 was so much on my mind, and it was so natural to me to confide in
Peggotty, when I found her again by my side of an evening with the old set of
industrial implements, busily making the tour of my wardrobe, that I imparted to
her, in a sufficiently roundabout way, my great secret. Peggotty was strongly
interested, but I could not get her into my view of the case at all. She was
audaciously prejudiced in my favour, and quite unable to understand why I should
have any misgivings, or be low-spirited about it. »The young lady might think
herself well off,« she observed, »to have such a beau. And as to her Pa,« she
said, »what did the gentleman expect, for gracious sake!«
    I observed, however, that Mr. Spenlow's Proctorial gown and stiff cravat
took Peggotty down a little, and inspired her with a greater reverence for the
man who was gradually becoming more and more etherealized in my eyes every day,
and about whom a reflected radiance seemed to me to beam when he sat erect in
Court among his papers, like a little lighthouse in a sea of stationery. And
by-the-bye, it used to be uncommonly strange to me to consider, I remember, as I
sat in Court too, how those dim old judges and doctors wouldn't have cared for
Dora, if they had known her; how they wouldn't have gone out of their senses
with rapture, if marriage with Dora had been proposed to them; how Dora might
have sung and played upon that glorified guitar, until she led me to the verge
of madness, yet not have tempted one of those slow-goers an inch out of his
road!
    I despised them, to a man. Frozen-out old gardeners in the flower-beds of
the heart, I took a personal offence against them all. The Bench was nothing to
me but an insensible blunderer. The Bar had no more tenderness or poetry in it,
than the Bar of a public-house.
    Taking the management of Peggotty's affairs into my own hands, with no
little pride, I proved the will, and came to a settlement with the Legacy
Duty-office, and took her to the Bank, and soon got everything into an orderly
train. We varied the legal character of these proceedings by going to see some
perspiring Wax-work, in Fleet Street (melted, I should hope, these twenty
years); and by visiting Miss Linwood's Exhibition, which I remember
