about the Commons, to practise under cover of my name (if I would take the necessary steps remaining to make a proctor of myself), and pay me a percentage on the profits. But I declined these offers; being already aware that there were plenty of such covert practitioners in existence, and considering the Commons quite bad enough, without my doing anything to make it worse.
The girls had gone home, when my name burst into bloom on Traddles’s door; and the sharp boy looked, all day, as if he had never heard of Sophy, shut up in a back room, glancing down from her work into a sooty little strip of garden with a pump in it. But there I always found her, the same bright housewife; often humming her Devonshire ballads when no strange foot was coming up the stairs, and blunting the sharp boy in his official closet with melody.
I wondered, at first, why I so often found Sophy writing in a copybook; and why she always shut it up when I appeared, and hurried it into the table-drawer. But the secret soon came out. One day, Traddles (who had just come home through the drizzling sleet from Court) took a paper out of his desk, and asked me what I thought of that handwriting?
“Oh, don’t , Tom!” cried Sophy, who was warming his slippers before the fire.
“My dear,” returned Tom, in a delighted state, “why not? What do you say to that writing, Copperfield?”
“It’s extraordinarily legal and formal,” said I. “I don’t think I ever saw such a stiff hand.”
“Not like a lady’s hand, is it?” said Traddles.
“A lady’s!” I repeated. “Bricks and mortar are more like a lady’s hand!”