Mr Clennam, that one of them was meant for me?'
asked Pet herself, now standing in the doorway.

'I might have thought that both of them were meant for you, both
are still so like you. Indeed,' said Clennam, glancing from the fair
original to the picture and back, 'I cannot even now say which is not
your portrait.' 'D'ye hear that, Mother?' cried Mr Meagles to his wife,
who had followed her daughter. 'It's always the same, Clennam; nobody
can decide. The child to your left is Pet.'

The picture happened to be near a looking-glass. As Arthur looked at
it again, he saw, by the reflection of the mirror, Tattycoram stop in
passing outside the door, listen to what was going on, and pass away
with an angry and contemptuous frown upon her face, that changed its
beauty into ugliness.

'But come!' said Mr Meagles. 'You have had a long walk, and will be glad
to get your boots off. As to Daniel here, I suppose he'd never think of
taking his boots off, unless we showed him a boot-jack.'

'Why not?' asked Daniel, with a significant smile at Clennam.

'Oh! You have so many things to think about,' returned Mr Meagles,
clapping him on the shoulder, as if his weakness must not be left to
itself on any account. 'Figures, and wheels, and cogs, and levers, and
screws, and cylinders, and a thousand things.'

'In my calling,' said Daniel, amused, 'the greater usually includes the
less. But never mind, never mind! Whatever pleases you, pleases me.'

Clennam could not help speculating, as he seated himself in his room
by the fire, whether there might be in the breast of this honest,
affectionate, and cordial Mr Meagles, any microscopic portion of
the mustard-seed that had sprung up into the great tree of the
Circumlocution Office. His curious sense of a general superiority to
Daniel Doyce, which seemed to be founded, not so much on anything
in Doyce's personal character as on the mere fact of his being an
originator and a man out of the beaten track of other men, suggested the
idea. It might have occupied him until he went down to dinner an hour
afterwards, if he had not had another question to consider, which
had been in his mind so long ago as before he was in quarantine at
Marseilles, and which had now returned to it, and was very urgent with
it. No less a question than this: Whether he should allow himself to
fall in love with Pet?

He was twice her age. (He changed the leg he had crossed over the other,
and tried the calculation