Both of his own suggestions seemed so oddly impossible to him. To be ill--he, in whose veins the blood ran so lightly, so tunefully, his pulse beating with the calm and continued strength of perfect harmony; or to want a pound or two--he who had possessed unlimited credit and means which he had never exhausted all his life. The change was so great that it affected him almost childishly--as a poor man might be affected by coming into a sudden fortune, or as a very young wife is sometimes affected by the bewildering and laughable, yet certain fact, that she, the other day only a little girl in pinafores, is now at the head of a house, free to give as many orders as she pleases, and sure to be obeyed. The extreme humour of the situation is the first thing that strikes a lively girl, under these circumstances, and it was the humour of it which struck Edgar: a fact, perhaps, which may lower his character in the reader’s eyes. But that, alas, I cannot help, for such as he was, such I must show him, and his character had many defects. Often had he been upbraided that he did not feel vicissitudes which looked like ruin and destruction to minds differently constituted. He did not--he was the most _insouciant_, the most care-hating of men. Up to this period of his life he had found the means, somehow, of getting a smile, or some gleam of fun, out of everything that happened. When he could not manage this the circumstances were very strange indeed, and I suppose he felt it; but at all events, in such cases, he kept his failure to himself. As soon as he had refreshed himself and breakfasted, he went out to see his lawyer, who received him with that air of melancholy disappointment which distinguishes all agents who are compelled to carry out what they think the foolish will of their principals: but who submitted the accounts to him, which showed that his directions had been obeyed, explaining everything in a depressed and despondent voice, full of the sense of injury. “I am compelled to say, Mr. Earnshaw,” said this good man, “that, as you have paid so little attention to our wishes, I and my firm would hence-forward have declined to take charge of your business transactions, if it had been the least likely that you would have had any more business to do; but as this is not possible, or at least probable--” “You will continue to do it,” said Edgar, laughing. “I hope so; it would be kind of you. No, I don’t suppose I shall have much more business to do.” “And may I ask without offence,” said Mr. Parchemin, who was an old friend of Edgar’s old friend, Mr. Farqakerley, and had taken up the foolish young fellow on the recommendation of that excellent and long-established family solicitor. “May I ask how, now you have given away all your money, you mean to live?” “I must work,” said Edgar, cheerfully. “Clearly; but what can you work at?”