I acted with inexcusable weakness?«
    In answer to this direct appeal, Mrs. Merdle assured Mrs. Gowan (speaking as
a Priestess of Society) that she was highly to be commended, that she was much
to be sympathised with, that she had taken the highest of parts, and had come
out of the furnace refined. And Mrs. Gowan, who of course saw through her own
threadbare blind perfectly, and who knew that Mrs. Merdle saw through it
perfectly, and who knew that Society would see through it perfectly, came out of
this form, notwithstanding, as she had gone into it, with immense complacency
and gravity.
    The conference was held at four or five o'clock in the afternoon, when all
the region of Harley Street, Cavendish Square, was resonant of carriage-wheels
and double-knocks. It had reached this point when Mr. Merdle came home, from his
daily occupation of causing the British name to be more and more respected in
all parts of the civilised globe, capable of the appreciation of world-wide
commercial enterprise and gigantic combinations of skill and capital. For,
though nobody knew with the least precision what Mr. Merdle's business was,
except that it was to coin money, these were the terms in which everybody
defined it on all ceremonious occasions, and which it was the last new polite
reading of the parable of the camel and the needle's eye to accept without
inquiry.
    For a gentleman who had this splendid work cut out for him, Mr. Merdle
looked a little common, and rather as if, in the course of his vast
transactions, he had accidentally made an interchange of heads with some
inferior spirit. He presented himself before the two ladies, in the course of a
dismal stroll through his mansion, which had no apparent object but escape from
the presence of the chief butler.
    »I beg your pardon,« he said, stopping short in confusion; »I didn't know
there was anybody here but the parrot.«
    However, as Mrs. Merdle said, »You can come in!« and as Mrs. Gowan said she
was just going, and had already risen to take her leave, he came in, and stood
looking out at a distant window, with his hands crossed under his uneasy
coat-cuffs, clasping his wrists as if he were taking himself into custody. In
this attitude he fell directly into a reverie, from which he was only aroused by
his wife's calling to him from her ottoman, when they had been for some
quarter-of-