d. By and by
perhaps.'

Dudley was ushered into Mr. Inchling's room and introduced to the
figure-head of the Firm of Inchling, Pennergate, and Radnor: a
respectable City merchant indeed, whom Dudley could read-off in a glimpse
of the downright contrast to his partner. He had heard casual remarks on
the respectable City of London merchant from Colney Durance. A short
analytical gaze at him, helped to an estimate of the powers of the man
who kept him up. Mr. Inchling was a florid City-feaster, descendant of a
line of City merchants, having features for a wife to identify; as
drovers, they tell us, can single one from another of their round-bellied
beasts. Formerly the leader of the Firm, he was now, after dreary fits of
restiveness, kickings, false prophecies of ruin, Victor's obedient
cart-horse. He sighed in set terms for the old days of the Firm, when,
like trouts in the current, the Firm had only to gape for shoals of good
things to fatten it: a tale of English prosperity in quiescence; narrated
interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to
make it our national Poem.

Mr. Inchling did not deny that grand mangers of golden oats were still
somehow constantly allotted to him. His wife believed in Victor, and
deemed the loss of the balancing Pennergate a gain. Since that lamentable
loss, Mr. Inchling, under the irony of circumstances the Tory of
Commerce, had trotted and gallopped whither driven, racing like mad
against his will and the rival nations now in the field to force the
pace; a name for enterprise; the close commercial connection of a man who
speculated--who, to put it plainly, lived on his wits; hurried onward and
onward; always doubting, munching, grumbling at satisfaction, in
perplexity of the gratitude which is apprehensive of black Nemesis at a
turn of the road,--to confound so wild a whip as Victor Radnor. He had
never forgiven the youth's venture in India of an enormous purchase of
Cotton many years back, and which he had repudiated, though not his share
of the hundreds of thousands realized before the refusal to ratify the
bargain had come to Victor. Mr. Inchling dated his first indigestion from
that disquieting period. He assented to the praise of Victor's genius,
admitting benefits; his heart refused to pardon, and consequently his
head wholly to trust, the man who robbed him of his quondam comfortable
feeling of security. And if you will imagine the sprite of the aggregate