 have a copy of.
 

                                  Chapter XXIV

                           The Evening of a Long Day.

That illustrious man, and great national ornament, Mr. Merdle, continued his
shining course. It began to be widely understood that one who had done society
the admirable service of making so much money out of it, could not be suffered
to remain a commoner. A baronetcy was spoken of with confidence; a peerage was
frequently mentioned. Rumour had it that Mr. Merdle had set his golden face
against a baronetcy; that he had plainly intimated to Lord Decimus that a
baronetcy was not enough for him; that he had said, »No: a Peerage, or plain
Merdle.« This was reported to have plunged Lord Decimus as nigh to his noble
chin in a slough of doubts as so lofty a person could be sunk. For, the
Barnacles, as a group of themselves in creation, had an idea that such
distinctions belonged to them; and that when a soldier, sailor, or lawyer,
became ennobled, they let him in, as it were, by an act of condescension, at the
family door, and immediately shut it again. Not only (said Rumour) had the
troubled Decimus his own hereditary part in this impression, but he also knew of
several Barnacle claims already on the file, which came into collision with that
of the master-spirit. Right or wrong, Rumour was very busy; and Lord Decimus,
while he was, or was supposed to be, in stately excogitation of the difficulty,
lent her some countenance, by taking, on several public occasions, one of those
elephantine trots of his through a jungle of overgrown sentences, waving Mr.
Merdle about on his trunk as Gigantic Enterprise, The Wealth of England,
Elasticity, Credit, Capital, Prosperity, and all manner of blessings.
    So quietly did the mowing of the old scythe go on, that fully three months
had passed unnoticed since the two English brothers had been laid in one tomb in
the strangers' cemetery at Rome. Mr. and Mrs. Sparkler were established in their
own house; a little mansion, rather of the Tite Barnacle class, quite a triumph
of inconvenience, with a perpetual smell in it of the day before yesterday's
soup and coach-horses, but extremely dear, as being exactly in the centre of the
habitable globe. In this enviable abode (and envied it really was by many
people), Mrs. Sparkler had intended to proceed at once to the demolition of the
Bosom, when active hostilities had been suspended by the arrival of the Courier
with his tidings of death
