they
took it very ill that they had not already got something much better. Genteel
blinds and makeshifts were more or less observable as soon as their doors were
opened; screens not half high enough, which made dining-rooms out of arched
passages, and warded off obscure corners where foot-boys slept at night with
their heads among the knives and forks; curtains which called upon you to
believe that they didn't hide anything; panes of glass which requested you not
to see them; many objects of various forms, feigning to have no connection with
their guilty secret, a bed; disguised traps in walls, which were clearly
coal-cellars; affectations of no thoroughfares, which were evidently doors to
little kitchens. Mental reservations and artful mysteries grew out of these
things. Callers looking steadily into the eyes of their receivers, pretended not
to smell cooking three feet off; people, confronting closets accidentally left
open, pretended not to see bottles; visitors, with their heads against a
partition of thin canvas and a page and a young female at high words on the
other side, made believe to be sitting in a primeval silence. There was no end
to the small social accommodation-bills of this nature which the gipsies of
gentility were constantly drawing upon, and accepting for, one another.
    Some of these Bohemians were of an irritable temperament, as constantly
soured and vexed by two mental trials: the first, the consciousness that they
had never got enough out of the public; the second, the consciousness that the
public were admitted into the building. Under the latter great wrong, a few
suffered dreadfully - particularly on Sundays, when they had for some time
expected the earth to open and swallow the public up; but which desirable event
had not yet occurred, in consequence of some reprehensible laxity in the
arrangements of the Universe.
    Mrs. Gowan's door was attended by a family servant of several years'
standing, who had his own crow to pluck with the public, concerning a situation
in the Post-Office which he had been for some time expecting, and to which he
was not yet appointed. He perfectly knew that the public could never have got
him in, but he grimly gratified himself with the idea that the public kept him
out. Under the influence of this injury (and perhaps of some little straitness
and irregularity in the matter of wages), he had grown neglectful of his person
and morose in mind; and now beholding in Clennam one of the degraded body of his
oppressors, received him with ignominy.
    Mrs. Gowan, however, received him with condescension