Chapter 18 - Page 2

It was a question much discussed between him and my guardian what arrangements should be made for his living in London, while he experimented on the law; for, we had long since gone back to Bleak House, and it was too far off to admit of his coming there oftener than once a week. My guardian told me that if Richard were to settle down at Mr Kenge’s he would take some apartments or chambers, where we, too, could occasionally stay for a few days at a time; “but, little woman,” he added, rubbing his head very significantly, “he hasn’t settled down there yet!” The discussions ended in our hiring for him, by the month, a neat little furnished lodging in a quiet old house near Queen Square. He immediately began to spend all the money he had, in buying the oddest little ornaments and luxuries for this lodging; and so often as Ada and I dissuaded him from making any purchase that he had in contemplation which was particularly unnecessary and expensive, he took credit for what it would have cost, and made out that to spend anything less on something else was to save the difference.

While these affairs were in abeyance, our visit to Mr Boythorn’s was postponed. At length, Richard having taken possession of his lodging, there was nothing to prevent our departure. He could have gone with us at that time of the year, very well; but, he was in the full novelty of his new position, and was making most energetic attempts to unravel the mysteries of the fatal suit. Consequently, we went without him; and my darling was delighted to praise him for being so busy.

We made a pleasant journey down into Lincolnshire by the coach, and had an entertaining companion in Mr Skimpole. His furniture had been all cleared off, it appeared, by the person who took possession of it on his blue-eyed daughter’s birth-day; but, he seemed quite relieved to think that it was gone. Chairs and tables, he said, were wearisome objects; they were monotonous ideas, they had no variety of expression, they looked you out of countenance, and you looked them out of countenance. How pleasant, then, to be bound to no particular chairs and tables, but to sport like a butterfly among all the furniture on hire, and to flit from rosewood to mahogany, and from mahogany to walnut, and from this shape to that, as the humour took one!

“The oddity of the thing is,” said Mr Skimpole, with a quickened sense of the ludicrous, “that my chairs and tables were not paid for, and yet my landlord walks off with them as composedly as possible. Now, that seems droll! There is something grotesque in it. The chair and table merchant never engaged to pay my landlord my rent. Why should my landlord quarrel with him? If I have a pimple on my nose which is disagreeable to my landlord’s peculiar ideas of beauty, my landlord has no business to scratch my chair and table merchant’s nose, which