 with the rest of his knowledge.
    Sir Leicester Dedlock is with my Lady, and is happy to see Mr. Tulkinghorn.
There is an air of prescription about him which is always agreeable to Sir
Leicester; he receives it as a kind of tribute. He likes Mr. Tulkinghorn's
dress; there is a kind of tribute in that too. It is eminently respectable, and
likewise, in a general way, retainer-like. It expresses, as it were, the steward
of the legal mysteries, the butler of the legal cellar, of the Dedlocks.
    Has Mr. Tulkinghorn any idea of this himself? It may be so, or it may not;
but there is this remarkable circumstance to be noted in everything associated
with my Lady Dedlock as one of a class - as one of the leaders and
representatives of her little world. She supposes herself to be an inscrutable
Being, quite out of the reach and ken of ordinary mortals - seeing herself in
her glass, where indeed she looks so. Yet, every dim little star revolving about
her, from her maid to the manager of the Italian Opera, knows her weaknesses,
prejudices, follies, haughtinesses, and caprices; and lives upon as accurate a
calculation and as nice a measure of her moral nature, as her dressmaker takes
of her physical proportions. Is a new dress, a new custom, a new singer, a new
dancer, a new form of jewellery, a new dwarf or giant, a new chapel, a new
anything, to be set up? There are deferential people, in a dozen callings, whom
my Lady Dedlock suspects of nothing but prostration before her, who can tell you
how to manage her as if she were a baby; who do nothing but nurse her all their
lives; who, humbly affecting to follow with profound subservience, lead her and
her whole troop after them; who, in hooking one, hook all and bear them off, as
Lemuel Gulliver bore away the stately fleet of the majestic Lilliput. »If you
want to address our people, sir,« say Blaze and Sparkle the jewellers - meaning
by our people, Lady Dedlock and the rest - »you must remember that you are not
dealing with the general public; you must hit our people in their weakest place,
and their weakest place is such a place.« »To make this article go down,
gentlemen,« say Sheen and Gloss the mercers, to their friends the manufacturers,
»you must come to us, because we know where to have the fashionable people, and
we can make it
