I am very happy to hear it. I was rather
afraid in my own mind that we might have helped to floor you, because there is
no doubt that it is our misfortune to do that kind of thing now and then. We
don't want to do it; but if men will be gravelled, why - we can't help it.«
    »Without giving an unqualified assent to what you say,« returned Arthur,
gloomily, »I am much obliged to you for your interest in me.«
    »No, but really! Our place is,« said the easy young Barnacle, »the most
inoffensive place possible. You'll say we are a Humbug. I won't say we are not;
but all that sort of thing is intended to be, and must be. Don't you see?«
    »I do not,« said Clennam.
    »You don't regard it from the right point of view. It is the point of view
that is the essential thing. Regard our place from the point of view that we
only ask you to leave us alone, and we are as capital a Department as you'll
find anywhere.«
    »Is your place there to be left alone?« asked Clennam.
    »You exactly hit it,« returned Ferdinand. »It is there with the express
intention that everything shall be left alone. That is what it means. That is
what it's for. No doubt there's a certain form to be kept up that it's for
something else, but it's only a form. Why, good Heaven, we are nothing but
forms! Think what a lot of our forms you have gone through. And you have never
got any nearer to an end?«
    »Never,« said Clennam.
    »Look at it from the right point of view, and there you have us - official
and effectual. It's like a limited game of cricket. A field of outsiders are
always going in to bowl at the Public Service, and we block the balls.«
    Clennam asked what became of the bowlers? The airy, young Barnacle replied,
that they grew tired, got dead beat, got lamed, got their backs broken, died
off, gave it up, went in for other games.
    »And this occasions me to congratulate myself again,« he pursued, »on the
circumstance that our place has had nothing to do with your temporary
retirement. It very easily might have had a hand in it; because it is
