“That’s it,” with a groan. “That’s it! Mr. Wegg, I’m thirty-two, and a bachelor. Mr. Wegg, I love her. Mr. Wegg, she is worthy of being loved by a potentate!” Here Silas is rather alarmed by Mr. Venus’s springing to his feet in the hurry of his spirits, and haggardly confronting him with his hand on his coat collar; but Mr. Venus, begging pardon, sits down again, saying, with the calmness of despair, “She objects to the business.”

“Does she know the profits of it?”

“She knows the profits of it, but she don’t appreciate the art of it, and she objects to it. ‘I do not wish,’ she writes in her own handwriting, ‘to regard myself, nor yet to be regarded, in that boney light.’ ”