gigantic combinations of skill and capital. For, though nobody knew with
the least precision what Mr Merdle's business was, except that it was
to coin money, these were the terms in which everybody defined it on all
ceremonious occasions, and which it was the last new polite reading of
the parable of the camel and the needle's eye to accept without inquiry.

For a gentleman who had this splendid work cut out for him, Mr Merdle
looked a little common, and rather as if, in the course of his vast
transactions, he had accidentally made an interchange of heads with
some inferior spirit. He presented himself before the two ladies in the
course of a dismal stroll through his mansion, which had no apparent
object but escape from the presence of the chief butler.

'I beg your pardon,' he said, stopping short in confusion; 'I didn't
know there was anybody here but the parrot.'

However, as Mrs Merdle said, 'You can come in!' and as Mrs Gowan said
she was just going, and had already risen to take her leave, he came in,
and stood looking out at a distant window, with his hands crossed under
his uneasy coat-cuffs, clasping his wrists as if he were taking himself
into custody. In this attitude he fell directly into a reverie from
which he was only aroused by his wife's calling to him from her ottoman,
when they had been for some quarter of an hour alone.

'Eh? Yes?' said Mr Merdle, turning towards her. 'What is it?'

'What is it?' repeated Mrs Merdle. 'It is, I suppose, that you have not
heard a word of my complaint.'

'Your complaint, Mrs Merdle?' said Mr Merdle. 'I didn't know that you
were suffering from a complaint. What complaint?'

'A complaint of you,' said Mrs Merdle.

'Oh! A complaint of me,' said Mr Merdle. 'What is the--what have I--what
may you have to complain of in me, Mrs Merdle?' In his withdrawing,
abstracted, pondering way, it took him some time to shape this question.
As a kind of faint attempt to convince himself that he was the master of
the house, he concluded by presenting his forefinger to the parrot, who
expressed his opinion on that subject by instantly driving his bill into
it.

'You were saying, Mrs Merdle,' said Mr Merdle, with his wounded finger
in his mouth, 'that you had a complaint against me?'

'A complaint which I could scarcely show the justice of more
emphatically, than by having to repeat it,' said Mrs Merdle. 'I might as
well have stated it to the wall. I had far better have stated it