This strongly marked way of doing business
made a strongly marked impression on me, and
that not of an agreeable kind. Mr. Jaggers
never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking
boots, and in poising himself on these boots,
with his large head bent down and his eyebrows
joined together, awaiting an answer, he
sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they
laughed in a dry and suspicious way. As he
happened to go out now, and as Wemmick was
brisk and talkative, I said to Wemmick that I
hardly knew what to make of Mr. Jaggers's
manner.

"Tell him that, and he'll take it as a compliment,"
answered Wemmick; "he don't mean
that you should know what to make of it.—
Oh!" for I looked surprised, "it's not personal;
it's professional: only professional."

Wemmick was at his desk, lunching—and
crunching—on a dry hard biscuit; pieces of
which he threw from time to time into his slit
of a mouth, as if he were posting them.

"Always seems to me," said Wemmick, "as
if he had set a man-trap and was watching it.
Suddenly—click—you're caught!"

Without remarking that man-traps were not
among the amenities of life, I said I supposed he
was very skilful?

"Deep," said Wemmick, "as Australia."
Pointing with his pen at the office floor, to
express that Australia was understood for the
purposes of the figure, to be symmetrically on
the opposite spot of the globe. "If there was
anything deeper," added Wemmick, bringing
his pen to paper, "he'd be it."

Then, I said I supposed he had a fine business,
and Wemmick said "Ca-pi-tal!" Then, I
asked if there were many clerks? To which he
replied:

"We don't run much into clerks, because
there's only one Jaggers, and people won't have
him at second hand. There are only four of us.
Would you like to see 'em? You are one of us,
as I may say."

I accepted the offer. When Mr. Wemmick
had put all his biscuit into the post, and had
paid me my money from a cash-box in a safe,
the key of which safe he kept somewhere down
his back and produced from his coat-collar like
an iron pigtail, we went up-stairs. The house
was dark and shabby, and the greasy shoulders
that had left their mark in Mr. Jaggers's room,
seemed to have been shuttling up and down the
staircase for years. In the front first floor, a
clerk who looked something between a publican
and a rat-catcher—a large pale puffed swollen
man—was attentively engaged with three or
four people of shabby appearance, whom he
treated as unceremoniously as everybody seemed
to be treated who contributed to Mr. Jaggers's
coffers. "Getting evidence together," said Mr.
Wemmick, as we came out, "for the Bailey." In
the room over that, a little flabby terrier of a
clerk with dangling hair (his cropping seemed
to have been forgotten when he was a puppy)
was similarly engaged with a man with weak
eyes, whom Mr. Wemmick presented to me as a
smelter who kept his pot always boiling, and who
would melt me anything I pleased—and who
was in an excessive white-perspiration, as if he
had been trying his art on himself. In a back
room, a high-shouldered man with a face-ache tied
up in dirty flannel, who was dressed in old black
clothes that bore the appearance of having been
waxed, was stooping over his work of making
fair copies of the notes of the other two gentlemen,
for Mr. Jaggers's own use.

This was all the establishment. When we
went down stairs again, Wemmick led me into
my guardian's room, and said, "This you've
seen already."

"Pray," said I, as the two odious casts with
the twitchy leer upon them caught my sight
again, "whose likenesses are those?"

"These?" said Wemmick, getting upon a
chair, and blowing the dust off the horrible
heads before bringing them down. "These are
two celebrated ones. Famous clients of ours
that got us a world of credit. This chap (why
you must have come down in the night and been
peeping into the inkstand, to get this blot upon
your eyebrow, you old rascal!) murdered his
master, and, considering that he wasn't brought
up to evidence, didn't plan it badly."

"Is it like him?" I asked, recoiling from the
brute, as Wemmick spat upon his eyebrow and
gave it a rub with his sleeve.

"Like him? It's himself, you know. The cast
was made in Newgate, directly after he was taken
down. You had a particular fancy for me,
hadn't you, Old Artful?" said Wemmick. He
then explained this affectionate apostrophe, by
touching his brooch representing the lady and
the weeping willow at the tomb with the urn
upon it, and saying, "Had it made for me,
express!"

"Is the lady anybody?" said I.

"No," returned Wemmick. "Only his game.
(You liked your bit of game, didn't you?)
No; deuce a bit of a lady in the case, Mr. Pip,
except one—and she wasn't of this slender ladylike
sort, and you wouldn't have caught her
looking after this urn—unless there was
something to drink in it." Wemmick's attention
being thus directed to his brooch, he put down
the cast, and polished the brooch with his
pocket-handkerchief.

"Did that other creature come to the same
end?" I asked. "He has the same look."

"You're right," said Wemmick, "it's the
genuine look. Much as if one nostril was
caught up with a horsehair and a little fishhook.
Yes, he came to the same end; quite
the natural end here, I assure you. He forged
wills, this blade did, if he didn't also put the
supposed testators to sleep too. You were a
gentlemanly Cove, though" (Mr. Wemmick was
again apostrophising), "and you said you could
write Greek. Yah, Bounceable! What a liar
you were. I never met such a liar as you!"
Before putting his late friend on his shelf again,
Wemmick touched the largest of his mourning
rings, and said, "Sent out to buy it for me,
only the day before."