The conference was held at four or five o'clock in the afternoon, when all the region of Harley Street, Cavendish Square, was resonant of carriage-wheels and double-knocks. It had reached this point when Mr Merdle came home from his daily occupation of causing the British name to be more and more respected in all parts of the civilised globe capable of the appreciation of world-wide commercial enterprise and 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; 'Ididn'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. 'Imight as well have stated it to the wall. I had far better have stated it to the bird. He would at least have screamed.'
'You don't want me to scream, Mrs Merdle, I suppose,' said Mr Merdle, taking a chair.
'Indeed I don't know,' retorted Mrs Merdle, 'but that you had better do that, than be so moody and distraught. One would at least know that you were sensible of what was going on around you.'
'A man might scream, and yet not be that, Mrs Merdle,' said Mr Merdle, heavily.
'And might be dogged, as you are at present, without screaming,'returned Mrs Merdle. 'That's very true. If you wish to know the complaint I make against you, it is, in so many plain words, that you really ought not to go into Society unless you can accommodate yourself to Society.'
Mr Merdle, so twisting his hands into what hair he had upon his head that he seemed to lift himself up by it as he started out of his chair, cried:
'Why, in the name of all the infernal powers, Mrs Merdle, who does more for Society than I do? Do you see these premises, Mrs Merdle?
Do you see this furniture, Mrs Merdle? Do you look in the glass and see yourself, Mrs Merdle? Do you know the cost of all this, and who it's all provided for? And yet will you tell me that Ioughtn't to go into Society? I, who shower money upon it in this way? I, who might always be said--to--to--to harness myself to a watering-cart full of money, and go about saturating Society every day of my life.'
'Pray, don't be violent, Mr Merdle,' said Mrs Merdle.
'Violent?' said Mr Merdle. 'You are enough to make me desperate.
You don't know half of what I do to accommodate Society. You don't know anything of the sacrifices I make for it.'
'I know,' returned Mrs Merdle, 'that you receive the best in the land. I know that you move in the whole Society of the country.
And I believe I know (indeed, not to make any ridiculous pretence about it, I know I know) who sustains you in it, Mr Merdle.'
'Mrs Merdle,' retorted that gentleman, wiping his dull red and yellow face, 'I know that as well as you do. If you were not an ornament to Society, and if I was not a benefactor to Society, you and I would never have come together. When I say a benefactor to it, I mean a person who provides it with all sorts of expensive things to eat and drink and look at. But, to tell me that I am not fit for it after all I have done for it--after all I have done for it,' repeated Mr Merdle, with a wild emphasis that made his wife lift up her eyelids, 'after all--all!--to tell me I have no right to mix with it after all, is a pretty reward.'
'I say,' answered Mrs Merdle composedly, 'that you ought to make yourself fit for it by being more degage, and less preoccupied.
There is a positive vulgarity in carrying your business affairs about with you as you do.'