“Probably you don’t mistake, sir,” was Miss Wren’s cool answer; “because you had it on the best authority. Mine, you know.”

“Miss Jenny! Instead of coming up and being dead, let’s come out and look alive. It’ll pay better, I assure you,” said Fledgeby, bestowing an inveigling twinkle or two upon the dressmaker. “You’ll find it pay better.”

“Perhaps,” said Miss Jenny, holding out her doll at arm’s length, and critically contemplating the effect of her art with her scissors on her lips and her head thrown back, as if her interest lay there, and not in the conversation; “perhaps you’ll explain your meaning, young man, which is Greek to me. — You must have another touch of blue in your trimming, my dear.” Having addressed the last remark to her fair client, Miss Wren proceeded to snip at some blue fragments that lay before her, among fragments of all colours, and to thread a needle from a skein of blue silk.

“Look here,” said Fledgeby. — “Are you attending?”

“I am attending, sir,” replied Miss Wren, without the slightest appearance of so doing. “Another touch of blue in your trimming, my dear.”

“Well, look here,” said Fledgeby, rather discouraged by the circumstances under which he found himself pursuing the conversation. “If you’re attending—”

(“Light blue, my sweet young lady,” remarked Miss Wren, in a sprightly tone, “being best suited to your fair complexion and your flaxen curls.”)

“I say, if you’re attending,” proceeded Fledgeby, “it’ll pay better in this way. It’ll lead in a roundabout manner to your buying damage and waste of Pubsey and Co. at a nominal price, or even getting it for nothing.”

“Aha!” thought the dressmaker. “But you are not so roundabout, Little Eyes, that I don’t notice your answering for Pubsey and Co. after all! Little Eyes, Little Eyes, you’re too cunning by half.”

“And I take it for granted,” pursued Fledgeby, “that to get the most of your materials for nothing would be well worth your while, Miss Jenny?”

“You may take it for granted,” returned the dressmaker with many knowing nods, “that it’s always well worth my while to make money.”

“Now,” said Fledgeby approvingly, “you’re answering to a sensible purpose. Now, you’re coming out and looking alive! So I make so free, Miss Jenny, as to offer the remark, that you and Judah were too thick together to last. You can’t come to be intimate with such a deep file as Judah without beginning to see a little way into him, you know,” said Fledgeby with a wink.

“I must own,” returned the dressmaker, with her eyes upon her work, “that we are not good friends at present.”

“I know you’re not good friends at present,” said Fledgeby. “I know all about it. I should like to pay off Judah, by not letting him have his own deep way in everything. In most things he’ll get it by hook or by crook, but — hang it all! — don’t let him have his own deep way in everything. That’s too much.” Mr Fledgeby said this with some display of indignant warmth, as if he was counsel in the cause for Virtue.

“How can I prevent his having his own way?” began the dressmaker.

“Deep way, I called it,” said Fledgeby.

“ — His own deep way, in anything?”