c? I want your most
careful consideration. If you would like, when you have gone over it in
your mind, to discuss the matter with me and Arthur Smith (who would
manage the whole of the business, which I should never touch); we will
make an appointment. But I ought to add that Arthur Smith plainly says,
'Of the immense return in money, I have no doubt. Of the Dash into the
new position, however, I am not so good a judge.' I enclose you a rough
note[218] of my project, as it stands in my mind."

Mr. Arthur Smith, a man possessed of many qualities that justified the
confidence Dickens placed in him, might not have been a good judge of
the "Dash" into the new position, but no man knew better every
disadvantage incident to it, or was less likely to be disconcerted by
any. His exact fitness to manage the scheme successfully, made him an
unsafe counsellor respecting it. Within a week from this time the
reading for the Charity was to be given. "They have let," Dickens wrote
on the 9th of April, "five hundred stalls for the Hospital night; and
as people come every day for more, and it is out of the question to make
more, they cannot be restrained at St. Martin's Hall from taking down
names for other readings." This closed the attempt at further objection.
Exactly a fortnight after the reading for the children's hospital, on
Thursday the 29th April, came the first public reading for his own
benefit; and before the next month was over, this launch into a new life
had been followed by a change in his old home. Thenceforward he and his
wife lived apart. The eldest son went with his mother, Dickens at once
giving effect to her expressed wish in this respect; and the other
children remained with himself, their intercourse with Mrs. Dickens
being left entirely to themselves. It was thus far an arrangement of a
strictly private nature, and no decent person could have had excuse for
regarding it in any other light, if public attention had not been
unexpectedly invited to it by a printed statement in _Household Words_.
Dickens was stung into this by some miserable gossip at which in
ordinary circumstances no man would more determinedly have been silent;
but he had now publicly to show himself, at stated times, as a public
entertainer, and this, with his name even so aspersed, he found to be
impossible. All he would concede to my strenuous resistance against such
a publication, was an offer to suppress it, if, upon reference to the
opinion