“Shall I incommode you, if I put mine up too?” returned Mortimer. “Thank you. I hate mine.”
“It was forced upon me,” said the gloomy Eugene, “because it was understood that we wanted a barrister in the family. We have got a precious one.”
“It was forced upon me,” said Mortimer, “because it was understood that we wanted a solicitor in the family. And we have got a precious one.”
“There are four of us, with our names painted on a doorpost in right of one black hole called a set of chambers,” said Eugene; “and each of us has the fourth of a clerk—Cassim Baba, in the robber’s cave—and Cassim is the only respectable member of the party.”
“I am one by myself, one,” said Mortimer, “high up an awful staircase commanding a burial-ground, and I have a whole clerk to myself, and he has nothing to do but look at the burial-ground, and what he will turn out when arrived at maturity, I cannot conceive. Whether, in that shabby rook’s nest, he is always plotting wisdom, or plotting murder; whether he will grow up, after so much solitary brooding, to enlighten his fellow-creatures, or to poison them; is the only speck of interest that presents itself to my professional view. Will you give me a light? Thank you.”
“Then idiots talk,” said Eugene, leaning back, folding his arms, smoking with his eyes shut, and speaking slightly through his nose, “of energy. If there is a word in the dictionary under any letter from A to Z that I abominate, it is energy. It is such a conventional superstition, such parrot gabble! What the deuce! Am I to rush out into the street, collar the first man of a wealthy appearance that I meet, shake him, and say, ‘Go to law upon the spot, you dog, and retain me, or I’ll be the death of you’? Yet that would be energy.”
“Precisely my view of the case, Eugene. But show me a good opportunity, show me something really worth being energetic about,