Mr. Venus preferred, he said, to leave Mr. Boffin to arrive at his own conclusions on that delicate question.
“I am sure I don’t know what to do,” said Mr. Boffin. “If I ask advice of anyone else, it’s only letting in another person to be bought out, and then I shall be ruined that way, and might as well have given up the property and gone slap to the workhouse. If I was to take advice of my young man, Rokesmith, I should have to buy him out. Sooner or later, of course, he’d drop down upon me, like Wegg. I was brought into the world to be dropped down upon, it appears to me.”
Mr. Venus listened to these lamentations in silence, while Mr. Boffin jogged to and fro, holding his pockets as if he had a pain in them.
“After all, you haven’t said what you mean to do yourself, Venus. When you do go out of it, how do you mean to go?”
Venus replied that as Wegg had found the document and handed it to him, it was his intention to hand it back to Wegg, with the declaration that he himself would have nothing to say to it, or do with it, and that Wegg must act as he chose, and take the consequences.
“And then he drops down with his whole weight upon me !” cried Mr. Boffin, ruefully. “I’d sooner be dropped upon by you than by him, or even by you jintly, than by him alone!”
Mr. Venus could only repeat that it was his fixed intention to betake himself to the paths of science, and to walk in the same all the days of his life; not dropping down upon his fellow-creatures until they were deceased, and then only to articulate them to the best of his humble ability.