get on.”

“You don’t get on with your account of your matrimonial

intentions,” answered Carton, with a careless air; “I wish you

would keep to that. As to mewill you never understand that I am

incorrigible?”

He asked the question with some appearance of scorn.

“You have no business to be incorrigible,” was his friend’s

answer, delivered in no very soothing tone.

“I have no business to be, at all, that I know of,” said Sydney

Carton. “Who is the lady?”

“Now, don’t let my announcement of the name make you

uncomfortable, Sydney,” said Mr. Stryver, preparing him with

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

ostentatious friendliness for the disclosure he was about to make,

“because I know you don’t mean half you say; and if you meant it

all, it would be of no importance. I make this little preface, because

you once mentioned the young lady to me in slighting terms.”

“I did?”

“Certainly; and in these chambers.”

Sydney Carton looked at his punch and looked at his

complacent friend; drank his punch and looked at his complacent

friend.

“You made mention of the young lady as a golden haired doll.

The young lady is Miss Manette. If you had been a fellow of any

sensitiveness or delicacy of feeling that kind of way, Sydney, I

might have been a little resentful of your employing such a

designation; but you are not. You want that sense altogether;

therefore I am no more annoyed when I think of the expression,

than I should be annoyed by a man’s opinion of a picture of mine,

who had no eye for pictures: or of a piece of music of mine, who

had no ear for music.”

Sydney Carton drank the punch at a great rate; drank it by

bumpers, looking at his friend.

“Now you know all about it, Syd,” said Mr. Stryver. “I don’t

care about fortune: she is a charming creature, and I have made

up my mind to please myself: on the whole, I think I can afford to

please myself. She will have in me a man already pretty well off,

and a rapidly rising man, and a man of some distinction: it is a

piece of good fortune for her, but she is worthy of good fortune.

Are you astonished?”

Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, “Why should I be

astonished?”

Charles Dickens ElecBook Classics

“You approve?”

Carton, still drinking the punch, rejoined, “Why should I not

approve?”

“Well!” said his friend Stryver, “you take it more easily than I

fancied you would, and are less mercenary on my behalf than I

thought you would be; though, to be sure, you know well enough

by this time that your ancient chum is a man of a pretty strong