hich do
mysteriously get into houses sometimes, which nobody seems to have
picked up in a distinct form from anybody, and yet which everybody seems
to have got hold of loosely from somebody and let go again, that she
lives, or was living, thereabouts.' Mr Meagles handed him a slip of
paper, on which was written the name of one of the dull by-streets in
the Grosvenor region, near Park Lane.

'Here is no number,' said Arthur looking over it.

'No number, my dear Clennam?' returned his friend. 'No anything! The
very name of the street may have been floating in the air; for, as I
tell you, none of my people can say where they got it from. However,
it's worth an inquiry; and as I would rather make it in company than
alone, and as you too were a fellow-traveller of that immovable woman's,
I thought perhaps--' Clennam finished the sentence for him by taking up
his hat again, and saying he was ready.

It was now summer-time; a grey, hot, dusty evening. They rode to the top
of Oxford Street, and there alighting, dived in among the great streets
of melancholy stateliness, and the little streets that try to be as
stately and succeed in being more melancholy, of which there is a
labyrinth near Park Lane. Wildernesses of corner houses, with barbarous
old porticoes and appurtenances; horrors that came into existence under
some wrong-headed person in some wrong-headed time, still demanding
the blind admiration of all ensuing generations and determined to do
so until they tumbled down; frowned upon the twilight. Parasite little
tenements, with the cramp in their whole frame, from the dwarf hall-door
on the giant model of His Grace's in the Square to the squeezed window
of the boudoir commanding the dunghills in the Mews, made the evening
doleful. Rickety dwellings of undoubted fashion, but of a capacity to
hold nothing comfortably except a dismal smell, looked like the last
result of the great mansions' breeding in-and-in; and, where their
little supplementary bows and balconies were supported on thin iron
columns, seemed to be scrofulously resting upon crutches.

Here and there a Hatchment, with the whole science of Heraldry in it,
loomed down upon the street, like an Archbishop discoursing on Vanity.
The shops, few in number, made no show; for popular opinion was as
nothing to them. The pastrycook knew who was on his books, and in
that knowledge could be calm, with a few glass cylinders of dowager
peppermint-drops in his window,