dn'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. He found her a courtly old lady, formerly a Beauty, and
still sufficiently well-favoured to have dispensed with the powder on
her nose and a certain impossible bloom under each eye. She was a little
lofty with him; so was another old lady, dark-browed and high-nosed,
and who must