“Certainly I am, sir. Why, we have everything on our side.”
“Except your sister, perhaps,” thought Bradley. But he only gloomily thought it, and said nothing.
“Everything on our side,” repeated the boy with boyish confidence. “Respectability, an excellent connection for me, common sense, everything!”
“To be sure, your sister has always shown herself a devoted sister,” said Bradley, willing to sustain himself on even that low ground of hope.
“Naturally, Mr. Headstone, I have a good deal of influence with her. And now that you have honoured me with your confidence and spoken to me first, I say again, we have everything on our side.”
And Bradley thought again, “Except your sister, perhaps.”
A grey dusty withered evening in London city has not a hopeful aspect. The closed warehouses and offices have an air of death about them, and the national dread of colour has an air of mourning. The towers and steeples of the many house-encompassed churches, dark and dingy as the sky that seems descending on them, are no relief to the general gloom; a sundial on a church-wall has the look, in its useless black shade, of having failed in its business enterprise and stopped payment forever; melancholy waifs and strays of housekeepers and porters sweep melancholy waifs and strays of papers and pins into the kennels, and other more melancholy waifs and strays explore them, searching and stooping and poking for anything to sell. The set of humanity outward from the City is as a set of prisoners departing from gaol, and dismal Newgate seems quite as fit a stronghold for the mighty Lord Mayor as his own state-dwelling.
On such an evening, when the city grit gets into the hair and eyes and skin, and when the fallen leaves of the few unhappy city trees grind down