of cleverness in him too that would astonish you!'

'It would. Very much,' said Clennam, drily.

'And after all,' cried Gowan, with that characteristic balancing of his

which reduced everything in the wide world to the same light weight,

'though I can't deny that the Circumlocution Office may ultimately

shipwreck everybody and everything, still, that will probably not be in

our time--and it's a school for gentlemen.'

'It's a very dangerous, unsatisfactory, and expensive school to the

people who pay to keep the pupils there, I am afraid,' said Clennam,

shaking his head.

'Ah! You are a terrible fellow,' returned Gowan, airily. 'I can

understand how you have frightened that little donkey, Clarence, the

most estimable of moon-calves (I really love him) nearly out of his

wits. But enough of him, and of all the rest of them. I want to present

you to my mother, Mr Clennam. Pray do me the favour to give me the

opportunity.'

In nobody's state of mind, there was nothing Clennam would have desired

less, or would have been more at a loss how to avoid.

'My mother lives in a most primitive manner down in that dreary

red-brick dungeon at Hampton Court,' said Gowan. 'If you would make

your own appointment, suggest your own day for permitting me to take

you there to dinner, you would be bored and she would be charmed. Really

that's the state of the case.'

What could Clennam say after this? His retiring character included a

great deal that was simple in the best sense, because unpractised and

unused; and in his simplicity and modesty, he could only say that he was

happy to place himself at Mr Gowan's disposal. Accordingly he said it,

and the day was fixed. And a dreaded day it was on his part, and a very

unwelcome day when it came and they went down to Hampton Court together.

The venerable inhabitants of that venerable pile seemed, in those times,

to be encamped there like a sort of civilised gipsies. There was a

temporary air about their establishments, as if they were going away the

moment they could get anything better; there was also a dissatisfied air

about themselves, as if they took it very ill that they had not already

got something much better. Genteel blinds and makeshifts were more or

less observable as soon as their doors were opened; screens not half

high enough, which made dining-rooms out of arched passages, and warded

off obscure corners where footboys slept at nights with their heads

among the knives and forks; curtains which called upon you to believe

that they didn't hide anything; panes of glass which requested you

not to see them; many objects of various forms, feigning to have no

connection with their guilty secret, a bed; disguised traps in walls,

which were clearly coal-cellars; affectations of no thoroughfares, which

were evidently doors to little kitchens. Mental reservations and artful

mysteries grew out of these things. Callers looking steadily into the

eyes of their receivers, pretended not to smell cooking three feet off;

people, confronting closets accidentally left open, pretended not to see

bottles; visitors with their heads against a partition of thin canvas,

and a page and a young female at high words on the other side, made

believe to be sitting in a primeval silence. There was no end to the

small social accommodation-bills of this nature which the gipsies of

gentility were constantly drawing upon, and accepting for, one another.

Some of these Bohemians were of an irritable temperament, as constantly

soured and vexed by two mental trials: the first, the consciousness

that they had never got enough out of the public; the second, the

consciousness that the public were admitted into the building. Under the

latter great wrong, a few suffered dreadfully--particularly on Sundays,

when they had for some time expected the earth to open and swallow

the public up; but which desirable event had not yet occurred, in

consequence of some reprehensible laxity in the arrangements of the

Universe.

Mrs Gowan's door was attended by a family servant of several years'

standing, who had his own crow to pluck with the public concerning a

situation in the Post-Office which he had been for some time expecting,

and to which he was not yet appointed. He perfectly knew that the public

could never have got him in, but he grimly gratified himself with the

idea that the public kept him out. Under the influence of this injury

(and perhaps of some little straitness and irregularity in the matter

of wages), he had grown neglectful of his person and morose in mind;

and now beholding in Clennam one of the degraded body of his oppressors,

received him with ignominy. Mrs Gowan, however, received him with

condescension. He found her a courtly old lady, formerly a Beauty, and

still sufficiently well-favoured to have dispensed with the powder on

her nose and a certain impossible bloom under each eye. She was a little

lofty with him; so was another old lady, dark-browed and high-nosed,

and who must have had something real about her or she could not have

existed, but it was certainly not her hair or her teeth or her figure

or her complexion; so was a grey old gentleman of dignified and sullen

appearance; both of whom had come to dinner. But, as they had all

been in the British Embassy way in sundry parts of the earth, and as

a British Embassy cannot better establish a character with the

Circumlocution Office than by treating its compatriots with illimitable

contempt (else it would become like the Embassies of other countries),

Clennam felt that on the whole they let him off lightly.

The dignified old gentleman turned out to be Lord Lancaster

Stiltstalking, who had been maintained by the Circumlocution Office for

many years as a representative of the Britannic Majesty abroad.

This noble Refrigerator had iced several European courts in his time,

and had done it with such complete success that the very name of

Englishman yet struck cold to the stomachs of foreigners who had the

distinguished honour of remembering him at a distance of a quarter of a

century.

He was now in retirement, and hence (in a ponderous white cravat, like

a stiff snow-drift) was so obliging as to shade the dinner. There was a

whisper of the pervading Bohemian character in the nomadic nature of

the service and its curious races of plates and dishes; but the noble

Refrigerator, infinitely better than plate or porcelain, made it superb.

He shaded the dinner, cooled the wines, chilled the gravy, and blighted

the vegetables.

There was only one other person in the room: a microscopically small

footboy, who waited on the malevolent man who hadn't got into the

Post-Office. Even this youth, if his jacket could have been unbuttoned

and his heart laid bare, would have been seen, as a distant adherent of

the Barnacle family, already to aspire to a situation under Government.

Mrs Gowan with a gentle melancholy upon her, occasioned by her son's

being reduced to court the swinish public as a follower of the low Arts,

instead of asserting his birthright and putting a ring through its nose

as an acknowledged Barnacle, headed the conversation at dinner on the

evil days. It was then that Clennam learned for the first time what

little pivots this great world goes round upon.

'If John Barnacle,' said Mrs Gowan, after the degeneracy of the times

had been fully ascertained, 'if John Barnacle had but abandoned his most

unfortunate idea of conciliating the mob, all would have been well, and

I think the country would have been preserved.' The old lady with the

high nose assented; but added that if Augustus Stiltstalking had in a

general way ordered the cavalry out with instructions to charge, she

thought the country would have been preserved.

The noble Refrigerator assented; but added that if William Barnacle and

Tudor Stiltstalking, when they came over to one another and formed