Mr. Jarndyce had fallen into this company in the tenderness of his heart and his earnest desire to do all the good in his power; but that he felt it to be too often an unsatisfactory company, where benevolence took spasmodic forms, where charity was assumed as a regular uniform by loud professors and speculators in cheap notoriety, vehement in profession, restless and vain in action, servile in the last degree of meanness to the great, adulatory of one another, and intolerable to those who were anxious quietly to help the weak from failing rather than with a great deal of bluster and self-laudation to raise them up a little way when they were down, he plainly told us.  When a testimonial was originated to Mr. Quale by Mr. Gusher (who had already got one, originated by Mr. Quale), and when Mr. Gusher spoke for an hour and a half on the subject to a meeting, including two charity schools of small boys and girls, who were specially reminded of the widow’s mite, and requested to come forward with halfpence and be acceptable sacrifices, I think the wind was in the east for three whole weeks.

I mention this because I am coming to Mr. Skimpole again.  It seemed to me that his off-hand professions of childishness and carelessness were a great relief to my guardian, by contrast with such things, and were the more readily believed in since to find one perfectly undesigning and candid man among many opposites could not fail to give him pleasure.  I should be sorry to imply that Mr. Skimpole divined this and was politic; I really never understood him well enough to know.  What he was to my guardian, he certainly was to the rest of the world.

He had not been very well; and thus, though he lived in London, we had seen nothing of him until now.  He appeared one morning in his usual agreeable way and as full of pleasant spirits as ever.

Well, he said, here he was!  He had been bilious, but rich men were often bilious, and therefore he had been persuading himself that he was a man of property.  So he was, in a certain point of view—­in his expansive intentions.  He had been enriching his medical attendant in the most lavish manner.  He had always doubled, and sometimes quadrupled, his fees.  He had said to the doctor, “Now, my dear doctor, it is quite a delusion on your part to suppose that you attend me for nothing.  I am overwhelming you with money—­in my expansive intentions—­if you only knew it!” And really (he said) he meant it to that degree that he thought it much the same as doing it.  If he had had those bits of metal or thin paper to which mankind attached so much importance to put in the doctor’s hand, he would have put them in the doctor’s hand.  Not having them, he substituted the will for the deed.  Very well!  If he really meant it—­if his will were genuine and real, which it was—­it appeared to him that it was the same as coin, and cancelled the obligation.