her moral nature as her

dressmaker takes of her physical proportions. Is

a new dress, a new custom, a new singer, a new dancer, a new form of

jewellery, a new dwarf or giant, a new chapel, a new anything, to be set

up? There are deferential people in a dozen callings whom my Lady

Dedlock suspects of nothing but prostration before her, who can tell you

how to manage her as if she were a baby, who do nothing but nurse her

all their lives, who, humbly affecting to follow with profound

subservience, lead her and her whole troop after them; who, in hooking

one, hook all and bear them off as Lemuel Gulliver bore away the stately

fleet of the majestic Lilliput. If you want to address our people, sir,” say ‟

Blaze and Sparkle, the jewellers—meaning by our people Lady Dedlock

and the rest— you must remember that you are not dealing with the ‟

general public; you must hit our people in their weakest place, and their

weakest place is such a place.” To make this article go down, gentlemen,” ‟

say Sheen and Gloss, the mercers, to their friends the manufacturers,

‟you must come to us, because we know where to have the fashionable

people, and we can make it fashionable.” If you want to get this print ‟

upon the tables of my high connexion, sir,” says Mr. Sladdery, the

librarian, or if you want to get this dwarf or giant into the houses of my ‟

high connexion, sir, or if you want to secure to this entertainment the

patronage of my high connexion, sir, you must leave it, if you please, to

me, for I have been accustomed to study the leaders of my high

connexion, sir, and I may tell you without vanity that I can turn them

round my finger”—in which Mr. Sladdery, who is an honest man, does

not exaggerate at all.

Therefore, while Mr. Tulkinghorn may not know what is passing in

the Dedlock mind at present, it is very possible that he may.

‟My Lady’s cause has been again before the Chancellor, has it, Mr.

Tulkinghorn?” says Sir Leicester, giving him his hand.

‟Yes. It has been on again to-day,” Mr. Tulkinghorn replies, making

one of his quiet bows to my Lady, who is on a sofa near the fire, shadingher face with a hand-screen.

‟It would be useless to ask,” says my Lady with the dreariness of the

place in Lincolnshire still upon her, whether anything has been done.” ‟ ‟Nothing that you would call anything has been done to-day,” replies

Mr. Tulkinghorn.

‟Nor ever will be,” says my Lady.

Sir Leicester has no objection to an interminable Chancery suit. It is a

slow, expensive, British, constitutional kind of thing. To be sure, he has

not a vital interest in the suit in question, her part in which was the only

property my Lady brought him; and he has a shadowy impression that

for his name—the name of Dedlock—to be in a cause, and not in the

title of that cause, is a most ridiculous accident. But he regards the Court

of Chancery, even if it should involve an occasional delay of justice and a

trifling amount of confusion, as a something devised in conjunction

with a variety of other somethings by the perfection of human wisdom

for the eternal settlement (humanly speaking) of everything. And he is

upon the whole of a fixed opinion that to give the sanction of his

countenance to any complaints respecting it would be to encourage

some person in the lower classes to rise up somewhere—like Wat Tyler.

‟As a few fresh affidavits have been put upon the file,” says Mr.

Tulkinghorn, and as they are short, and as I proceed upon the ‟

troublesome principle of begging leave to possess my clients with any

new proceedings in a cause”—cautious man Mr. Tulkinghorn, taking no

more responsibility than necessary— and further, as I see you are going ‟

to Paris, I have brought them in my pocket.”

(Sir Leicester was going to Paris too, by the by, but the delight of the

fashionable intelligence was in his Lady.)

Mr. Tulkinghorn takes out his papers, asks permission to place them

on a golden talisman of a table at my Lady’s elbow, puts on his

spectacles, and begins to read by the light of a shaded lamp.

” In Chancery. Between John Jarndyce—