b, and from the Club home.

Whilst the Major was absent from his lodgings, Morgan had been seated
in the landlady's parlour, drinking freely of hot brandy-and-water, and
pouring out on Mrs. Brixham some of the abuse which he had received from
his master upstairs. Mrs. Brixham was Mr. Morgan's slave. He was his
landlady's landlord. He had bought the lease of the house which she
rented; he had got her name and her son's to acceptances, and a bill of
sale which made him master of the luckless widow's furniture. The young
Brixham was a clerk in an insurance office, and Morgan could put him
into what he called quod any day. Mrs. Brixham was a clergyman's widow,
and Mr. Morgan, after performing his duties on the first floor, had a
pleasure in making the old lady fetch him his bootjack and his slippers.
She was his slave. The little black profiles of her son and daughter;
the very picture of Tiddlecot Church, where she was married, and her
poor dear Brixham lived and died, was now Morgan's property, as it
hung there over the mantelpiece of his back-parlour. Morgan sate in the
widow's back-room, in the ex-curate's old horse-hair study-chair, making
Mrs. Brixham bring supper for him, and fill his glass again and again.

The liquor was bought with the poor woman's own coin, and hence Morgan
indulged in it only the more freely; and he had eaten his supper and was
drinking a third tumbler, when old Pendennis returned from the Club, and
went upstairs to his rooms. Mr. Morgan swore very savagely at him and
his bell, when he heard the latter, and finished his tumbler of brandy
before he went up to answer the summons.

He received the abuse consequent on this delay in silence, nor did the
Major condescend to read in the flushed face and glaring eyes of
the man, the anger under which he was labouring. The old gentleman's
foot-bath was at the fire; his gown and slippers awaiting him there.
Morgan knelt down to take his boots off with due subordination: and as
the Major abused him from above, kept up a growl of maledictions below
at his feet. Thus, when Pendennis was crying "Confound you, sir, mind
that strap--curse you, don't wrench my foot off," Morgan sotto voce
below was expressing a wish to strangle him, drown him, and punch his
head off.

The boots removed, it became necessary to divest Mr. Pendennis of his
coat: and for this purpose the valet had necessarily to approach very
near to his employer; so near that Pendennis could not