prompt:
Chapter: VII. Monseigneur in Town

Monseigneur, one of the great lords in power at the Court, held his
fortnightly reception in his grand hotel in Paris. Monseigneur was in
his inner room, his sanctuary of sanctuaries, the Holiest of Holiests to
the crowd of worshippers in the suite of rooms without. Monseigneur
was about to take his chocolate. Monseigneur could swallow a great many
things with ease, and was by some few sullen minds supposed to be rather
rapidly swallowing France; but, his morning's chocolate could not so
much as get into the throat of Monseigneur, without the aid of four
strong men besides the Cook.

Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the
Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his
pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to
conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur's lips. One lacquey carried
the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed
the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function;
a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold
watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to
dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high
place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon
his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three
men; he must have died of two.

Monseigneur had been out at a little supper last night, where the Comedy
and the Grand Opera were charmingly represented. Monseigneur was out at
a little supper most nights, with fascinating company. So polite and so
impressible was Monseigneur, that the Comedy and the Grand Opera had far
more influence with him in the tiresome articles of state affairs and
state secrets, than the needs of all France. A happy circumstance
for France, as the like always is for all countries similarly
favoured!--always was for England (by way of example), in the regretted
days of the merry Stuart who sold it.

Monseigneur had one truly noble idea of general public business, which
was, to let everything go on in its own way; of particular public
business, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea that it must all go
his way--tend to his own power and pocket. Of his pleasures, general and
particular, Monseigneur had the other truly noble idea, that the world
was made for them. The text of his order (altered from the original
by only a pronoun, which is not much) ran: "The earth and the fulness
thereof are mine, saith Monseigneur."

Yet, Monseigneur had slowly found that vulgar embarrassments crept into
his affairs, both private and public; and he had, as to both classes of
affairs, allied himself perforce with a Farmer-General. As to finances
public, because Monseigneur could not make anything at all of them, and
must consequently let them out to somebody who could; as to finances
private, because Farmer-Generals were rich, and Monseigneur, after
generations of great luxury and expense, was growing poor. Hence
Monseigneur had taken his sister from a convent, while there was yet
time to ward off the impending veil, the cheapest garment she could
wear, and had bestowed her as a prize upon a very rich Farmer-General,
poor in family. Which Farmer-General, carrying an appropriate cane with
a golden apple on the top of it, was now among the company in the outer
rooms, much prostrated before by mankind--always excepting superior
mankind of the blood of Monseigneur, who, his own wife included, looked
down upon him with the loftiest contempt.

A sumptuous man was the Farmer-General. Thirty horses stood in his
stables, twenty-four male domestics sat in his halls, six body-women
waited on his wife. As one who pretended to do nothing but plunder and
forage where he could, the Farmer-General--howsoever his matrimonial
relations conduced to social morality--was at least the greatest reality
among the personages who attended at the hotel of Monseigneur that day.

For, the rooms, though a beautiful scene to look at, and adorned with
every device of decoration that the taste and skill of the time could
achieve, were, in truth, not a sound business; considered with any
reference to the scarecrows in the rags and nightcaps elsewhere (and not
so far off, either, but that the watching towers of Notre Dame, almost
equidistant from the two extremes, could see them both), they would
have been an exceedingly uncomfortable business--if that could have
been anybody's business, at the house of Monseigneur. Military officers
destitute of military knowledge; naval officers with no idea of a ship;
civil officers without a notion of affairs; brazen ecclesiastics, of the
worst world worldly, with sensual eyes, loose tongues, and looser lives;
all totally unfit for their several callings, all lying horribly in
pretending to belong to them, but all nearly or remotely of the order of
Monseigneur, and therefore foisted on all public employments from which
anything was to be got; these were to be told off by the score and the
score. People not immediately connected with Monseigneur or the State,
yet equally unconnected with anything that was real, or with lives
passed in travelling by any straight road to any true earthly end, were
no less abundant. Doctors who made great fortunes out of dainty remedies
for imaginary disorders that never existed, smiled upon their courtly
patients in the ante-chambers of Monseigneur. Projectors who had
discovered every kind of remedy for the little evils with which the
State was touched, except the remedy of setting to work in earnest to
root out a single sin, poured their distracting babble into any ears
they could lay hold of, at the reception of Monseigneur. Unbelieving
Philosophers who were remodelling the world with words, and making
card-towers of Babel to scale the skies with, talked with Unbelieving
Chemists who had an eye on the transmutation of metals, at this
wonderful gathering accumulated by Monseigneur. Exquisite gentlemen of
the finest breeding, which was at that remarkable time--and has been
since--to be known by its fruits of indifference to every natural
subject of human interest, were in the most exemplary state of
exhaustion, at the hotel of Monseigneur. Such homes had these various
notabilities left behind them in the fine world of Paris, that the spies
among the assembled devotees of Monseigneur--forming a goodly half
of the polite company--would have found it hard to discover among
the angels of that sphere one solitary wife, who, in her manners and
appearance, owned to being a Mother. Indeed, except for the mere act of
bringing a troublesome creature into this world--which does not go far
towards the realisation of the name of mother--there was no such thing
known to the fashion. Peasant women kept the unfashionable babies close,
and brought them up, and charming grandmammas of sixty dressed and
supped as at twenty.

The leprosy of unreality disfigured every human creature in attendance
upon Monseigneur. In the outermost room were half a dozen exceptional
people who had had, for a few years, some vague misgiving in them that
things in general were going rather wrong. As a promising way of setting
them right, half of the half-dozen had become members of a fantastic
sect of Convulsionists, and were even then considering within themselves
whether they should foam, rage, roar, and turn cataleptic on the
spot--thereby setting up a highly intelligible finger-post to the
Future, for Monseigneur's guidance. Besides these Dervishes, were other
three who had rushed into another sect, which mended matters with a
jargon about "the Centre of Truth:" holding that Man had got out of the
Centre of Truth--which did not need much demonstration--but had not got
out of the Circumference, and that he was to be kept from flying out of
the Circumference, and was even to be shoved back into the Centre,
by fasting and seeing of spirits. Among these, accordingly, much
discoursing with spirits went on--and it did a world of good which never
became manifest.

But, the comfort was, that all the company at the grand hotel of
Monseigneur were perfectly dressed. If the Day of Judgment had only been
ascertained to be a dress day, everybody there would have been eternally
correct. Such frizzling and powdering and sticking up of hair, such
delicate complexions artificially preserved and mended, such gallant
swords to look at, and such delicate honour to the sense of smell, would
surely keep anything going, for ever and ever. The exquisite gentlemen
of the finest breeding wore little pendent trinkets that chinked as they
languidly moved; these golden fetters rang like precious little bells;
and what with that ringing, and with the rustle of silk and brocade and
fine linen, there was a flutter in the air that fanned Saint Antoine and
his devouring hunger far away.

Dress was the one unfailing talisman and charm used for keeping all
things in their places. Everybody was dressed for a Fancy Ball that
was never to leave off. From the Palace of the Tuileries, through
Monseigneur and the whole Court, through the Chambers, the Tribunals
of Justice, and all society (except the scarecrows), the Fancy Ball
descended to the Common Executioner: who, in pursuance of the charm, was
required to officiate "frizzled, powdered, in a gold-laced coat, pumps,
and white silk stockings." At the gallows and the wheel--the axe was a
rarity--Monsieur Paris, as it was the episcopal mode among his brother
Professors of the provinces, Monsieur Orleans, and the rest, to call
him, presided in this dainty dress. And who among the company at
Monseigneur's reception in that seventeen hundred and eightieth year
of our Lord, could possibly doubt, that a system rooted in a frizzled
hangman, powdered, gold-laced, pumped, and white-silk stockinged, would
see the very stars out!

Monseigneur having eased his four men of their burdens and taken his
chocolate, caused the doors of the Holiest of Holiests to be thrown
open, and issued forth. Then, what submission, what cringing and
fawning, what servility, what abject humiliation! As to bowing down in
body and spirit, nothing in that way was left for Heaven--which may have
been one among other reasons why the worshippers of Monseigneur never
troubled it.

Bestowing a word of promise here and a smile there, a whisper on one
happy slave and a wave of the hand on another, Monseigneur affably
passed through his rooms to the remote region of the Circumference of
Truth. There, Monseigneur turned, and came back again, and so in due
course of time got himself shut up in his sanctuary by the chocolate
sprites, and was seen no more.

The show being over, the flutter in the air became quite a little storm,
and the precious little bells went ringing downstairs. There was soon
but one person left of all the crowd, and he, with his hat under his arm
and his snuff-box in his hand, slowly passed among the mirrors on his
way out.

"I devote you," said this person, stopping at the last door on his way,
and turning in the direction of the sanctuary, "to the Devil!"

With that, he shook the snuff from his fingers as if he had shaken the
dust from his feet, and quietly walked downstairs.

He was a man of about sixty, handsomely dressed, haughty in manner, and
with a face like a fine mask. A face of a transparent paleness; every
feature in it clearly defined; one set expression on it. The nose,
beautifully formed otherwise, was very slightly pinched at the top
of each nostril. In those two compressions, or dints, the only little
change that the face ever showed, resided. They persisted in changing
colour sometimes, and they would be occasionally dilated and contracted
by something like a faint pulsation; then, they gave a look of
treachery, and cruelty, to the whole countenance. Examined with
attention, its capacity of helping such a look was to be found in the
line of the mouth, and the lines of the orbits of the eyes, being much
too horizontal and thin; still, in the effect of the face made, it was a
handsome face, and a remarkable one.

Its owner went downstairs into the courtyard, got into his carriage, and
drove away. Not many people had talked with him at the reception; he had
stood in a little space apart, and Monseigneur might have been warmer
in his manner. It appeared, under the circumstances, rather agreeable
to him to see the common people dispersed before his horses, and
often barely escaping from being run down. His man drove as if he were
charging an enemy, and the furious recklessness of the man brought no
check into the face, or to the lips, of the master. The complaint had
sometimes made itself audible, even in that deaf city and dumb age,
that, in the narrow streets without footways, the fierce patrician
custom of hard driving endangered and maimed the mere vulgar in a
barbarous manner. But, few cared enough for that to think of it a second
time, and, in this matter, as in all others, the common wretches were
left to get out of their difficulties as they could.

With a wild rattle and clatter, and an inhuman abandonment of
consideration not easy to be understood in these days, the carriage
dashed through streets and swept round corners, with women screaming
before it, and men clutching each other and clutching children out of
its way. At last, swooping at a street corner by a fountain, one of its
wheels came to a sickening little jolt, and there was a loud cry from a
number of voices, and the horses reared and plunged.

But for the latter inconvenience, the carriage probably would not have
stopped; carriages were often known to drive on, and leave their wounded
behind, and why not? But the frightened valet had got down in a hurry,
and there were twenty hands at the horses' bridles.

"What has gone wrong?" said Monsieur, calmly looking out.

A tall man in a nightcap had caught up a bundle from among the feet of
the horses, and had laid it on the basement of the fountain, and was
down in the mud and wet, howling over it like a wild animal.

"Pardon, Monsieur the Marquis!" said a ragged and submissive man, "it is
a child."

"Why does he make that abominable noise? Is it his child?"

"Excuse me, Monsieur the Marquis--it is a pity--yes."

The fountain was a little removed; for the street opened, where it was,
into a space some ten or twelve yards square. As the tall man suddenly
got up from the ground, and came running at the carriage, Monsieur the
Marquis clapped his hand for an instant on his sword-hilt.

"Killed!" shrieked the man, in wild desperation, extending both arms at
their length above his head, and staring at him. "Dead!"

The people closed round, and looked at Monsieur the Marquis. There was
nothing revealed by the many eyes that looked at him but watchfulness
and eagerness; there was no visible menacing or anger. Neither did the
people say anything; after the first cry, they had been silent, and they
remained so. The voice of the submissive man who had spoken, was flat
and tame in its extreme submission. Monsieur the Marquis ran his eyes
over them all, as if they had been mere rats come out of their holes.

He took out his purse.

"It is extraordinary to me," said he, "that you people cannot take care
of yourselves and your children. One or the other of you is for ever in
the way. How do I know what injury you have done my horses. See! Give
him that."

He threw out a gold coin for the valet to pick up, and all the heads
craned forward that all the eyes might look down at it as it fell. The
tall man called out again with a most unearthly cry, "Dead!"

He was arrested by the quick arrival of another man, for whom the rest
made way. On seeing him, the miserable creature fell upon his shoulder,
sobbing and crying, and pointing to the fountain, where some women were
stooping over the motionless bundle, and moving gently about it. They
were as silent, however, as the men.

"I know all, I know all," said the last comer. "Be a brave man, my
Gaspard! It is better for the poor little plaything to die so, than to
live. It has died in a moment without pain. Could it have lived an hour
as happily?"

"You are a philosopher, you there," said the Marquis, smiling. "How do
they call you?"

"They call me Defarge."

"Of what trade?"

"Monsieur the Marquis, vendor of wine."

"Pick up that, philosopher and vendor of wine," said the Marquis,
throwing him another gold coin, "and spend it as you will. The horses
there; are they right?"

Without deigning to look at the assemblage a second time, Monsieur the
Marquis leaned back in his seat, and was just being driven away with the
air of a gentleman who had accidentally broke some common thing, and had
paid for it, and could afford to pay for it; when his ease was suddenly
disturbed by a coin flying into his carriage, and ringing on its floor.

"Hold!" said Monsieur the Marquis. "Hold the horses! Who threw that?"

He looked to the spot where Defarge the vendor of wine had stood, a
moment before; but the wretched father was grovelling on his face on
the pavement in that spot, and the figure that stood beside him was the
figure of a dark stout woman, knitting.

"You dogs!" said the Marquis, but smoothly, and with an unchanged front,
except as to the spots on his nose: "I would ride over any of you very
willingly, and exterminate you from the earth. If I knew which rascal
threw at the carriage, and if that brigand were sufficiently near it, he
should be crushed under the wheels."

So cowed was their condition, and so long and hard their experience of
what such a man could do to them, within the law and beyond it, that not
a voice, or a hand, or even an eye was raised. Among the men, not one.
But the woman who stood knitting looked up steadily, and looked the
Marquis in the face. It was not for his dignity to notice it; his
contemptuous eyes passed over her, and over all the other rats; and he
leaned back in his seat again, and gave the word "Go on!"

He was driven on, and other carriages came whirling by in quick
succession; the Minister, the State-Projector, the Farmer-General, the
Doctor, the Lawyer, the Ecclesiastic, the Grand Opera, the Comedy, the
whole Fancy Ball in a bright continuous flow, came whirling by. The rats
had crept out of their holes to look on, and they remained looking
on for hours; soldiers and police often passing between them and the
spectacle, and making a barrier behind which they slunk, and through
which they peeped. The father had long ago taken up his bundle and
bidden himself away with it, when the women who had tended the bundle
while it lay on the base of the fountain, sat there watching the running
of the water and the rolling of the Fancy Ball--when the one woman who
had stood conspicuous, knitting, still knitted on with the steadfastness
of Fate. The water of the fountain ran, the swift river ran, the day ran
into evening, so much life in the city ran into death according to rule,
time and tide waited for no man, the rats were sleeping close together
in their dark holes again, the Fancy Ball was lighted up at supper, all
things ran their course.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Monseigneur in Town Monseigneur, a great lord in the royal court, holds a reception in Paris. He surrounds himself with the greatest pomp and luxury. For example, he has four serving men help him drink his chocolate. The narrator tells us that Monseigneur's money corrupts everyone who touches it. Monseigneur parades around his guests briefly and then returns to his sanctuary. Miffed at Monseigneur's haughtiness, one guest, the Marquis Evremonde, condemns Monseigneur as he leaves. The Marquis orders his carriage to be raced through the city streets, delighting to see the commoners nearly run down by his horses. Suddenly the carriage jolts to a stop. A child lies dead under its wheels. The Marquis tosses a few coins to the boy's father, a man named Gaspard, and to the wine shop owner Defarge, who tries to comfort Gaspard. As the Marquis drives away, a coin comes flying back into the carriage, thrown in bitterness. He curses the commoners, saying that he would willingly ride over any of them. Madame Defarge watches the scene, knitting the entire time


prompt:
Chapter: VIII. Monseigneur in the Country

A beautiful landscape, with the corn bright in it, but not abundant.
Patches of poor rye where corn should have been, patches of poor peas
and beans, patches of most coarse vegetable substitutes for wheat. On
inanimate nature, as on the men and women who cultivated it, a prevalent
tendency towards an appearance of vegetating unwillingly--a dejected
disposition to give up, and wither away.

Monsieur the Marquis in his travelling carriage (which might have been
lighter), conducted by four post-horses and two postilions, fagged up
a steep hill. A blush on the countenance of Monsieur the Marquis was
no impeachment of his high breeding; it was not from within; it was
occasioned by an external circumstance beyond his control--the setting
sun.

The sunset struck so brilliantly into the travelling carriage when it
gained the hill-top, that its occupant was steeped in crimson. "It will
die out," said Monsieur the Marquis, glancing at his hands, "directly."

In effect, the sun was so low that it dipped at the moment. When the
heavy drag had been adjusted to the wheel, and the carriage slid down
hill, with a cinderous smell, in a cloud of dust, the red glow departed
quickly; the sun and the Marquis going down together, there was no glow
left when the drag was taken off.

But, there remained a broken country, bold and open, a little village
at the bottom of the hill, a broad sweep and rise beyond it, a
church-tower, a windmill, a forest for the chase, and a crag with a
fortress on it used as a prison. Round upon all these darkening objects
as the night drew on, the Marquis looked, with the air of one who was
coming near home.

The village had its one poor street, with its poor brewery, poor
tannery, poor tavern, poor stable-yard for relays of post-horses, poor
fountain, all usual poor appointments. It had its poor people too. All
its people were poor, and many of them were sitting at their doors,
shredding spare onions and the like for supper, while many were at the
fountain, washing leaves, and grasses, and any such small yieldings of
the earth that could be eaten. Expressive signs of what made them poor,
were not wanting; the tax for the state, the tax for the church, the tax
for the lord, tax local and tax general, were to be paid here and to be
paid there, according to solemn inscription in the little village, until
the wonder was, that there was any village left unswallowed.

Few children were to be seen, and no dogs. As to the men and women,
their choice on earth was stated in the prospect--Life on the lowest
terms that could sustain it, down in the little village under the mill;
or captivity and Death in the dominant prison on the crag.

Heralded by a courier in advance, and by the cracking of his postilions'
whips, which twined snake-like about their heads in the evening air, as
if he came attended by the Furies, Monsieur the Marquis drew up in
his travelling carriage at the posting-house gate. It was hard by the
fountain, and the peasants suspended their operations to look at him.
He looked at them, and saw in them, without knowing it, the slow
sure filing down of misery-worn face and figure, that was to make the
meagreness of Frenchmen an English superstition which should survive the
truth through the best part of a hundred years.

Monsieur the Marquis cast his eyes over the submissive faces that
drooped before him, as the like of himself had drooped before
Monseigneur of the Court--only the difference was, that these faces
drooped merely to suffer and not to propitiate--when a grizzled mender
of the roads joined the group.

"Bring me hither that fellow!" said the Marquis to the courier.

The fellow was brought, cap in hand, and the other fellows closed round
to look and listen, in the manner of the people at the Paris fountain.

"I passed you on the road?"

"Monseigneur, it is true. I had the honour of being passed on the road."

"Coming up the hill, and at the top of the hill, both?"

"Monseigneur, it is true."

"What did you look at, so fixedly?"

"Monseigneur, I looked at the man."

He stooped a little, and with his tattered blue cap pointed under the
carriage. All his fellows stooped to look under the carriage.

"What man, pig? And why look there?"

"Pardon, Monseigneur; he swung by the chain of the shoe--the drag."

"Who?" demanded the traveller.

"Monseigneur, the man."

"May the Devil carry away these idiots! How do you call the man? You
know all the men of this part of the country. Who was he?"

"Your clemency, Monseigneur! He was not of this part of the country. Of
all the days of my life, I never saw him."

"Swinging by the chain? To be suffocated?"

"With your gracious permission, that was the wonder of it, Monseigneur.
His head hanging over--like this!"

He turned himself sideways to the carriage, and leaned back, with his
face thrown up to the sky, and his head hanging down; then recovered
himself, fumbled with his cap, and made a bow.

"What was he like?"

"Monseigneur, he was whiter than the miller. All covered with dust,
white as a spectre, tall as a spectre!"

The picture produced an immense sensation in the little crowd; but all
eyes, without comparing notes with other eyes, looked at Monsieur
the Marquis. Perhaps, to observe whether he had any spectre on his
conscience.

"Truly, you did well," said the Marquis, felicitously sensible that such
vermin were not to ruffle him, "to see a thief accompanying my carriage,
and not open that great mouth of yours. Bah! Put him aside, Monsieur
Gabelle!"

Monsieur Gabelle was the Postmaster, and some other taxing functionary
united; he had come out with great obsequiousness to assist at this
examination, and had held the examined by the drapery of his arm in an
official manner.

"Bah! Go aside!" said Monsieur Gabelle.

"Lay hands on this stranger if he seeks to lodge in your village
to-night, and be sure that his business is honest, Gabelle."

"Monseigneur, I am flattered to devote myself to your orders."

"Did he run away, fellow?--where is that Accursed?"

The accursed was already under the carriage with some half-dozen
particular friends, pointing out the chain with his blue cap. Some
half-dozen other particular friends promptly hauled him out, and
presented him breathless to Monsieur the Marquis.

"Did the man run away, Dolt, when we stopped for the drag?"

"Monseigneur, he precipitated himself over the hill-side, head first, as
a person plunges into the river."

"See to it, Gabelle. Go on!"

The half-dozen who were peering at the chain were still among the
wheels, like sheep; the wheels turned so suddenly that they were lucky
to save their skins and bones; they had very little else to save, or
they might not have been so fortunate.

The burst with which the carriage started out of the village and up the
rise beyond, was soon checked by the steepness of the hill. Gradually,
it subsided to a foot pace, swinging and lumbering upward among the many
sweet scents of a summer night. The postilions, with a thousand gossamer
gnats circling about them in lieu of the Furies, quietly mended the
points to the lashes of their whips; the valet walked by the horses; the
courier was audible, trotting on ahead into the dull distance.

At the steepest point of the hill there was a little burial-ground,
with a Cross and a new large figure of Our Saviour on it; it was a poor
figure in wood, done by some inexperienced rustic carver, but he had
studied the figure from the life--his own life, maybe--for it was
dreadfully spare and thin.

To this distressful emblem of a great distress that had long been
growing worse, and was not at its worst, a woman was kneeling. She
turned her head as the carriage came up to her, rose quickly, and
presented herself at the carriage-door.

"It is you, Monseigneur! Monseigneur, a petition."

With an exclamation of impatience, but with his unchangeable face,
Monseigneur looked out.

"How, then! What is it? Always petitions!"

"Monseigneur. For the love of the great God! My husband, the forester."

"What of your husband, the forester? Always the same with you people. He
cannot pay something?"

"He has paid all, Monseigneur. He is dead."

"Well! He is quiet. Can I restore him to you?"

"Alas, no, Monseigneur! But he lies yonder, under a little heap of poor
grass."

"Well?"

"Monseigneur, there are so many little heaps of poor grass?"

"Again, well?"

She looked an old woman, but was young. Her manner was one of passionate
grief; by turns she clasped her veinous and knotted hands together
with wild energy, and laid one of them on the carriage-door--tenderly,
caressingly, as if it had been a human breast, and could be expected to
feel the appealing touch.

"Monseigneur, hear me! Monseigneur, hear my petition! My husband died of
want; so many die of want; so many more will die of want."

"Again, well? Can I feed them?"

"Monseigneur, the good God knows; but I don't ask it. My petition is,
that a morsel of stone or wood, with my husband's name, may be placed
over him to show where he lies. Otherwise, the place will be quickly
forgotten, it will never be found when I am dead of the same malady, I
shall be laid under some other heap of poor grass. Monseigneur, they
are so many, they increase so fast, there is so much want. Monseigneur!
Monseigneur!"

The valet had put her away from the door, the carriage had broken into
a brisk trot, the postilions had quickened the pace, she was left far
behind, and Monseigneur, again escorted by the Furies, was rapidly
diminishing the league or two of distance that remained between him and
his chateau.

The sweet scents of the summer night rose all around him, and rose, as
the rain falls, impartially, on the dusty, ragged, and toil-worn group
at the fountain not far away; to whom the mender of roads, with the aid
of the blue cap without which he was nothing, still enlarged upon his
man like a spectre, as long as they could bear it. By degrees, as they
could bear no more, they dropped off one by one, and lights twinkled
in little casements; which lights, as the casements darkened, and more
stars came out, seemed to have shot up into the sky instead of having
been extinguished.

The shadow of a large high-roofed house, and of many over-hanging trees,
was upon Monsieur the Marquis by that time; and the shadow was exchanged
for the light of a flambeau, as his carriage stopped, and the great door
of his chateau was opened to him.

"Monsieur Charles, whom I expect; is he arrived from England?"

"Monseigneur, not yet."

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Monseigneur in the Country The Marquis arrives in the small village to which he serves as lord. There, too, the people live wretched lives, exploited, poor, and starving. As he looks over the submissive faces of the peasants, he singles out a road-mender whom he passed on his journey, a man whose fixed stare bothered him. He demands to know what the road-mender was staring at, and the man responds that someone was holding onto the bottom of the carriage. The Marquis continues on his way and soon comes upon a peasant woman, mourning at a rustic graveside. The woman stops him and begs that he provide her husband's grave with some stone or marker, lest he be forgotten, but the Marquis drives away, unmoved. He arrives at his chateau and, upon entering, asks if Monsieur Charles has arrived from England


prompt:
Chapter: IX. The Gorgon's Head

It was a heavy mass of building, that chateau of Monsieur the Marquis,
with a large stone courtyard before it, and two stone sweeps of
staircase meeting in a stone terrace before the principal door. A stony
business altogether, with heavy stone balustrades, and stone urns, and
stone flowers, and stone faces of men, and stone heads of lions, in
all directions. As if the Gorgon's head had surveyed it, when it was
finished, two centuries ago.

Up the broad flight of shallow steps, Monsieur the Marquis, flambeau
preceded, went from his carriage, sufficiently disturbing the darkness
to elicit loud remonstrance from an owl in the roof of the great pile
of stable building away among the trees. All else was so quiet, that the
flambeau carried up the steps, and the other flambeau held at the great
door, burnt as if they were in a close room of state, instead of being
in the open night-air. Other sound than the owl's voice there was none,
save the falling of a fountain into its stone basin; for, it was one of
those dark nights that hold their breath by the hour together, and then
heave a long low sigh, and hold their breath again.

The great door clanged behind him, and Monsieur the Marquis crossed a
hall grim with certain old boar-spears, swords, and knives of the chase;
grimmer with certain heavy riding-rods and riding-whips, of which many a
peasant, gone to his benefactor Death, had felt the weight when his lord
was angry.

Avoiding the larger rooms, which were dark and made fast for the night,
Monsieur the Marquis, with his flambeau-bearer going on before, went up
the staircase to a door in a corridor. This thrown open, admitted him
to his own private apartment of three rooms: his bed-chamber and two
others. High vaulted rooms with cool uncarpeted floors, great dogs upon
the hearths for the burning of wood in winter time, and all luxuries
befitting the state of a marquis in a luxurious age and country.
The fashion of the last Louis but one, of the line that was never to
break--the fourteenth Louis--was conspicuous in their rich furniture;
but, it was diversified by many objects that were illustrations of old
pages in the history of France.

A supper-table was laid for two, in the third of the rooms; a round
room, in one of the chateau's four extinguisher-topped towers. A small
lofty room, with its window wide open, and the wooden jalousie-blinds
closed, so that the dark night only showed in slight horizontal lines of
black, alternating with their broad lines of stone colour.

"My nephew," said the Marquis, glancing at the supper preparation; "they
said he was not arrived."

Nor was he; but, he had been expected with Monseigneur.

"Ah! It is not probable he will arrive to-night; nevertheless, leave the
table as it is. I shall be ready in a quarter of an hour."

In a quarter of an hour Monseigneur was ready, and sat down alone to his
sumptuous and choice supper. His chair was opposite to the window, and
he had taken his soup, and was raising his glass of Bordeaux to his
lips, when he put it down.

"What is that?" he calmly asked, looking with attention at the
horizontal lines of black and stone colour.

"Monseigneur? That?"

"Outside the blinds. Open the blinds."

It was done.

"Well?"

"Monseigneur, it is nothing. The trees and the night are all that are
here."

The servant who spoke, had thrown the blinds wide, had looked out into
the vacant darkness, and stood with that blank behind him, looking round
for instructions.

"Good," said the imperturbable master. "Close them again."

That was done too, and the Marquis went on with his supper. He was
half way through it, when he again stopped with his glass in his hand,
hearing the sound of wheels. It came on briskly, and came up to the
front of the chateau.

"Ask who is arrived."

It was the nephew of Monseigneur. He had been some few leagues behind
Monseigneur, early in the afternoon. He had diminished the distance
rapidly, but not so rapidly as to come up with Monseigneur on the road.
He had heard of Monseigneur, at the posting-houses, as being before him.

He was to be told (said Monseigneur) that supper awaited him then and
there, and that he was prayed to come to it. In a little while he came.
He had been known in England as Charles Darnay.

Monseigneur received him in a courtly manner, but they did not shake
hands.

"You left Paris yesterday, sir?" he said to Monseigneur, as he took his
seat at table.

"Yesterday. And you?"

"I come direct."

"From London?"

"Yes."

"You have been a long time coming," said the Marquis, with a smile.

"On the contrary; I come direct."

"Pardon me! I mean, not a long time on the journey; a long time
intending the journey."

"I have been detained by"--the nephew stopped a moment in his
answer--"various business."

"Without doubt," said the polished uncle.

So long as a servant was present, no other words passed between them.
When coffee had been served and they were alone together, the nephew,
looking at the uncle and meeting the eyes of the face that was like a
fine mask, opened a conversation.

"I have come back, sir, as you anticipate, pursuing the object that
took me away. It carried me into great and unexpected peril; but it is
a sacred object, and if it had carried me to death I hope it would have
sustained me."

"Not to death," said the uncle; "it is not necessary to say, to death."

"I doubt, sir," returned the nephew, "whether, if it had carried me to
the utmost brink of death, you would have cared to stop me there."

The deepened marks in the nose, and the lengthening of the fine straight
lines in the cruel face, looked ominous as to that; the uncle made a
graceful gesture of protest, which was so clearly a slight form of good
breeding that it was not reassuring.

"Indeed, sir," pursued the nephew, "for anything I know, you may have
expressly worked to give a more suspicious appearance to the suspicious
circumstances that surrounded me."

"No, no, no," said the uncle, pleasantly.

"But, however that may be," resumed the nephew, glancing at him with
deep distrust, "I know that your diplomacy would stop me by any means,
and would know no scruple as to means."

"My friend, I told you so," said the uncle, with a fine pulsation in the
two marks. "Do me the favour to recall that I told you so, long ago."

"I recall it."

"Thank you," said the Marquis--very sweetly indeed.

His tone lingered in the air, almost like the tone of a musical
instrument.

"In effect, sir," pursued the nephew, "I believe it to be at once your
bad fortune, and my good fortune, that has kept me out of a prison in
France here."

"I do not quite understand," returned the uncle, sipping his coffee.
"Dare I ask you to explain?"

"I believe that if you were not in disgrace with the Court, and had not
been overshadowed by that cloud for years past, a letter de cachet would
have sent me to some fortress indefinitely."

"It is possible," said the uncle, with great calmness. "For the honour
of the family, I could even resolve to incommode you to that extent.
Pray excuse me!"

"I perceive that, happily for me, the Reception of the day before
yesterday was, as usual, a cold one," observed the nephew.

"I would not say happily, my friend," returned the uncle, with refined
politeness; "I would not be sure of that. A good opportunity for
consideration, surrounded by the advantages of solitude, might influence
your destiny to far greater advantage than you influence it for
yourself. But it is useless to discuss the question. I am, as you say,
at a disadvantage. These little instruments of correction, these gentle
aids to the power and honour of families, these slight favours that
might so incommode you, are only to be obtained now by interest
and importunity. They are sought by so many, and they are granted
(comparatively) to so few! It used not to be so, but France in all such
things is changed for the worse. Our not remote ancestors held the right
of life and death over the surrounding vulgar. From this room, many such
dogs have been taken out to be hanged; in the next room (my bedroom),
one fellow, to our knowledge, was poniarded on the spot for professing
some insolent delicacy respecting his daughter--_his_ daughter? We have
lost many privileges; a new philosophy has become the mode; and the
assertion of our station, in these days, might (I do not go so far as
to say would, but might) cause us real inconvenience. All very bad, very
bad!"

The Marquis took a gentle little pinch of snuff, and shook his head;
as elegantly despondent as he could becomingly be of a country still
containing himself, that great means of regeneration.

"We have so asserted our station, both in the old time and in the modern
time also," said the nephew, gloomily, "that I believe our name to be
more detested than any name in France."

"Let us hope so," said the uncle. "Detestation of the high is the
involuntary homage of the low."

"There is not," pursued the nephew, in his former tone, "a face I can
look at, in all this country round about us, which looks at me with any
deference on it but the dark deference of fear and slavery."

"A compliment," said the Marquis, "to the grandeur of the family,
merited by the manner in which the family has sustained its grandeur.
Hah!" And he took another gentle little pinch of snuff, and lightly
crossed his legs.

But, when his nephew, leaning an elbow on the table, covered his eyes
thoughtfully and dejectedly with his hand, the fine mask looked at
him sideways with a stronger concentration of keenness, closeness,
and dislike, than was comportable with its wearer's assumption of
indifference.

"Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear
and slavery, my friend," observed the Marquis, "will keep the dogs
obedient to the whip, as long as this roof," looking up to it, "shuts
out the sky."

That might not be so long as the Marquis supposed. If a picture of the
chateau as it was to be a very few years hence, and of fifty like it as
they too were to be a very few years hence, could have been shown to
him that night, he might have been at a loss to claim his own from
the ghastly, fire-charred, plunder-wrecked rains. As for the roof
he vaunted, he might have found _that_ shutting out the sky in a new
way--to wit, for ever, from the eyes of the bodies into which its lead
was fired, out of the barrels of a hundred thousand muskets.

"Meanwhile," said the Marquis, "I will preserve the honour and repose
of the family, if you will not. But you must be fatigued. Shall we
terminate our conference for the night?"

"A moment more."

"An hour, if you please."

"Sir," said the nephew, "we have done wrong, and are reaping the fruits
of wrong."

"_We_ have done wrong?" repeated the Marquis, with an inquiring smile,
and delicately pointing, first to his nephew, then to himself.

"Our family; our honourable family, whose honour is of so much account
to both of us, in such different ways. Even in my father's time, we did
a world of wrong, injuring every human creature who came between us and
our pleasure, whatever it was. Why need I speak of my father's time,
when it is equally yours? Can I separate my father's twin-brother, joint
inheritor, and next successor, from himself?"

"Death has done that!" said the Marquis.

"And has left me," answered the nephew, "bound to a system that is
frightful to me, responsible for it, but powerless in it; seeking to
execute the last request of my dear mother's lips, and obey the last
look of my dear mother's eyes, which implored me to have mercy and to
redress; and tortured by seeking assistance and power in vain."

"Seeking them from me, my nephew," said the Marquis, touching him on the
breast with his forefinger--they were now standing by the hearth--"you
will for ever seek them in vain, be assured."

Every fine straight line in the clear whiteness of his face, was
cruelly, craftily, and closely compressed, while he stood looking
quietly at his nephew, with his snuff-box in his hand. Once again he
touched him on the breast, as though his finger were the fine point of
a small sword, with which, in delicate finesse, he ran him through the
body, and said,

"My friend, I will die, perpetuating the system under which I have
lived."

When he had said it, he took a culminating pinch of snuff, and put his
box in his pocket.

"Better to be a rational creature," he added then, after ringing a small
bell on the table, "and accept your natural destiny. But you are lost,
Monsieur Charles, I see."

"This property and France are lost to me," said the nephew, sadly; "I
renounce them."

"Are they both yours to renounce? France may be, but is the property? It
is scarcely worth mentioning; but, is it yet?"

"I had no intention, in the words I used, to claim it yet. If it passed
to me from you, to-morrow--"

"Which I have the vanity to hope is not probable."

"--or twenty years hence--"

"You do me too much honour," said the Marquis; "still, I prefer that
supposition."

"--I would abandon it, and live otherwise and elsewhere. It is little to
relinquish. What is it but a wilderness of misery and ruin!"

"Hah!" said the Marquis, glancing round the luxurious room.

"To the eye it is fair enough, here; but seen in its integrity,
under the sky, and by the daylight, it is a crumbling tower of waste,
mismanagement, extortion, debt, mortgage, oppression, hunger, nakedness,
and suffering."

"Hah!" said the Marquis again, in a well-satisfied manner.

"If it ever becomes mine, it shall be put into some hands better
qualified to free it slowly (if such a thing is possible) from the
weight that drags it down, so that the miserable people who cannot leave
it and who have been long wrung to the last point of endurance, may, in
another generation, suffer less; but it is not for me. There is a curse
on it, and on all this land."

"And you?" said the uncle. "Forgive my curiosity; do you, under your new
philosophy, graciously intend to live?"

"I must do, to live, what others of my countrymen, even with nobility at
their backs, may have to do some day--work."

"In England, for example?"

"Yes. The family honour, sir, is safe from me in this country. The
family name can suffer from me in no other, for I bear it in no other."

The ringing of the bell had caused the adjoining bed-chamber to be
lighted. It now shone brightly, through the door of communication. The
Marquis looked that way, and listened for the retreating step of his
valet.

"England is very attractive to you, seeing how indifferently you have
prospered there," he observed then, turning his calm face to his nephew
with a smile.

"I have already said, that for my prospering there, I am sensible I may
be indebted to you, sir. For the rest, it is my Refuge."

"They say, those boastful English, that it is the Refuge of many. You
know a compatriot who has found a Refuge there? A Doctor?"

"Yes."

"With a daughter?"

"Yes."

"Yes," said the Marquis. "You are fatigued. Good night!"

As he bent his head in his most courtly manner, there was a secrecy
in his smiling face, and he conveyed an air of mystery to those words,
which struck the eyes and ears of his nephew forcibly. At the same
time, the thin straight lines of the setting of the eyes, and the thin
straight lips, and the markings in the nose, curved with a sarcasm that
looked handsomely diabolic.

"Yes," repeated the Marquis. "A Doctor with a daughter. Yes. So
commences the new philosophy! You are fatigued. Good night!"

It would have been of as much avail to interrogate any stone face
outside the chateau as to interrogate that face of his. The nephew
looked at him, in vain, in passing on to the door.

"Good night!" said the uncle. "I look to the pleasure of seeing you
again in the morning. Good repose! Light Monsieur my nephew to his
chamber there!--And burn Monsieur my nephew in his bed, if you will," he
added to himself, before he rang his little bell again, and summoned his
valet to his own bedroom.

The valet come and gone, Monsieur the Marquis walked to and fro in his
loose chamber-robe, to prepare himself gently for sleep, that hot still
night. Rustling about the room, his softly-slippered feet making no
noise on the floor, he moved like a refined tiger:--looked like some
enchanted marquis of the impenitently wicked sort, in story, whose
periodical change into tiger form was either just going off, or just
coming on.

He moved from end to end of his voluptuous bedroom, looking again at the
scraps of the day's journey that came unbidden into his mind; the slow
toil up the hill at sunset, the setting sun, the descent, the mill, the
prison on the crag, the little village in the hollow, the peasants at
the fountain, and the mender of roads with his blue cap pointing out the
chain under the carriage. That fountain suggested the Paris fountain,
the little bundle lying on the step, the women bending over it, and the
tall man with his arms up, crying, "Dead!"

"I am cool now," said Monsieur the Marquis, "and may go to bed."

So, leaving only one light burning on the large hearth, he let his thin
gauze curtains fall around him, and heard the night break its silence
with a long sigh as he composed himself to sleep.

The stone faces on the outer walls stared blindly at the black night
for three heavy hours; for three heavy hours, the horses in the stables
rattled at their racks, the dogs barked, and the owl made a noise with
very little resemblance in it to the noise conventionally assigned to
the owl by men-poets. But it is the obstinate custom of such creatures
hardly ever to say what is set down for them.

For three heavy hours, the stone faces of the chateau, lion and human,
stared blindly at the night. Dead darkness lay on all the landscape,
dead darkness added its own hush to the hushing dust on all the roads.
The burial-place had got to the pass that its little heaps of poor grass
were undistinguishable from one another; the figure on the Cross might
have come down, for anything that could be seen of it. In the village,
taxers and taxed were fast asleep. Dreaming, perhaps, of banquets, as
the starved usually do, and of ease and rest, as the driven slave and
the yoked ox may, its lean inhabitants slept soundly, and were fed and
freed.

The fountain in the village flowed unseen and unheard, and the fountain
at the chateau dropped unseen and unheard--both melting away, like the
minutes that were falling from the spring of Time--through three dark
hours. Then, the grey water of both began to be ghostly in the light,
and the eyes of the stone faces of the chateau were opened.

Lighter and lighter, until at last the sun touched the tops of the still
trees, and poured its radiance over the hill. In the glow, the water
of the chateau fountain seemed to turn to blood, and the stone faces
crimsoned. The carol of the birds was loud and high, and, on the
weather-beaten sill of the great window of the bed-chamber of Monsieur
the Marquis, one little bird sang its sweetest song with all its might.
At this, the nearest stone face seemed to stare amazed, and, with open
mouth and dropped under-jaw, looked awe-stricken.

Now, the sun was full up, and movement began in the village. Casement
windows opened, crazy doors were unbarred, and people came forth
shivering--chilled, as yet, by the new sweet air. Then began the rarely
lightened toil of the day among the village population. Some, to the
fountain; some, to the fields; men and women here, to dig and delve; men
and women there, to see to the poor live stock, and lead the bony cows
out, to such pasture as could be found by the roadside. In the church
and at the Cross, a kneeling figure or two; attendant on the latter
prayers, the led cow, trying for a breakfast among the weeds at its
foot.

The chateau awoke later, as became its quality, but awoke gradually and
surely. First, the lonely boar-spears and knives of the chase had been
reddened as of old; then, had gleamed trenchant in the morning sunshine;
now, doors and windows were thrown open, horses in their stables looked
round over their shoulders at the light and freshness pouring in at
doorways, leaves sparkled and rustled at iron-grated windows, dogs
pulled hard at their chains, and reared impatient to be loosed.

All these trivial incidents belonged to the routine of life, and the
return of morning. Surely, not so the ringing of the great bell of the
chateau, nor the running up and down the stairs; nor the hurried
figures on the terrace; nor the booting and tramping here and there and
everywhere, nor the quick saddling of horses and riding away?

What winds conveyed this hurry to the grizzled mender of roads, already
at work on the hill-top beyond the village, with his day's dinner (not
much to carry) lying in a bundle that it was worth no crow's while to
peck at, on a heap of stones? Had the birds, carrying some grains of it
to a distance, dropped one over him as they sow chance seeds? Whether or
no, the mender of roads ran, on the sultry morning, as if for his life,
down the hill, knee-high in dust, and never stopped till he got to the
fountain.

All the people of the village were at the fountain, standing about
in their depressed manner, and whispering low, but showing no other
emotions than grim curiosity and surprise. The led cows, hastily brought
in and tethered to anything that would hold them, were looking stupidly
on, or lying down chewing the cud of nothing particularly repaying their
trouble, which they had picked up in their interrupted saunter. Some of
the people of the chateau, and some of those of the posting-house, and
all the taxing authorities, were armed more or less, and were crowded
on the other side of the little street in a purposeless way, that was
highly fraught with nothing. Already, the mender of roads had penetrated
into the midst of a group of fifty particular friends, and was smiting
himself in the breast with his blue cap. What did all this portend,
and what portended the swift hoisting-up of Monsieur Gabelle behind
a servant on horseback, and the conveying away of the said Gabelle
(double-laden though the horse was), at a gallop, like a new version of
the German ballad of Leonora?

It portended that there was one stone face too many, up at the chateau.

The Gorgon had surveyed the building again in the night, and had added
the one stone face wanting; the stone face for which it had waited
through about two hundred years.

It lay back on the pillow of Monsieur the Marquis. It was like a fine
mask, suddenly startled, made angry, and petrified. Driven home into the
heart of the stone figure attached to it, was a knife. Round its hilt
was a frill of paper, on which was scrawled:

"Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques."

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The Gorgon's Head Later that night, at the Marquis' chateau, Charles Darnay, the nephew of the Marquis, arrives by carriage. Darnay tells his uncle that he wants to renounce the title and property that he stands to inherit when the Marquis dies. The family's name, Darnay contends, is associated with "fear and slavery. He insists that the family has consistently acted shamefully, "injuring every human creature who came between us and our pleasure. The Marquis dismisses these protests, urging his nephew to accept his "natural destiny. The next morning, the Marquis is found dead with a knife through his heart. Attached to the knife is a note that reads: "Drive him fast to his tomb. This, from Jacques


prompt:
Chapter: X. Two Promises

More months, to the number of twelve, had come and gone, and Mr. Charles
Darnay was established in England as a higher teacher of the French
language who was conversant with French literature. In this age, he
would have been a Professor; in that age, he was a Tutor. He read with
young men who could find any leisure and interest for the study of a
living tongue spoken all over the world, and he cultivated a taste for
its stores of knowledge and fancy. He could write of them, besides, in
sound English, and render them into sound English. Such masters were not
at that time easily found; Princes that had been, and Kings that were
to be, were not yet of the Teacher class, and no ruined nobility had
dropped out of Tellson's ledgers, to turn cooks and carpenters. As a
tutor, whose attainments made the student's way unusually pleasant and
profitable, and as an elegant translator who brought something to his
work besides mere dictionary knowledge, young Mr. Darnay soon became
known and encouraged. He was well acquainted, more-over, with the
circumstances of his country, and those were of ever-growing interest.
So, with great perseverance and untiring industry, he prospered.

In London, he had expected neither to walk on pavements of gold, nor
to lie on beds of roses; if he had had any such exalted expectation, he
would not have prospered. He had expected labour, and he found it, and
did it and made the best of it. In this, his prosperity consisted.

A certain portion of his time was passed at Cambridge, where he
read with undergraduates as a sort of tolerated smuggler who drove a
contraband trade in European languages, instead of conveying Greek
and Latin through the Custom-house. The rest of his time he passed in
London.

Now, from the days when it was always summer in Eden, to these days
when it is mostly winter in fallen latitudes, the world of a man has
invariably gone one way--Charles Darnay's way--the way of the love of a
woman.

He had loved Lucie Manette from the hour of his danger. He had never
heard a sound so sweet and dear as the sound of her compassionate voice;
he had never seen a face so tenderly beautiful, as hers when it was
confronted with his own on the edge of the grave that had been dug for
him. But, he had not yet spoken to her on the subject; the assassination
at the deserted chateau far away beyond the heaving water and the long,
long, dusty roads--the solid stone chateau which had itself become the
mere mist of a dream--had been done a year, and he had never yet, by so
much as a single spoken word, disclosed to her the state of his heart.

That he had his reasons for this, he knew full well. It was again a
summer day when, lately arrived in London from his college occupation,
he turned into the quiet corner in Soho, bent on seeking an opportunity
of opening his mind to Doctor Manette. It was the close of the summer
day, and he knew Lucie to be out with Miss Pross.

He found the Doctor reading in his arm-chair at a window. The energy
which had at once supported him under his old sufferings and aggravated
their sharpness, had been gradually restored to him. He was now a
very energetic man indeed, with great firmness of purpose, strength
of resolution, and vigour of action. In his recovered energy he was
sometimes a little fitful and sudden, as he had at first been in the
exercise of his other recovered faculties; but, this had never been
frequently observable, and had grown more and more rare.

He studied much, slept little, sustained a great deal of fatigue with
ease, and was equably cheerful. To him, now entered Charles Darnay, at
sight of whom he laid aside his book and held out his hand.

"Charles Darnay! I rejoice to see you. We have been counting on your
return these three or four days past. Mr. Stryver and Sydney Carton were
both here yesterday, and both made you out to be more than due."

"I am obliged to them for their interest in the matter," he answered,
a little coldly as to them, though very warmly as to the Doctor. "Miss
Manette--"

"Is well," said the Doctor, as he stopped short, "and your return will
delight us all. She has gone out on some household matters, but will
soon be home."

"Doctor Manette, I knew she was from home. I took the opportunity of her
being from home, to beg to speak to you."

There was a blank silence.

"Yes?" said the Doctor, with evident constraint. "Bring your chair here,
and speak on."

He complied as to the chair, but appeared to find the speaking on less
easy.

"I have had the happiness, Doctor Manette, of being so intimate here,"
so he at length began, "for some year and a half, that I hope the topic
on which I am about to touch may not--"

He was stayed by the Doctor's putting out his hand to stop him. When he
had kept it so a little while, he said, drawing it back:

"Is Lucie the topic?"

"She is."

"It is hard for me to speak of her at any time. It is very hard for me
to hear her spoken of in that tone of yours, Charles Darnay."

"It is a tone of fervent admiration, true homage, and deep love, Doctor
Manette!" he said deferentially.

There was another blank silence before her father rejoined:

"I believe it. I do you justice; I believe it."

His constraint was so manifest, and it was so manifest, too, that it
originated in an unwillingness to approach the subject, that Charles
Darnay hesitated.

"Shall I go on, sir?"

Another blank.

"Yes, go on."

"You anticipate what I would say, though you cannot know how earnestly
I say it, how earnestly I feel it, without knowing my secret heart, and
the hopes and fears and anxieties with which it has long been
laden. Dear Doctor Manette, I love your daughter fondly, dearly,
disinterestedly, devotedly. If ever there were love in the world, I love
her. You have loved yourself; let your old love speak for me!"

The Doctor sat with his face turned away, and his eyes bent on the
ground. At the last words, he stretched out his hand again, hurriedly,
and cried:

"Not that, sir! Let that be! I adjure you, do not recall that!"

His cry was so like a cry of actual pain, that it rang in Charles
Darnay's ears long after he had ceased. He motioned with the hand he had
extended, and it seemed to be an appeal to Darnay to pause. The latter
so received it, and remained silent.

"I ask your pardon," said the Doctor, in a subdued tone, after some
moments. "I do not doubt your loving Lucie; you may be satisfied of it."

He turned towards him in his chair, but did not look at him, or
raise his eyes. His chin dropped upon his hand, and his white hair
overshadowed his face:

"Have you spoken to Lucie?"

"No."

"Nor written?"

"Never."

"It would be ungenerous to affect not to know that your self-denial is
to be referred to your consideration for her father. Her father thanks
you."

He offered his hand; but his eyes did not go with it.

"I know," said Darnay, respectfully, "how can I fail to know, Doctor
Manette, I who have seen you together from day to day, that between
you and Miss Manette there is an affection so unusual, so touching, so
belonging to the circumstances in which it has been nurtured, that it
can have few parallels, even in the tenderness between a father and
child. I know, Doctor Manette--how can I fail to know--that, mingled
with the affection and duty of a daughter who has become a woman, there
is, in her heart, towards you, all the love and reliance of infancy
itself. I know that, as in her childhood she had no parent, so she is
now devoted to you with all the constancy and fervour of her present
years and character, united to the trustfulness and attachment of the
early days in which you were lost to her. I know perfectly well that if
you had been restored to her from the world beyond this life, you could
hardly be invested, in her sight, with a more sacred character than that
in which you are always with her. I know that when she is clinging to
you, the hands of baby, girl, and woman, all in one, are round your
neck. I know that in loving you she sees and loves her mother at her
own age, sees and loves you at my age, loves her mother broken-hearted,
loves you through your dreadful trial and in your blessed restoration. I
have known this, night and day, since I have known you in your home."

Her father sat silent, with his face bent down. His breathing was a
little quickened; but he repressed all other signs of agitation.

"Dear Doctor Manette, always knowing this, always seeing her and you
with this hallowed light about you, I have forborne, and forborne, as
long as it was in the nature of man to do it. I have felt, and do even
now feel, that to bring my love--even mine--between you, is to touch
your history with something not quite so good as itself. But I love her.
Heaven is my witness that I love her!"

"I believe it," answered her father, mournfully. "I have thought so
before now. I believe it."

"But, do not believe," said Darnay, upon whose ear the mournful voice
struck with a reproachful sound, "that if my fortune were so cast as
that, being one day so happy as to make her my wife, I must at any time
put any separation between her and you, I could or would breathe a
word of what I now say. Besides that I should know it to be hopeless, I
should know it to be a baseness. If I had any such possibility, even at
a remote distance of years, harboured in my thoughts, and hidden in my
heart--if it ever had been there--if it ever could be there--I could not
now touch this honoured hand."

He laid his own upon it as he spoke.

"No, dear Doctor Manette. Like you, a voluntary exile from France; like
you, driven from it by its distractions, oppressions, and miseries; like
you, striving to live away from it by my own exertions, and trusting
in a happier future; I look only to sharing your fortunes, sharing your
life and home, and being faithful to you to the death. Not to divide
with Lucie her privilege as your child, companion, and friend; but to
come in aid of it, and bind her closer to you, if such a thing can be."

His touch still lingered on her father's hand. Answering the touch for a
moment, but not coldly, her father rested his hands upon the arms of
his chair, and looked up for the first time since the beginning of the
conference. A struggle was evidently in his face; a struggle with that
occasional look which had a tendency in it to dark doubt and dread.

"You speak so feelingly and so manfully, Charles Darnay, that I thank
you with all my heart, and will open all my heart--or nearly so. Have
you any reason to believe that Lucie loves you?"

"None. As yet, none."

"Is it the immediate object of this confidence, that you may at once
ascertain that, with my knowledge?"

"Not even so. I might not have the hopefulness to do it for weeks; I
might (mistaken or not mistaken) have that hopefulness to-morrow."

"Do you seek any guidance from me?"

"I ask none, sir. But I have thought it possible that you might have it
in your power, if you should deem it right, to give me some."

"Do you seek any promise from me?"

"I do seek that."

"What is it?"

"I well understand that, without you, I could have no hope. I well
understand that, even if Miss Manette held me at this moment in her
innocent heart--do not think I have the presumption to assume so much--I
could retain no place in it against her love for her father."

"If that be so, do you see what, on the other hand, is involved in it?"

"I understand equally well, that a word from her father in any suitor's
favour, would outweigh herself and all the world. For which reason,
Doctor Manette," said Darnay, modestly but firmly, "I would not ask that
word, to save my life."

"I am sure of it. Charles Darnay, mysteries arise out of close love, as
well as out of wide division; in the former case, they are subtle and
delicate, and difficult to penetrate. My daughter Lucie is, in this one
respect, such a mystery to me; I can make no guess at the state of her
heart."

"May I ask, sir, if you think she is--" As he hesitated, her father
supplied the rest.

"Is sought by any other suitor?"

"It is what I meant to say."

Her father considered a little before he answered:

"You have seen Mr. Carton here, yourself. Mr. Stryver is here too,
occasionally. If it be at all, it can only be by one of these."

"Or both," said Darnay.

"I had not thought of both; I should not think either, likely. You want
a promise from me. Tell me what it is."

"It is, that if Miss Manette should bring to you at any time, on her own
part, such a confidence as I have ventured to lay before you, you will
bear testimony to what I have said, and to your belief in it. I hope you
may be able to think so well of me, as to urge no influence against
me. I say nothing more of my stake in this; this is what I ask. The
condition on which I ask it, and which you have an undoubted right to
require, I will observe immediately."

"I give the promise," said the Doctor, "without any condition. I believe
your object to be, purely and truthfully, as you have stated it. I
believe your intention is to perpetuate, and not to weaken, the ties
between me and my other and far dearer self. If she should ever tell me
that you are essential to her perfect happiness, I will give her to you.
If there were--Charles Darnay, if there were--"

The young man had taken his hand gratefully; their hands were joined as
the Doctor spoke:

"--any fancies, any reasons, any apprehensions, anything whatsoever,
new or old, against the man she really loved--the direct responsibility
thereof not lying on his head--they should all be obliterated for her
sake. She is everything to me; more to me than suffering, more to me
than wrong, more to me--Well! This is idle talk."

So strange was the way in which he faded into silence, and so strange
his fixed look when he had ceased to speak, that Darnay felt his own
hand turn cold in the hand that slowly released and dropped it.

"You said something to me," said Doctor Manette, breaking into a smile.
"What was it you said to me?"

He was at a loss how to answer, until he remembered having spoken of a
condition. Relieved as his mind reverted to that, he answered:

"Your confidence in me ought to be returned with full confidence on my
part. My present name, though but slightly changed from my mother's, is
not, as you will remember, my own. I wish to tell you what that is, and
why I am in England."

"Stop!" said the Doctor of Beauvais.

"I wish it, that I may the better deserve your confidence, and have no
secret from you."

"Stop!"

For an instant, the Doctor even had his two hands at his ears; for
another instant, even had his two hands laid on Darnay's lips.

"Tell me when I ask you, not now. If your suit should prosper, if Lucie
should love you, you shall tell me on your marriage morning. Do you
promise?"

"Willingly.

"Give me your hand. She will be home directly, and it is better she
should not see us together to-night. Go! God bless you!"

It was dark when Charles Darnay left him, and it was an hour later and
darker when Lucie came home; she hurried into the room alone--for
Miss Pross had gone straight up-stairs--and was surprised to find his
reading-chair empty.

"My father!" she called to him. "Father dear!"

Nothing was said in answer, but she heard a low hammering sound in his
bedroom. Passing lightly across the intermediate room, she looked in at
his door and came running back frightened, crying to herself, with her
blood all chilled, "What shall I do! What shall I do!"

Her uncertainty lasted but a moment; she hurried back, and tapped at
his door, and softly called to him. The noise ceased at the sound of
her voice, and he presently came out to her, and they walked up and down
together for a long time.

She came down from her bed, to look at him in his sleep that night. He
slept heavily, and his tray of shoemaking tools, and his old unfinished
work, were all as usual.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Two Promises A year later, Darnay makes a moderate living as a French teacher in London. He visits Doctor Manette and admits his love for Lucie. He honors Manette's special relationship with his daughter, assuring him that his own love for Lucie will in no way disturb that bond. Manette applauds Darnay for speaking so "feelingly and so manfully" and asks if he seeks a promise from him. Darnay asks Manette to promise to vouch for what he has said, for the true nature of his love, should Lucie ever ask. Manette promises as much. Wanting to be worthy of his confidence, Darnay attempts to tell Manette his real name, confessing that it is not Darnay. Manette stops him short, making him promise to reveal his name only if he proves successful in his courtship. He will hear Darnay's secret on his wedding day. Hours later, after Darnay has left, Lucie hears her father cobbling away at his shoemaker's bench. Frightened by his relapse, she watches him as he sleeps that night


prompt:
Chapter: XI. A Companion Picture

"Sydney," said Mr. Stryver, on that self-same night, or morning, to his
jackal; "mix another bowl of punch; I have something to say to you."

Sydney had been working double tides that night, and the night before,
and the night before that, and a good many nights in succession, making
a grand clearance among Mr. Stryver's papers before the setting in
of the long vacation. The clearance was effected at last; the Stryver
arrears were handsomely fetched up; everything was got rid of until
November should come with its fogs atmospheric, and fogs legal, and
bring grist to the mill again.

Sydney was none the livelier and none the soberer for so much
application. It had taken a deal of extra wet-towelling to pull him
through the night; a correspondingly extra quantity of wine had preceded
the towelling; and he was in a very damaged condition, as he now pulled
his turban off and threw it into the basin in which he had steeped it at
intervals for the last six hours.

"Are you mixing that other bowl of punch?" said Stryver the portly, with
his hands in his waistband, glancing round from the sofa where he lay on
his back.

"I am."

"Now, look here! I am going to tell you something that will rather
surprise you, and that perhaps will make you think me not quite as
shrewd as you usually do think me. I intend to marry."

"_Do_ you?"

"Yes. And not for money. What do you say now?"

"I don't feel disposed to say much. Who is she?"

"Guess."

"Do I know her?"

"Guess."

"I am not going to guess, at five o'clock in the morning, with my brains
frying and sputtering in my head. If you want me to guess, you must ask
me to dinner."

"Well then, I'll tell you," said Stryver, coming slowly into a sitting
posture. "Sydney, I rather despair of making myself intelligible to you,
because you are such an insensible dog."

"And you," returned Sydney, busy concocting the punch, "are such a
sensitive and poetical spirit--"

"Come!" rejoined Stryver, laughing boastfully, "though I don't prefer
any claim to being the soul of Romance (for I hope I know better), still
I am a tenderer sort of fellow than _you_."

"You are a luckier, if you mean that."

"I don't mean that. I mean I am a man of more--more--"

"Say gallantry, while you are about it," suggested Carton.

"Well! I'll say gallantry. My meaning is that I am a man," said Stryver,
inflating himself at his friend as he made the punch, "who cares more to
be agreeable, who takes more pains to be agreeable, who knows better how
to be agreeable, in a woman's society, than you do."

"Go on," said Sydney Carton.

"No; but before I go on," said Stryver, shaking his head in his bullying
way, "I'll have this out with you. You've been at Doctor Manette's house
as much as I have, or more than I have. Why, I have been ashamed of your
moroseness there! Your manners have been of that silent and sullen and
hangdog kind, that, upon my life and soul, I have been ashamed of you,
Sydney!"

"It should be very beneficial to a man in your practice at the bar, to
be ashamed of anything," returned Sydney; "you ought to be much obliged
to me."

"You shall not get off in that way," rejoined Stryver, shouldering the
rejoinder at him; "no, Sydney, it's my duty to tell you--and I tell you
to your face to do you good--that you are a devilish ill-conditioned
fellow in that sort of society. You are a disagreeable fellow."

Sydney drank a bumper of the punch he had made, and laughed.

"Look at me!" said Stryver, squaring himself; "I have less need to make
myself agreeable than you have, being more independent in circumstances.
Why do I do it?"

"I never saw you do it yet," muttered Carton.

"I do it because it's politic; I do it on principle. And look at me! I
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 me--will 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 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 in 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?"

"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 will. Yes, Sydney, I have had
enough of this style of life, with no other as a change from it; I
feel that it is a pleasant thing for a man to have a home when he feels
inclined to go to it (when he doesn't, he can stay away), and I feel
that Miss Manette will tell well in any station, and will always do me
credit. So I have made up my mind. And now, Sydney, old boy, I want to
say a word to _you_ about _your_ prospects. You are in a bad way, you
know; you really are in a bad way. You don't know the value of money,
you live hard, you'll knock up one of these days, and be ill and poor;
you really ought to think about a nurse."

The prosperous patronage with which he said it, made him look twice as
big as he was, and four times as offensive.

"Now, let me recommend you," pursued Stryver, "to look it in the face.
I have looked it in the face, in my different way; look it in the face,
you, in your different way. Marry. Provide somebody to take care of
you. Never mind your having no enjoyment of women's society, nor
understanding of it, nor tact for it. Find out somebody. Find out some
respectable woman with a little property--somebody in the landlady way,
or lodging-letting way--and marry her, against a rainy day. That's the
kind of thing for _you_. Now think of it, Sydney."

"I'll think of it," said Sydney.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: A Companion Picture Late that same night, Carton and Stryver work in Stryver's chambers. In his puffed-up and arrogant manner, Stryver announces that he intends to marry Lucie. Carton drinks heavily at the news, assuring Stryver that his words have not upset him. Stryver suggests that Carton himself find "some respectable woman with a little property," and marry her, lest he end up ill and penniless


prompt:
Chapter: XII. The Fellow of Delicacy

Mr. Stryver having made up his mind to that magnanimous bestowal of good
fortune on the Doctor's daughter, resolved to make her happiness known
to her before he left town for the Long Vacation. After some mental
debating of the point, he came to the conclusion that it would be as
well to get all the preliminaries done with, and they could then arrange
at their leisure whether he should give her his hand a week or two
before Michaelmas Term, or in the little Christmas vacation between it
and Hilary.

As to the strength of his case, he had not a doubt about it, but clearly
saw his way to the verdict. Argued with the jury on substantial worldly
grounds--the only grounds ever worth taking into account--it was a
plain case, and had not a weak spot in it. He called himself for the
plaintiff, there was no getting over his evidence, the counsel for
the defendant threw up his brief, and the jury did not even turn to
consider. After trying it, Stryver, C. J., was satisfied that no plainer
case could be.

Accordingly, Mr. Stryver inaugurated the Long Vacation with a formal
proposal to take Miss Manette to Vauxhall Gardens; that failing, to
Ranelagh; that unaccountably failing too, it behoved him to present
himself in Soho, and there declare his noble mind.

Towards Soho, therefore, Mr. Stryver shouldered his way from the Temple,
while the bloom of the Long Vacation's infancy was still upon it.
Anybody who had seen him projecting himself into Soho while he was yet
on Saint Dunstan's side of Temple Bar, bursting in his full-blown way
along the pavement, to the jostlement of all weaker people, might have
seen how safe and strong he was.

His way taking him past Tellson's, and he both banking at Tellson's and
knowing Mr. Lorry as the intimate friend of the Manettes, it entered Mr.
Stryver's mind to enter the bank, and reveal to Mr. Lorry the brightness
of the Soho horizon. So, he pushed open the door with the weak rattle
in its throat, stumbled down the two steps, got past the two ancient
cashiers, and shouldered himself into the musty back closet where Mr.
Lorry sat at great books ruled for figures, with perpendicular iron
bars to his window as if that were ruled for figures too, and everything
under the clouds were a sum.

"Halloa!" said Mr. Stryver. "How do you do? I hope you are well!"

It was Stryver's grand peculiarity that he always seemed too big for any
place, or space. He was so much too big for Tellson's, that old clerks
in distant corners looked up with looks of remonstrance, as though he
squeezed them against the wall. The House itself, magnificently reading
the paper quite in the far-off perspective, lowered displeased, as if
the Stryver head had been butted into its responsible waistcoat.

The discreet Mr. Lorry said, in a sample tone of the voice he would
recommend under the circumstances, "How do you do, Mr. Stryver? How do
you do, sir?" and shook hands. There was a peculiarity in his manner
of shaking hands, always to be seen in any clerk at Tellson's who shook
hands with a customer when the House pervaded the air. He shook in a
self-abnegating way, as one who shook for Tellson and Co.

"Can I do anything for you, Mr. Stryver?" asked Mr. Lorry, in his
business character.

"Why, no, thank you; this is a private visit to yourself, Mr. Lorry; I
have come for a private word."

"Oh indeed!" said Mr. Lorry, bending down his ear, while his eye strayed
to the House afar off.

"I am going," said Mr. Stryver, leaning his arms confidentially on the
desk: whereupon, although it was a large double one, there appeared to
be not half desk enough for him: "I am going to make an offer of myself
in marriage to your agreeable little friend, Miss Manette, Mr. Lorry."

"Oh dear me!" cried Mr. Lorry, rubbing his chin, and looking at his
visitor dubiously.

"Oh dear me, sir?" repeated Stryver, drawing back. "Oh dear you, sir?
What may your meaning be, Mr. Lorry?"

"My meaning," answered the man of business, "is, of course, friendly and
appreciative, and that it does you the greatest credit, and--in short,
my meaning is everything you could desire. But--really, you know, Mr.
Stryver--" Mr. Lorry paused, and shook his head at him in the oddest
manner, as if he were compelled against his will to add, internally,
"you know there really is so much too much of you!"

"Well!" said Stryver, slapping the desk with his contentious hand,
opening his eyes wider, and taking a long breath, "if I understand you,
Mr. Lorry, I'll be hanged!"

Mr. Lorry adjusted his little wig at both ears as a means towards that
end, and bit the feather of a pen.

"D--n it all, sir!" said Stryver, staring at him, "am I not eligible?"

"Oh dear yes! Yes. Oh yes, you're eligible!" said Mr. Lorry. "If you say
eligible, you are eligible."

"Am I not prosperous?" asked Stryver.

"Oh! if you come to prosperous, you are prosperous," said Mr. Lorry.

"And advancing?"

"If you come to advancing you know," said Mr. Lorry, delighted to be
able to make another admission, "nobody can doubt that."

"Then what on earth is your meaning, Mr. Lorry?" demanded Stryver,
perceptibly crestfallen.

"Well! I--Were you going there now?" asked Mr. Lorry.

"Straight!" said Stryver, with a plump of his fist on the desk.

"Then I think I wouldn't, if I was you."

"Why?" said Stryver. "Now, I'll put you in a corner," forensically
shaking a forefinger at him. "You are a man of business and bound to
have a reason. State your reason. Why wouldn't you go?"

"Because," said Mr. Lorry, "I wouldn't go on such an object without
having some cause to believe that I should succeed."

"D--n _me_!" cried Stryver, "but this beats everything."

Mr. Lorry glanced at the distant House, and glanced at the angry
Stryver.

"Here's a man of business--a man of years--a man of experience--_in_
a Bank," said Stryver; "and having summed up three leading reasons for
complete success, he says there's no reason at all! Says it with his
head on!" Mr. Stryver remarked upon the peculiarity as if it would have
been infinitely less remarkable if he had said it with his head off.

"When I speak of success, I speak of success with the young lady; and
when I speak of causes and reasons to make success probable, I speak of
causes and reasons that will tell as such with the young lady. The young
lady, my good sir," said Mr. Lorry, mildly tapping the Stryver arm, "the
young lady. The young lady goes before all."

"Then you mean to tell me, Mr. Lorry," said Stryver, squaring his
elbows, "that it is your deliberate opinion that the young lady at
present in question is a mincing Fool?"

"Not exactly so. I mean to tell you, Mr. Stryver," said Mr. Lorry,
reddening, "that I will hear no disrespectful word of that young lady
from any lips; and that if I knew any man--which I hope I do not--whose
taste was so coarse, and whose temper was so overbearing, that he could
not restrain himself from speaking disrespectfully of that young lady at
this desk, not even Tellson's should prevent my giving him a piece of my
mind."

The necessity of being angry in a suppressed tone had put Mr. Stryver's
blood-vessels into a dangerous state when it was his turn to be angry;
Mr. Lorry's veins, methodical as their courses could usually be, were in
no better state now it was his turn.

"That is what I mean to tell you, sir," said Mr. Lorry. "Pray let there
be no mistake about it."

Mr. Stryver sucked the end of a ruler for a little while, and then stood
hitting a tune out of his teeth with it, which probably gave him the
toothache. He broke the awkward silence by saying:

"This is something new to me, Mr. Lorry. You deliberately advise me not
to go up to Soho and offer myself--_my_self, Stryver of the King's Bench
bar?"

"Do you ask me for my advice, Mr. Stryver?"

"Yes, I do."

"Very good. Then I give it, and you have repeated it correctly."

"And all I can say of it is," laughed Stryver with a vexed laugh, "that
this--ha, ha!--beats everything past, present, and to come."

"Now understand me," pursued Mr. Lorry. "As a man of business, I am
not justified in saying anything about this matter, for, as a man of
business, I know nothing of it. But, as an old fellow, who has carried
Miss Manette in his arms, who is the trusted friend of Miss Manette and
of her father too, and who has a great affection for them both, I have
spoken. The confidence is not of my seeking, recollect. Now, you think I
may not be right?"

"Not I!" said Stryver, whistling. "I can't undertake to find third
parties in common sense; I can only find it for myself. I suppose sense
in certain quarters; you suppose mincing bread-and-butter nonsense. It's
new to me, but you are right, I dare say."

"What I suppose, Mr. Stryver, I claim to characterise for myself--And
understand me, sir," said Mr. Lorry, quickly flushing again, "I
will not--not even at Tellson's--have it characterised for me by any
gentleman breathing."

"There! I beg your pardon!" said Stryver.

"Granted. Thank you. Well, Mr. Stryver, I was about to say:--it might be
painful to you to find yourself mistaken, it might be painful to Doctor
Manette to have the task of being explicit with you, it might be very
painful to Miss Manette to have the task of being explicit with you. You
know the terms upon which I have the honour and happiness to stand with
the family. If you please, committing you in no way, representing you
in no way, I will undertake to correct my advice by the exercise of a
little new observation and judgment expressly brought to bear upon
it. If you should then be dissatisfied with it, you can but test its
soundness for yourself; if, on the other hand, you should be satisfied
with it, and it should be what it now is, it may spare all sides what is
best spared. What do you say?"

"How long would you keep me in town?"

"Oh! It is only a question of a few hours. I could go to Soho in the
evening, and come to your chambers afterwards."

"Then I say yes," said Stryver: "I won't go up there now, I am not so
hot upon it as that comes to; I say yes, and I shall expect you to look
in to-night. Good morning."

Then Mr. Stryver turned and burst out of the Bank, causing such a
concussion of air on his passage through, that to stand up against it
bowing behind the two counters, required the utmost remaining strength
of the two ancient clerks. Those venerable and feeble persons were
always seen by the public in the act of bowing, and were popularly
believed, when they had bowed a customer out, still to keep on bowing in
the empty office until they bowed another customer in.

The barrister was keen enough to divine that the banker would not have
gone so far in his expression of opinion on any less solid ground than
moral certainty. Unprepared as he was for the large pill he had to
swallow, he got it down. "And now," said Mr. Stryver, shaking his
forensic forefinger at the Temple in general, when it was down, "my way
out of this, is, to put you all in the wrong."

It was a bit of the art of an Old Bailey tactician, in which he found
great relief. "You shall not put me in the wrong, young lady," said Mr.
Stryver; "I'll do that for you."

Accordingly, when Mr. Lorry called that night as late as ten o'clock,
Mr. Stryver, among a quantity of books and papers littered out for the
purpose, seemed to have nothing less on his mind than the subject of
the morning. He even showed surprise when he saw Mr. Lorry, and was
altogether in an absent and preoccupied state.

"Well!" said that good-natured emissary, after a full half-hour of
bootless attempts to bring him round to the question. "I have been to
Soho."

"To Soho?" repeated Mr. Stryver, coldly. "Oh, to be sure! What am I
thinking of!"

"And I have no doubt," said Mr. Lorry, "that I was right in the
conversation we had. My opinion is confirmed, and I reiterate my
advice."

"I assure you," returned Mr. Stryver, in the friendliest way, "that I
am sorry for it on your account, and sorry for it on the poor father's
account. I know this must always be a sore subject with the family; let
us say no more about it."

"I don't understand you," said Mr. Lorry.

"I dare say not," rejoined Stryver, nodding his head in a smoothing and
final way; "no matter, no matter."

"But it does matter," Mr. Lorry urged.

"No it doesn't; I assure you it doesn't. Having supposed that there was
sense where there is no sense, and a laudable ambition where there is
not a laudable ambition, I am well out of my mistake, and no harm is
done. Young women have committed similar follies often before, and have
repented them in poverty and obscurity often before. In an unselfish
aspect, I am sorry that the thing is dropped, because it would have been
a bad thing for me in a worldly point of view; in a selfish aspect, I am
glad that the thing has dropped, because it would have been a bad thing
for me in a worldly point of view--it is hardly necessary to say I could
have gained nothing by it. There is no harm at all done. I have not
proposed to the young lady, and, between ourselves, I am by no means
certain, on reflection, that I ever should have committed myself to
that extent. Mr. Lorry, you cannot control the mincing vanities and
giddinesses of empty-headed girls; you must not expect to do it, or you
will always be disappointed. Now, pray say no more about it. I tell you,
I regret it on account of others, but I am satisfied on my own account.
And I am really very much obliged to you for allowing me to sound you,
and for giving me your advice; you know the young lady better than I do;
you were right, it never would have done."

Mr. Lorry was so taken aback, that he looked quite stupidly at Mr.
Stryver shouldering him towards the door, with an appearance of
showering generosity, forbearance, and goodwill, on his erring head.
"Make the best of it, my dear sir," said Stryver; "say no more about it;
thank you again for allowing me to sound you; good night!"

Mr. Lorry was out in the night, before he knew where he was. Mr. Stryver
was lying back on his sofa, winking at his ceiling.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The Fellow of Delicacy The next day, Stryver plans to take Lucie to the Vauxhall Gardens to make his marriage proposal. On his way, he drops in at Tellson's Bank, where he informs Mr. Lorry of his intentions. Lorry persuades Stryver to postpone his proposal until he knows for certain that Lucie will accept. This admonition upsets Stryver. He almost insults Lucie as a "mincing Fool," but Lorry warns him against doing so. Lorry asks that Stryver hold off his proposal for a few hours to give him time to consult the family and see exactly where Stryver stands. Later that night, Lorry visits Stryver and reports that his fears have been confirmed. If Stryver were to propose, the Manettes would reject his offer. Stryver dismisses the entire affair as one of the "vanities" of "empty-headed girls" and begs Lorry to forget it