CHAPTER II. In Fashion

It is but a glimpse of the world of fashion that we want on this same miry

afternoon. It is not so unlike the Court of Chancery but that we may pass

from the one scene to the other, as the crow flies. Both the world of

fashion and the Court of Chancery are things of precedent and usage:

oversleeping Rip Van Winkles who have played at strange games through

a deal of thundery weather; sleeping beauties whom the knight will

wake one day, when all the stopped spits in the kitchen shall begin to

turn prodigiously!

It is not a large world. Relatively even to this world of ours, which has

its limits too (as your Highness shall find when you have made the tour

of it and are come to the brink of the void beyond), it is a very little

speck. There is much good in it; there are many good and true people in

it; it has its appointed place. But the evil of it is that it is a world

wrapped up in too much jeweller’s cotton and fine wool, and cannot

hear the rushing of the larger worlds, and cannot see them as they circle

round the sun. It is a deadened world, and its growth is sometimes

unhealthy for want of air.

My Lady Dedlock has returned to her house in town for a few days

previous to her departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay

some weeks, after which her movements are uncertain. The fashionable

intelligence says so for the comfort of the Parisians, and it knows all

fashionable things. To know things otherwise were to be unfashionable.

My Lady Dedlock has been down at what she calls, in familiar

conversation, her place” in Lincolnshire. The waters are out in ‟

Lincolnshire. An arch of the bridge in the park has been sapped and

sopped away. The adjacent low-lying ground for half a mile in breadth is

a stagnant river with melancholy trees for islands in it and a surface

punctured all over, all day long, with falling rain. My Lady Dedlock’s

place has been extremely dreary. The weather for many a day and nightI hope so, I am sure,” said Mr. Kenge politely.

”—Wished Esther only to know what would be serviceable to her.

And she knows, from any teaching she has had here, nothing more.”

Well!” said Mr. Kenge. Upon the whole, very proper. Now to the ‟ ‟

point,” addressing me. Miss Barbary, your sole relation (in fact that is, ‟

for I am bound to observe that in law you had none) being deceased and

it naturally not being to be expected that Mrs. Rachael—”

‟Oh, dear no!” said Mrs. Rachael quickly.

‟Quite so,” assented Mr. Kenge; ”—that Mrs. Rachael should charge

herself with your maintenance and support (I beg you won’t distress

yourself), you are in a position to receive the renewal of an offer which I

was instructed to make to Miss Barbary some two years ago and which,

though rejected then, was understood to be renewable under the

lamentable circumstances that have since occurred. Now, if I avow that I

represent, in Jarndyce and Jarndyce and otherwise, a highly humane, but

at the same time singular, man, shall I compromise myself by any stretch

of my professional caution?” said Mr. Kenge, leaning back in his chair

again and looking calmly at us both.

He appeared to enjoy beyond everything the sound of his own voice. I

couldn’t wonder at that, for it was mellow and full and gave great

importance to every word he uttered. He listened to himself with

obvious satisfaction and sometimes gently beat time to his own music

with his head or rounded a sentence with his hand. I was very much

impressed by him—even then, before I knew that he formed himself on

the model of a great lord who was his client and that he was generally

called Conversation Kenge.

Mr. Jarndyce,” he pursued, being aware of the—I would say, desolate ‟ ‟

—position of our young friend, offers to place her at a first-rate

establishment where her education shall be completed, where her

comfort shall be secured, where her reasonable wants shall be

anticipated, where she shall be eminently qualified to discharge her duty