Bleak House by Charles Dickens (best ebook reader for laptop .txt) 📕

“Indeed, I think so, Esther,” replied Caddy. “They are the loveliest I ever saw.”

“Prince, my dear?” said I in a whisper.

“No,” answered Caddy, shaking her head and holding them to me to smell. “Not Prince.”

“Well, to be sure, Caddy!” said I. “You must have two lovers!”

“What? Do they look like that sort of thing?” said Caddy.

“Do they look like that sort of thing?” I repeated, pinching her cheek.

Caddy only laughed in return, and telling me that she had come for half an hour, at the expiration of which time Prince would be waiting for her at the corner, sat chatting with me and Ada in the window, every now and then handing me the flowers again or trying how they looked against my hair. At last, when she was going, she took me into my room and put them in my dress.

“For me?” said I, surprised.

“For you,” said Caddy with a kiss. “They were left behind by somebody.”

“Left behind?”

“At poor Miss Flite’s,” said Caddy. “Somebody who has been very good to her was hurrying away an hour ago to join a ship and left these flowers behind. No, no! Don’t take them out. Let the pretty little things lie here,” said Caddy, adjusting them with a careful hand, “because I was present myself, and I shouldn’t wonder if somebody left them on purpose!”

“Do they look like that sort of thing?” said Ada, coming laughingly behind me and clasping me merrily round the waist. “Oh, yes, indeed they do, Dame Durden! They look very, very like that sort of thing. Oh, very like it indeed, my dear!”

It was not so easy as it had appeared at first to arrange for Richard’s making a trial of Mr. Kenge’s office. Richard himself was the chief impediment. As soon as he had it in his power to leave Mr. Badger at any moment, he began to doubt whether he wanted to leave him at all. He didn’t know, he said, really. It wasn’t a bad profession; he couldn’t assert that he disliked it; perhaps he liked it as well as he liked any other⁠—suppose he gave it one more chance! Upon that, he shut himself up for a few weeks with some books and some bones and seemed to acquire a considerable fund of information with great rapidity. His fervour, after lasting about a month, began to cool, and when it was quite cooled, began to grow warm again. His vacillations between law and medicine lasted so long that midsummer arrived before he finally separated from Mr. Badger and entered on an experimental course of Messrs. Kenge and Carboy. For all his waywardness, he took great credit to himself as being determined to be in earnest “this time.” And he was so good-natured throughout, and in such high spirits, and so fond of Ada, that it was very difficult indeed to be otherwise than pleased with him.

“As to Mr. Jarndyce,” who, I may mention, found the wind much given, during this period, to stick in the east; “As to Mr. Jarndyce,” Richard would say to me, “he is the finest fellow in the world, Esther! I must be particularly careful, if it were only for his satisfaction, to take myself well to task and have a regular windup of this business now.”

The idea of his taking himself well to task, with that laughing face and heedless manner and with a fancy that everything could catch and nothing could hold, was ludicrously anomalous. However, he told us between-whiles that he was doing it to such an extent that he wondered his hair didn’t turn grey. His regular windup of the business was (as I have said) that he went to Mr. Kenge’s about midsummer to try how he liked it.

All this time he was, in money affairs, what I have described him in a former illustration⁠—generous, profuse, wildly careless, but fully persuaded that he was rather calculating and prudent. I happened to say to Ada, in his presence, half jestingly, half seriously, about the time of his going to Mr. Kenge’s, that he needed to have Fortunatus’ purse, he made so light of money, which he answered in this way, “My jewel of a dear cousin, you hear this old woman! Why does she say that? Because I gave eight pounds odd (or whatever it was) for a certain neat waistcoat and buttons a few days ago. Now, if I had stayed at Badger’s I should have been obliged to spend twelve pounds at a blow for some heartbreaking lecture-fees. So I make four pounds⁠—in a lump⁠—by the transaction!”

It was a question much discussed between him and my guardian what arrangements should be made for his living in London while he experimented on the law, for we had long since gone back to Bleak House, and it was too far off to admit of his coming there oftener than once a week. My guardian told me that if Richard were to settle down at Mr. Kenge’s he would take some apartments or chambers where we too could occasionally stay for a few days at a time; “but, little woman,” he added, rubbing his head very significantly, “he hasn’t settled down there yet!” The discussions ended in our hiring for him, by the month, a neat little furnished lodging in a quiet old house near Queen Square. He immediately began to spend all the money he had in buying the oddest little ornaments and luxuries for this lodging; and so often as Ada and I dissuaded him from making any purchase that he had in contemplation which was particularly unnecessary and expensive, he took credit for what it would have cost and made out that to spend anything less on something else was to save the difference.

While these affairs were in abeyance, our visit to Mr. Boythorn’s was postponed. At length, Richard having taken possession of his lodging, there was nothing to prevent our departure. He could have gone with us at that time of the