it's always well worth my while to make money.'

'Now,' said Fledgeby approvingly, 'you're answering to a sensible
purpose. Now, you're coming out and looking alive! So I make so free,
Miss Jenny, as to offer the remark, that you and Judah were too thick
together to last. You can't come to be intimate with such a deep file
as Judah without beginning to see a little way into him, you know,' said
Fledgeby with a wink.

'I must own,' returned the dressmaker, with her eyes upon her work,
'that we are not good friends at present.'

'I know you're not good friends at present,' said Fledgeby. 'I know all
about it. I should like to pay off Judah, by not letting him have his
own deep way in everything. In most things he'll get it by hook or
by crook, but--hang it all!--don't let him have his own deep way in
everything. That's too much.' Mr Fledgeby said this with some display of
indignant warmth, as if he was counsel in the cause for Virtue.

'How can I prevent his having his own way?' began the dressmaker.

'Deep way, I called it,' said Fledgeby.

'--His own deep way, in anything?'

'I'll tell you,' said Fledgeby. 'I like to hear you ask it, because
it's looking alive. It's what I should expect to find in one of your
sagacious understanding. Now, candidly.'

'Eh?' cried Miss Jenny.

'I said, now candidly,' Mr Fledgeby explained, a little put out.

'Oh-h!'

'I should be glad to countermine him, respecting the handsome gal, your
friend. He means something there. You may depend upon it, Judah means
something there. He has a motive, and of course his motive is a dark
motive. Now, whatever his motive is, it's necessary to his motive'--Mr
Fledgeby's constructive powers were not equal to the avoidance of some
tautology here--'that it should be kept from me, what he has done with
her. So I put it to you, who know: What HAS he done with her? I ask no
more. And is that asking much, when you understand that it will pay?'

Miss Jenny Wren, who had cast her eyes upon the bench again after her
last interruption, sat looking at it, needle in hand but not working,
for some moments. She then briskly resumed her work, and said with a
sidelong glance of her eyes and chin at Mr Fledgeby:

'Where d'ye live?'

'Albany, Piccadilly,' replied Fledgeby.

'When are you at home?'

'When you like.'

'Breakfast-time?' said Jenny, in her abruptest and shortest manner.

'No better time in the day,' said Fledgeby.

'I'll look in upon yo