And now, Mr. Wegg at length pushed away his plate and put on his spectacles, and Mr. Boffin lighted his pipe and looked with beaming eyes into the opening world before him, and Mrs. Boffin reclined in a fashionable manner on her sofa: as one who would be part of the audience if she found she could, and would go to sleep if she found she couldn’t.

“Hem!” began Wegg, “This, Mr. Boffin and Lady, is the first chapter of the first wollume of the Decline and Fall off⁠—” here he looked hard at the book, and stopped.

“What’s the matter, Wegg?”