'How do I carry them about, Mrs Merdle?' asked Mr Merdle.
'How do you carry them about?' said Mrs Merdle. 'Look at yourself in the glass.'
Mr Merdle involuntarily turned his eyes in the direction of the nearest mirror, and asked, with a slow determination of his turbid blood to his temples, whether a man was to be called to account for his digestion?
'You have a physician,' said Mrs Merdle.
'He does me no good,' said Mr Merdle.
Mrs Merdle changed her ground.
'Besides,' said she, 'your digestion is nonsense. I don't speak of your digestion. I speak of your manner.'
'Mrs Merdle,' returned her husband, 'I look to you for that. You supply manner, and I supply money.'
'I don't expect you,' said Mrs Merdle, reposing easily among her cushions, 'to captivate people. I don't want you to take any trouble upon yourself, or to try to be fascinating. I simply request you to care about nothing--or seem to care about nothing--as everybody else does.'
'Do I ever say I care about anything?' asked Mr Merdle.
'Say? No! Nobody would attend to you if you did. But you show it.'
'Show what? What do I show?' demanded Mr Merdle hurriedly.
'I have already told you. You show that you carry your business cares an projects about, instead of leaving them in the City, or wherever else they belong to,' said Mrs Merdle. 'Or seeming to.
Seeming would be quite enough: I ask no more. Whereas you couldn't be more occupied with your day's calculations and combinations than you habitually show yourself to be, if you were a carpenter.'
'A carpenter!' repeated Mr Merdle, checking something like a groan.
'I shouldn't so much mind being a carpenter, Mrs Merdle.'
'And my complaint is,' pursued the lady, disregarding the low remark, 'that it is not the tone of Society, and that you ought to correct it, Mr Merdle. If you have any doubt of my judgment, ask even Edmund Sparkler.' The door of the room had opened, and Mrs Merdle now surveyed the head of her son through her glass.
'Edmund; we want you here.'
Mr Sparkler, who had merely put in his head and looked round the room without entering (as if he were searching the house for that young lady with no nonsense about her), upon this followed up his head with his body, and stood before them. To whom, in a few easy words adapted to his capacity, Mrs Merdle stated the question at issue.
The young gentleman, after anxiously feeling his shirt-collar as if it were his pulse and he were hypochondriacal, observed, 'That he had heard it noticed by fellers.'
'Edmund Sparkler has heard it noticed,' said Mrs Merdle, with languid triumph. 'Why, no doubt everybody has heard it noticed!'
Which in truth was no unreasonable inference; seeing that Mr Sparkler would probably be the last person, in any assemblage of the human species, to receive an impression from anything that passed in his presence.
'And Edmund Sparkler will tell you, I dare say,' said Mrs Merdle, waving her favourite hand towards her husband, 'how he has heard it noticed.'
'I couldn't,' said Mr Sparkler, after feeling his pulse as before, 'couldn't undertake to say what led to it--'cause memory desperate loose. But being in company with the brother of a doosed fine gal--well educated too--with no biggodd nonsense about her--at the period alluded to--'
'There! Never mind the sister,' remarked Mrs Merdle, a little impatiently. 'What did the brother say?'
'Didn't say a word, ma'am,' answered Mr Sparkler. 'As silent a feller as myself. Equally hard up for a remark.'
'Somebody said something,' returned Mrs Merdle. 'Never mind who it was.'
('Assure you I don't in the least,' said Mr Sparkler.)'But tell us what it was.'
Mr Sparkler referred to his pulse again, and put himself through some severe mental discipline before he replied:
'Fellers referring to my Governor--expression not my own--occasionally compliment my Governor in a very handsome way on being immensely rich and knowing--perfect phenomenon of Buyer and Banker and that--but say the Shop sits heavily on him. Say he carried the Shop about, on his back rather--like Jew clothesmen with too much business.'
'Which,' said Mrs Merdle, rising, with her floating drapery about her, 'is exactly my complaint. Edmund, give me your arm up-stairs.'
Mr Merdle, left alone to meditate on a better conformation of himself to Society, looked out of nine windows in succession, and appeared to see nine wastes of space. When he had thus entertained himself he went down-stairs, and looked intently at all the carpets on the ground-floor; and then came up-stairs again, and looked intently at all the carpets on the first-floor; as if they were gloomy depths, in unison with his oppressed soul. Through all the rooms he wandered, as he always did, like the last person on earth who had any business to approach them. Let Mrs Merdle announce, with all her might, that she was at Home ever so many nights in a season, she could not announce more widely and unmistakably than Mr Merdle did that he was never at home.
At last he met the chief butler, the sight of which splendid retainer always finished him. Extinguished by this great creature, he sneaked to his dressing-room, and there remained shut up until he rode out to dinner, with Mrs Merdle, in her own handsome chariot. At dinner, he was envied and flattered as a being of might, was Treasuried, Barred, and Bishoped, as much as he would;and an hour after midnight came home alone, and being instantly put out again in his own hall, like a rushlight, by the chief butler, went sighing to bed.
