er money, you know.'

Mrs Lammle winced a little at the reminder, but only enough to shake her
scents and essences anew into the atmosphere of the little carriage, as
she settled herself afresh in her own dark corner.

Chapter 12

THE SWEAT OF AN HONEST MAN'S BROW

Mr Mortimer Lightwood and Mr Eugene Wrayburn took a coffee-house dinner
together in Mr Lightwood's office. They had newly agreed to set up a
joint establishment together. They had taken a bachelor cottage near
Hampton, on the brink of the Thames, with a lawn, and a boat-house; and
all things fitting, and were to float with the stream through the summer
and the Long Vacation.

It was not summer yet, but spring; and it was not gentle spring
ethereally mild, as in Thomson's Seasons, but nipping spring with an
easterly wind, as in Johnson's, Jackson's, Dickson's, Smith's, and
Jones's Seasons. The grating wind sawed rather than blew; and as it
sawed, the sawdust whirled about the sawpit. Every street was a sawpit,
and there were no top-sawyers; every passenger was an under-sawyer, with
the sawdust blinding him and choking him.

That mysterious paper currency which circulates in London when the
wind blows, gyrated here and there and everywhere. Whence can it come,
whither can it go? It hangs on every bush, flutters in every tree, is
caught flying by the electric wires, haunts every enclosure, drinks at
every pump, cowers at every grating, shudders upon every plot of grass,
seeks rest in vain behind the legions of iron rails. In Paris, where
nothing is wasted, costly and luxurious city though it be, but where
wonderful human ants creep out of holes and pick up every scrap, there
is no such thing. There, it blows nothing but dust. There, sharp eyes
and sharp stomachs reap even the east wind, and get something out of it.

The wind sawed, and the sawdust whirled. The shrubs wrung their many
hands, bemoaning that they had been over-persuaded by the sun to bud;
the young leaves pined; the sparrows repented of their early marriages,
like men and women; the colours of the rainbow were discernible, not
in floral spring, but in the faces of the people whom it nibbled and
pinched. And ever the wind sawed, and the sawdust whirled.

When the spring evenings are too long and light to shut out, and such
weather is rife, the city which Mr Podsnap so explanatorily called
London, Londres, London, is at its worst. Such a black shrill city,
combining the qualities of a