Page 814 - bleak-house

CHAPTER XXXIX

Attorney and Client

The name of Mr. Vholes, preceded by the legend Ground-
Floor, is inscribed upon a door-post in Symond’s Inn,
Chancery Lane—a little, pale, wall-eyed, woebegone inn
like a large dust-binn of two compartments and a sifter. It
looks as if Symond were a sparing man in his way and con-
structed his inn of old building materials which took kindly
to the dry rot and to dirt and all things decaying and dis-
mal, and perpetuated Symond’s memory with congenial
shabbiness. Quartered in this dingy hatchment commemo-
rative of Symond are the legal bearings of Mr. Vholes.
Mr. Vholes’s office, in disposition retiring and in situa-
tion retired, is squeezed up in a corner and blinks at a dead
wall. Three feet of knotty-floored dark passage bring the cli-
ent to Mr. Vholes’s jet-black door, in an angle profoundly
dark on the brightest midsummer morning and encum-
bered by a black bulk-head of cellarage staircase against
which belated civilians generally strike their brows. Mr.
Vholes’s chambers are on so small a scale that one clerk can
open the door without getting off his stool, while the oth-
er who elbows him at the same desk has equal facilities for

814 Bleak House