trophies of her victory

She is perfectly well-bred. If she could be

translated to heaven to-morrow, she might be expected to ascend

without any rapture.

She has beauty still, and if it be not in its heyday, it is not yet in its

autumn. She has a fine face—originally of a character that would be

rather called very pretty than handsome, but improved into classicality

by the acquired expression of her fashionable state. Her figure is elegant

and has the effect of being tall. Not that she is so, but that the most is ‟

made,” as the Honourable Bob Stables has frequently asserted upon

oath, of all her points.” The same authority observes that she is perfectly ‟

got up and remarks in commendation of her hair especially that she is

the best-groomed woman in the whole stud.

With all her perfections on her head, my Lady Dedlock has come up

from her place in Lincolnshire (hotly pursued by the fashionable

intelligence) to pass a few days at her house in town previous to her

departure for Paris, where her ladyship intends to stay some weeks, after

which her movements are uncertain. And at her house in town, upon

this muddy, murky afternoon, presents himself an old-fashioned old

gentleman, attorney-at-law and eke solicitor of the High Court of

Chancery, who has the honour of acting as legal adviser of the Dedlocks

and has as many cast-iron boxes in his office with that name outside as if

the present baronet were the coin of the conjuror’s trick and were

constantly being juggled through the whole set. Across the hall, and up

the stairs, and along the passages, and through the rooms, which are

very brilliant in the season and very dismal out of it—fairy-land to visit,

but a desert to live in—the old gentleman is conducted by a Mercury in

powder to my Lady’s presence.

The old gentleman is rusty to look at, but is reputed to have made

good thrift out of aristocratic marriage settlements and aristocratic wills,

and to be very rich. He is surrounded by a mysterious halo of family

confidences, of which he is known to be the silent depository. There are

noble mausoleums rooted for centuries in retired glades of parks among

the growing timber and the fern, which perhaps hold fewer noble secrets

than walk abroad among men, shut up in the breast of Mr. Tulkinghorn.

He is of what is called the old school—a phrase generally meaning any

school that seems never to have been young—and wears knee-breeches

tied with ribbons, and gaiters or stockings. One peculiarity of his black

clothes and of his black stockings, be they silk or worsted, is that they

never shine. Mute, close, irresponsive to any glancing light, his dress is

like himself. He never converses when not professionally consulted. He

is found sometimes, speechless but quite at home, at corners of dinnertables in great country houses and near doors of drawing-rooms,

concerning which the fashionable intelligence is eloquent, where

everybody knows him and where half the Peerage stops to say How do ‟

you do, Mr. Tulkinghorn?” He receives these salutations with gravity and

buries them along with the rest of his knowledge.

Sir Leicester Dedlock is with my Lady and is happy to see Mr.

Tulkinghorn. There is an air of prescription about him which is always

agreeable to Sir Leicester; he receives it as a kind of tribute. He likes Mr.

Tulkinghorn’s dress; there is a kind of tribute in that too. It is eminently

respectable, and likewise, in a general way, retainer-like. It expresses, as

it were, the steward of the legal mysteries, the butler of the legal cellar,

of the Dedlocks.

Has Mr. Tulkinghorn any idea of this himself? It may be so, or it may

not, but there is this remarkable circumstance to be noted in everything

associated with my Lady Dedlock as one of a class—as one of the leaders

and representatives of her little world. She supposes herself to be an

inscrutable Being, quite out of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals—

seeing herself in her glass, where indeed she looks so. Yet every dim little

star revolving about her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian

Opera, knows her weaknesses, prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and

caprices and lives upon as accurate a calculation and as nice a measure of