After breakfast Mr. O'Boyneville kissed his wife, and hurried out of the house. At half-past six he came home, washed his hands in a little dressing-room at the back of his study, and sat down to dinner in the dress he had worn all day, with the dust of the law-courts in his hair, and all the dreariness of the law in his brain. Sometimes he talked a little to his wife during dinner, telling her some scrap of public news in which she did not feel the faintest interest, or reciting some legal witticism, which to her uninitiated mind appeared unspeakably stupid. After dinner he read his papers for a quarter of an hour, and then laid himself down upon a gigantic crimson-morocco-covered sofa, which looked like the relic of a departed era, a fossilised mammoth in the way of upholsterer's work, and slept peacefully until nine, when a modest and almost furtive double knock announced the advent of his clerk, who brought the evening's batch of letters and papers. Then the popular barrister arose like a giant refreshed, took a cup of tea from Cecil's attentive hands, and sipped the revivifying beverage in a dreamy manner, staring thoughtfully at his wife without seeing her, and still revolving the case of Giddles and Giddles, Liverpool brokers, and the three thousand bales of cotton. After tea he went to his study, which darksome sanctorum he rarely left until the smallest of the small hours had sounded from the clocks of St. Pancras and the Foundling. Laurence O'Boyneville had won his position by honest hard work, and by divine right of an intellect not easily matched amongst the ranks of hard-working man. But such a man is apt to make a terrible mistake when he brings a fair young wife to his joyless home. Incessant work had become the normal state of the barrister. He did not know that his home was dreary. His life seemed pleasant enough to him; and he did not know that to a woman such a mode of existence must be simply intolerable. He gave his wife a comfortable house, and the unlimited command of money; and he fancied he had done all that was necessary. He had no time for any thing more. When his day's work was finished he was too tired to change his dress, too tired to talk without effort, too tired to go from one room to another after his dinner; and when he had recovered from the fatigue of his day's work his night's work began.