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 her moral nature, as her dress-maker 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, shading her 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.”