“It’s very honourable of you, miss, I am sure,” said Mr. Guppy.  “If an altar could be erected in the bowers of friendship—­but, upon my soul, you may rely upon me in every respect save and except the tender passion only!”

The struggle in Mr. Guppy’s breast and the numerous oscillations it occasioned him between his mother’s door and us were sufficiently conspicuous in the windy street (particularly as his hair wanted cutting) to make us hurry away.  I did so with a lightened heart; but when we last looked back, Mr. Guppy was still oscillating in the same troubled state of mind.

CHAPTER XXXIX

Attorney and Client

The name of Mr. Vholes, preceded by the legend Ground-Floor, is inscribed upon a door-post in Symond’s Inn, Chancery Lane—­a little, pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn like a large dust-binn of two compartments and a sifter.  It looks as if Symond were a sparing man in his way and constructed his inn of old building materials which took kindly to the dry rot and to dirt and all things decaying and dismal, and perpetuated Symond’s memory with congenial shabbiness.  Quartered in this dingy hatchment commemorative of Symond are the legal bearings of Mr. Vholes.

Mr. Vholes’s office, in disposition retiring and in situation retired, is squeezed up in a corner and blinks at a dead wall.  Three feet of knotty-floored dark passage bring the client to Mr. Vholes’s jet-black door, in an angle profoundly dark on the brightest midsummer morning and encumbered by a black bulk-head of cellarage staircase against which belated civilians generally strike their brows.  Mr. Vholes’s chambers are on so small a scale that one clerk can open the door without getting off his stool, while the other who elbows him at the same desk has equal facilities for poking the fire.  A smell as of unwholesome sheep blending with the smell of must and dust is referable to the nightly (and often daily) consumption of mutton fat in candles and to the fretting of parchment forms and skins in greasy drawers.  The atmosphere is otherwise stale and close.  The place was last painted or whitewashed beyond the memory of man, and the two chimneys smoke, and there is a loose outer surface of soot everywhere, and the dull cracked windows in their heavy frames have but one piece of character in them, which is a determination to be always dirty and always shut unless coerced.  This accounts for the phenomenon of the weaker of the two usually having a bundle of firewood thrust between its jaws in hot weather.

Mr. Vholes is a very respectable man.  He has not a large business, but he is a very respectable man.  He is allowed by the greater attorneys who have made good fortunes or are making them to be a most respectable man.  He never misses a chance in his practice, which is a mark of respectability.  He never takes any pleasure, which is another mark of respectability.  He is reserved and serious, which is another mark of respectability.  His digestion is impaired, which is highly respectable.  And he is making hay of the grass which is flesh, for his three daughters.  And his father is dependent on him in the Vale of Taunton.