Brooke Burgess was a clerk in the office of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in London, and as such had to do with things very solemn, grave, and almost melancholy.  He had to deal with the rents of episcopal properties, to correspond with clerical claimants, and to be at home with the circumstances of underpaid vicars and perpetual curates with much less than 300 pounds a-year; but yet he was as jolly and pleasant at his desk as though he were busied about the collection of the malt tax, or wrote his letters to admirals and captains instead of to deans and prebendaries.  Brooke Burgess had risen to be a senior clerk, and was held in some respect in his office; but it was not perhaps for the amount of work he did, nor yet on account of the gravity of his demeanour, nor for the brilliancy of his intellect.  But if not clever, he was sensible; though he was not a dragon of official virtue, he had a conscience and he possessed those small but most valuable gifts by which a man becomes popular among men.  And thus it had come to pass in all those battles as to competitive merit which had taken place in his as in other public offices, that no one had ever dreamed of putting a junior over the head of Brooke Burgess.  He was tractable, easy, pleasant, and therefore deservedly successful.  All his brother clerks called him Brooke except the young lads who, for the first year or two of their service, still denominated him Mr Burgess.

‘Brooke,’ said one of his juniors, coming into his room and standing before the fireplace with a cigar in his mouth, ’have you heard who is to be the new Commissioner?’

‘Colenso, to be sure,’ said Brooke.

’What a lark that would be.  And I don’t see why he shouldn’t.  But it isn’t Colenso.  The name has just come down.’

‘And who is it?’

‘Old Proudie, from Barchester.’

‘Why, we had him here years ago, and he resigned.’

’But he’s to come on again now for a spell.  It always seems to me that the bishops ain’t a bit of use here.  They only get blown up, and snubbed, and shoved into corners by the others.’

‘You young reprobate, to talk of shoving an archbishop into a corner.’

’Well don’t they?  It’s only for the name of it they have them.  There’s the Bishop of Broomsgrove; he’s always sauntering about the place, looking as though he’d be so much obliged if somebody would give him something to do.  He’s always smiling, and so gracious just as if he didn’t feel above half sure that he had any right to be where he is, and he thought that perhaps somebody was going to kick him.’

‘And so old Proudie is coming up again,’ said Brooke.

’It certainly is very much the same to us whom they send.  He’ll get shoved into a corner, as you call it, only that he’ll go into the corner without any shoving.’  Then there came in a messenger with a card, and Brooke learned that Hugh Stanbury was waiting for him in the stranger’s room.  In performing the promise made to Dorothy, he had called upon her brother as soon as he was back in London, but had not found him.  This now was the return visit.