Dudley was ushered into Mr. Inchling’s room and introduced to the figure-head of the Firm of Inchling, Pennergate, and Radnor:  a respectable City merchant indeed, whom Dudley could read-off in a glimpse of the downright contrast to his partner.  He had heard casual remarks on the respectable City of London merchant from Colney Durance.  A short analytical gaze at him, helped to an estimate of the powers of the man who kept him up.  Mr. Inchling was a florid City-feaster, descendant of a line of City merchants, having features for a wife to identify; as drovers, they tell us, can single one from another of their round-bellied beasts.  Formerly the leader of the Firm, he was now, after dreary fits of restiveness, kickings, false prophecies of ruin, Victor’s obedient cart-horse.  He sighed in set terms for the old days of the Firm, when, like trouts in the current, the Firm had only to gape for shoals of good things to fatten it:  a tale of English prosperity in quiescence; narrated interjectorily among the by-ways of the City, and wanting only metre to make it our national Poem.

Mr. Inchling did not deny that grand mangers of golden oats were still somehow constantly allotted to him.  His wife believed in Victor, and deemed the loss of the balancing Pennergate a gain.  Since that lamentable loss, Mr. Inchling, under the irony of circumstances the Tory of Commerce, had trotted and gallopped whither driven, racing like mad against his will and the rival nations now in the field to force the pace; a name for enterprise; the close commercial connection of a man who speculated—­who, to put it plainly, lived on his wits; hurried onward and onward; always doubting, munching, grumbling at satisfaction, in perplexity of the gratitude which is apprehensive of black Nemesis at a turn of the road,—­to confound so wild a whip as Victor Radnor.  He had never forgiven the youth’s venture in India of an enormous purchase of Cotton many years back, and which he had repudiated, though not his share of the hundreds of thousands realized before the refusal to ratify the bargain had come to Victor.  Mr. Inchling dated his first indigestion from that disquieting period.  He assented to the praise of Victor’s genius, admitting benefits; his heart refused to pardon, and consequently his head wholly to trust, the man who robbed him of his quondam comfortable feeling of security.  And if you will imagine the sprite of the aggregate English Taxpayer personifying Steam as the malignant who has despoiled him of the blessed Safety-Assurance he once had from his God Neptune against invaders, you will comprehend the state of Mr. Inchling’s mind in regard to his terrific and bountiful, but very disturbing partner.