“My dear fellow, I don’t design anything. I have no design whatever. I am incapable of designs. If I conceived a design, I should speedily abandon it, exhausted by the operation.”

“Oh Eugene, Eugene!”

“My dear Mortimer, not that tone of melancholy reproach, I entreat. What can I do more than tell you all I know, and acknowledge my ignorance of all I don’t know! How does that little old song go, which, under pretence of being cheerful, is by far the most lugubrious I ever heard in my life?