Perhaps you guess the person.
Henry Gowan.'

'I was not unprepared to hear it.'

'Well!' said Mr Meagles, with a heavy sigh, 'I wish to God you had never
had to hear it. However, so it is. Mother and I have done all we could
to get the better of it, Clennam. We have tried tender advice, we
have tried time, we have tried absence. As yet, of no use. Our late
conversations have been upon the subject of going away for another year
at least, in order that there might be an entire separation and breaking
off for that term. Upon that question, Pet has been unhappy, and
therefore Mother and I have been unhappy.' Clennam said that he could
easily believe it.

'Well!' continued Mr Meagles in an apologetic way, 'I admit as a
practical man, and I am sure Mother would admit as a practical woman,
that we do, in families, magnify our troubles and make mountains of our
molehills in a way that is calculated to be rather trying to people who
look on--to mere outsiders, you know, Clennam.

Still, Pet's happiness or unhappiness is quite a life or death question
with us; and we may be excused, I hope, for making much of it. At all
events, it might have been borne by Tattycoram. Now, don't you think
so?'

'I do indeed think so,' returned Clennam, in most emphatic recognition
of this very moderate expectation.

'No, sir,' said Mr Meagles, shaking his head ruefully. 'She couldn't
stand it. The chafing and firing of that girl, the wearing and tearing
of that girl within her own breast, has been such that I have
softly said to her again and again in passing her, "Five-and-twenty,
Tattycoram, five-and-twenty!" I heartily wish she could have gone
on counting five-and-twenty day and night, and then it wouldn't have
happened.'

Mr Meagles with a despondent countenance in which the goodness of his
heart was even more expressed than in his times of cheerfulness and
gaiety, stroked his face down from his forehead to his chin, and shook
his head again.

'I said to Mother (not that it was necessary, for she would have thought
it all for herself), we are practical people, my dear, and we know her
story; we see in this unhappy girl some reflection of what was raging in
her mother's heart before ever such a creature as this poor thing was
in the world; we'll gloss her temper over, Mother, we won't notice it at
present, my dear, we'll take advantage of some better disposition in her
another time. So we said nothing. But, do what we would, it seems