r being any creditors present) was received as doing great
honour to his feelings. Thus, he generally brought away a soothed
conscience and left an agreeable impression behind him, when he
returned to his bracket: again to sit watching the strange faces of the
accountants and others, making so free with the great mysteries, the
Books; or now and then to go on tiptoe into Mr Dombey's empty room, and
stir the fire; or to take an airing at the door, and have a little more
doleful chat with any straggler whom he knew; or to propitiate, with
various small attentions, the head accountant: from whom Mr Perch had
expectations of a messengership in a Fire Office, when the affairs of
the House should be wound up.

To Major Bagstock, the bankruptcy was quite a calamity. The Major was
not a sympathetic character--his attention being wholly concentrated
on J. B.--nor was he a man subject to lively emotions, except in the
physical regards of gasping and choking. But he had so paraded his
friend Dombey at the club; had so flourished him at the heads of the
members in general, and so put them down by continual assertion of his
riches; that the club, being but human, was delighted to retort upon
the Major, by asking him, with a show of great concern, whether this
tremendous smash had been at all expected, and how his friend Dombey
bore it. To such questions, the Major, waxing very purple, would reply
that it was a bad world, Sir, altogether; that Joey knew a thing or two,
but had been done, Sir, done like an infant; that if you had foretold
this, Sir, to J. Bagstock, when he went abroad with Dombey and was
chasing that vagabond up and down France, J. Bagstock would have
pooh-pooh'd you--would have pooh--pooh'd you, Sir, by the Lord! That Joe
had been deceived, Sir, taken in, hoodwinked, blindfolded, but was broad
awake again and staring; insomuch, Sir, that if Joe's father were to
rise up from the grave to-morrow, he wouldn't trust the old blade with a
penny piece, but would tell him that his son Josh was too old a soldier
to be done again, Sir. That he was a suspicious, crabbed, cranky,
used-up, J. B. infidel, Sir; and that if it were consistent with the
dignity of a rough and tough old Major, of the old school, who had had
the honour of being personally known to, and commended by, their late
Royal Highnesses the Dukes of Kent and York, to retire to a tub and live
in it, by Gad! Sir, he'd have a tub in Pall Mall to-morrow, to show his