Page 481 - bleak-house

We walked a little way without speaking, and present-
ly Richard addressed me in his frankest and most feeling
manner, thus: ‘My dear Esther, I understand you, and I
wish to heaven I were a more constant sort of fellow. I don’t
mean constant to Ada, for I love her dearly—better and bet-
ter every day—but constant to myself. (Somehow, I mean
something that I can’t very well express, but you’ll make it
out.) If I were a more constant sort of fellow, I should have
held on either to Badger or to Kenge and Carboy like grim
death, and should have begun to be steady and systematic
by this time, and shouldn’t be in debt, and—‘
‘ARE you in debt, Richard?’
‘Yes,’ said Richard, ‘I am a little so, my dear. Also, I have
taken rather too much to billiards and that sort of thing.
Now the murder’s out; you despise me, Esther, don’t you?’
‘You know I don’t,’ said I.
‘You are kinder to me than I often am to myself,’ he re-
turned. ‘My dear Esther, I am a very unfortunate dog not
to be more settled, but how CAN I be more settled? If you
lived in an unfinished house, you couldn’t settle down in it;
if you were condemned to leave everything you undertook
unfinished, you would find it hard to apply yourself to any-
thing; and yet that’s my unhappy case. I was born into this
unfinished contention with all its chances and changes, and
it began to unsettle me before I quite knew the difference
between a suit at law and a suit of clothes; and it has gone
on unsettling me ever since; and here I am now, conscious
sometimes that I am but a worthless fellow to love my con-
fiding cousin Ada.’

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