good faith with me as implicitly as when I began.
If you knew how often I have tried to speak to you
to-day, you would almost pity me. I want no new
promise from you on my own account, for I am satisfied,
and I always shall be satisfied, with the promise
you have given me. I can venture to say no more,
for I see that I am watched. If you would set
my mind at rest with the assurance that you will interpose
with the father and save this harmless girl, close
that book before you return it to me, and I shall know
what you mean, and deeply thank you in my heart.—Alfred,
Mr Twemlow thinks the last one the best, and quite
agrees with you and me.’
Alfred advances. The groups break up. Lady
Tippins rises to go, and Mrs Veneering follows her
leader. For the moment, Mrs Lammle does not turn
to them, but remains looking at Twemlow looking at
Alfred’s portrait through his eyeglass.
The moment past, Twemlow drops his eyeglass at its
ribbon’s length, rises, and closes the book with
an emphasis which makes that fragile nursling of the
fairies, Tippins, start.
Then good-bye and good-bye, and charming occasion
worthy of the Golden Age, and more about the flitch
of bacon, and the like of that; and Twemlow goes staggering
across Piccadilly with his hand to his forehead, and
is nearly run down by a flushed lettercart, and at
last drops safe in his easy-chair, innocent good gentleman,
with his hand to his forehead still, and his head
in a whirl.
Chapter 1
It was a foggy day in London, and the fog was heavy
and dark. Animate London, with smarting eyes
and irritated lungs, was blinking, wheezing, and choking;
inanimate London was a sooty spectre, divided in purpose
between being visible and invisible, and so being wholly
neither. Gaslights flared in the shops with a
haggard and unblest air, as knowing themselves to
be night-creatures that had no business abroad under
the sun; while the sun itself when it was for a few
moments dimly indicated through circling eddies of
fog, showed as if it had gone out and were collapsing
flat and cold. Even in the surrounding country
it was a foggy day, but there the fog was grey, whereas
in London it was, at about the boundary line, dark
yellow, and a little within it brown, and then browner,
and then browner, until at the heart of the City—which
call Saint Mary Axe—it was rusty-black.
From any point of the high ridge of land northward,
it might have been discerned that the loftiest buildings
made an occasional struggle to get their heads above
the foggy sea, and especially that the great dome
of Saint Paul’s seemed to die hard; but this
was not perceivable in the streets at their feet, where
the whole metropolis was a heap of vapour charged
with muffled sound of wheels, and enfolding a gigantic
catarrh.
