, already.

Mr Bevan knocked at the door of a very neat house of moderate size, from
the parlour windows of which, lights were shining brightly into the now
dark street. It was quickly opened by a man with such a thoroughly Irish
face, that it seemed as if he ought, as a matter of right and principle,
to be in rags, and could have no sort of business to be looking
cheerfully at anybody out of a whole suit of clothes.

Commending Mark to the care of this phenomenon--for such he may be said
to have been in Martin's eyes--Mr Bevan led the way into the room
which had shed its cheerfulness upon the street, to whose occupants he
introduced Mr Chuzzlewit as a gentleman from England, whose acquaintance
he had recently had the pleasure to make. They gave him welcome in all
courtesy and politeness; and in less than five minutes' time he found
himself sitting very much at his ease by the fireside, and becoming
vastly well acquainted with the whole family.

There were two young ladies--one eighteen; the other twenty--both very
slender, but very pretty; their mother, who looked, as Martin thought
much older and more faded than she ought to have looked; and their
grandmother, a little sharp-eyed, quick old woman, who seemed to have
got past that stage, and to have come all right again. Besides these,
there were the young ladies' father, and the young ladies' brother; the
first engaged in mercantile affairs; the second, a student at college;
both, in a certain cordiality of manner, like his own friend, and not
unlike him in face. Which was no great wonder, for it soon appeared that
he was their near relation. Martin could not help tracing the family
pedigree from the two young ladies, because they were foremost in his
thoughts; not only from being, as aforesaid, very pretty, but by reason
of their wearing miraculously small shoes, and the thinnest possible
silk stockings; the which their rocking-chairs developed to a
distracting extent.

There is no doubt that it was a monstrous comfortable circumstance to be
sitting in a snug, well-furnished room, warmed by a cheerful fire, and
full of various pleasant decorations, including four small shoes, and
the like amount of silk stockings, and--yes, why not?--the feet and
legs therein enshrined. And there is no doubt that Martin was monstrous
well-disposed to regard his position in that light, after his recent
experience of the Screw, and of Mrs Pawkins's boarding-house. The
consequence w