At some loss to fathom Mr. Boffin’s notions of a tight will, Lightwood felt his way.
“I beg your pardon, but professional profundity must be exact. When you say tight—”
“I mean tight,” Mr. Boffin explained.
“Exactly so. And nothing can be more laudable. But is the tightness to bind Mrs. Boffin to any and what conditions?”
“Bind Mrs. Boffin?” interposed her husband. “No! What are you thinking of! What I want is, to make it all hers so tight as that her hold of it can’t be loosed.”
“Hers freely, to do what she likes with? Hers absolutely?”
“Absolutely?” repeated Mr. Boffin, with a short sturdy laugh. “Hah! I should think so! It would be handsome in me to begin to bind Mrs. Boffin at this time of day!”
So that instruction, too, was taken by Mr. Lightwood; and Mr. Lightwood, having taken it, was in the act of showing Mr. Boffin out, when Mr. Eugene Wrayburn almost jostled him in the doorway. Consequently Mr. Lightwood said, in his cool manner, “Let me make you two known to one another,” and further signified that Mr. Wrayburn was counsel learned in the law, and that, partly in the way of business and partly in the way of pleasure, he had imparted to Mr. Wrayburn some of the interesting facts of Mr. Boffin’s biography.
“Delighted,” said Eugene—though he didn’t look so—“to know Mr. Boffin.”