Our Mutual Friend

by Charles Dickens

this boat and the two figures in it obviously were doing something that they often did, and were seeking what they often sought.

Has a dead man any use for money? Is it possible for a dead man to have money? What world does a dead man belong to? 'Tother world. What world does money belong to? This world. How can money be a corpse's? Can a corpse own it, want it, spend it, claim it, miss it? Don't try to go confounding the rights and wrongs of things in that way. But it's worthy of the sneaking spirit that robs a live man.'

and he glanced at the backs of the books, with an awakened curiosity that went below the binding. No one who can read, ever looks at a book, even unopened on a shelf, like one who cannot.

'as to my literary man's duties, they're clear. Professionally he declines and he falls, and as a friend he drops into poetry.'

And this is the eternal law. For, Evil often stops short at itself and dies with the doer of it; but Good, never.

'I may call him Our Mutual Friend,' said Mr Boffin. 'What sort of a fellow IS Our Mutual Friend, now? Do you like him?'

'Because,' Mr Boffin explained, 'you must know that I'm not particularly well acquainted with Our Mutual Friend, for I have only seen him once.

As is well known to the wise in their generation, traffic in Shares is the one thing to have to do with in this world. Have no antecedents, no established character, no cultivation, no ideas, no manners; have Shares. Have Shares enough to be on Boards of Direction in capital letters, oscillate on mysterious business between London and Paris, and be great. Where does he come from? Shares. Where is he going to? Shares. What are his tastes? Shares.

O mighty Shares! To set those blaring images so high, and to cause us smaller vermin, as under the influence of henbane or opium, to cry out, night and day, 'Relieve us of our money, scatter it for us, buy us and sell us, ruin us, only we beseech ye take rank among the powers of the earth, and fatten on us'!

Twemlow has before noticed in his feeble way how soon the Veneering guests become infected with the Veneering fiction.

'It was a little particular of Providence,' said the foreign gentleman, laughing; 'for the frontier is not large.'

'In susceptibility to boredom,' returned that worthy, 'I assure you I am the most consistent of mankind.'

'I believe him to be a thorough rascal. But he may tell the truth, for his own purpose, and for this occasion only.'

Aslant against the hard implacable weather and the rough wind, he was no more to be driven back than hurried forward, but held on like an advancing Destiny.

Mr Inspector replied, with due generality and reticence, that it was always more likely that a man had done a bad thing than that he hadn't.

Do you feel like a dark combination of traitor and pickpocket when you think of that girl?'

Perhaps fire, like the higher animal and vegetable life it helps to sustain, has its greatest tendency towards death, when the night is dying and the day is not yet born.

'What I say is, the world's wide enough for all of us!'

'So it is, my dear,' said Mr Boffin, 'when not literary. But when so, not so.

Whatever is built by man for man's occupation, must, like natural creations, fulfil the intention of its existence, or soon perish.

'only when you DO pay people for looking alive, it's as well to know that they ARE looking alive.

everything that is at all, must begin at some time.

gracious, and ready. Yet the something never left it. It has been written of men who have undergone a cruel captivity, or who have passed through a terrible strait, or who in self-preservation have killed a defenceless fellow-creature, that the record thereof has never faded from their countenances until they died.

The suddenness of an orphan's rise in the market was not to be paralleled by the maddest records of the Stock Exchange.

Full-Private Number One in the Awkward Squad of the rank and file of life, was Sloppy, and yet had his glimmering notions of standing true to the Colours.

But I couldn't take anything from you, my dear. I never did take anything from any one. It ain't that I'm not grateful, but I love to earn it better.'

I shall transact the business: you will transact the pleasure. I shall have my salary to earn; you will have nothing to do but to enjoy and attract.'

Tradesmen's books hunger, and tradesmen's mouths water, for the gold dust of the Golden Dustman.

But no one knows so well as the Secretary, who opens and reads the letters, what a set is made at the man marked by a stroke of notoriety.

Perhaps conspirators who have once established an understanding, may not be over-fond of repeating the terms and objects of their conspiracy.

It is one of the easiest achievements in life to offend your family when your family want to get rid of you.

'I don't object, Lammle,' returned Fledgeby, with an internal chuckle, 'to being understood, though I object to being questioned. That certainly IS the way I do it.'

It was a part of his avarice to take, within narrow bounds, long odds at races; if he won, he drove harder bargains; if he lost, he half starved himself until next time. Why money should be so precious to an Ass too dull and mean to exchange it for any other satisfaction, is strange; but there is no animal so sure to get laden with it, as the Ass who sees nothing written on the face of the earth and sky but the three letters L. S. D.--not Luxury, Sensuality, Dissoluteness, which they often stand for, but the three dry letters.

Your concentrated Fox is seldom comparable to your concentrated Ass in money-breeding.

'Sir, there is,' returned the old man with quiet emphasis, 'too much untruth among all denominations of men.'

'Twelve shillings a week, even when they are an old man's wages, bury themselves.'

'Come up and be dead! Come up and be dead!'

'My dear fellow, I don't design anything. I have no design whatever. I am incapable of designs. If I conceived a design, I should speedily abandon it, exhausted by the operation.'

Pa. I feel that I can't beg it, borrow it, or steal it; and so I have resolved that I must marry it.'

I say, Pa, that to get money I must marry money. In consequence of which, I am always looking out for money to captivate.'

Love, though said to be afflicted with blindness, is a vigilant watchman,

To think it out through the future, is a harder though a much shorter task than to think it out through the past.

'What would I have? Dead, I have found the true friends of my lifetime still as true as tender and as faithful as when I was alive, and making my memory an incentive to good actions done in my name. Dead, I have found them when they might have slighted my name, and passed greedily over my grave to ease and wealth, lingering by the way, like single-hearted children, to recall their love for me when I was a poor frightened child. Dead, I have heard from the woman who would have been my wife if I had lived, the revolting truth that I should have purchased her, caring nothing for me, as a Sultan buys a slave.

'What would I have? If the dead could know, or do know, how the living use them, who among the hosts of dead has found a more disinterested fidelity on earth than I?

brought their simple faith and honour clean out of dustheaps.

'Slow, you may be; sure, you are!'

(quacks being the only sages he believed in besides usurers),

If it had never let him out any more, the world would have had no irreparable loss, but could have easily replaced him from its stock on hand.

Recollect, we must scrunch or be scrunched. Recollect, we must hold our own. Recollect, money makes money.

'What HAVE we found?' cried Wegg, delighted to be able to acquiesce. 'Ah! There I grant you, comrade. Nothing. But on the contrary, comrade, what MAY we find? There you'll grant me. Anything.'