“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.
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.
