’Always alone; except that I have daily company in a gentleman by the name of Bazzard, my clerk.’

‘He doesn’t live here?’

’No, he goes his way, after office hours.  In fact, he is off duty here, altogether, just at present; and a firm down-stairs, with which I have business relations, lend me a substitute.  But it would be extremely difficult to replace Mr. Bazzard.’

‘He must be very fond of you,’ said Rosa.

‘He bears up against it with commendable fortitude if he is,’ returned Mr. Grewgious, after considering the matter.  ’But I doubt if he is.  Not particularly so.  You see, he is discontented, poor fellow.’

‘Why isn’t he contented?’ was the natural inquiry.

‘Misplaced,’ said Mr. Grewgious, with great mystery.

Rosa’s eyebrows resumed their inquisitive and perplexed expression.

‘So misplaced,’ Mr. Grewgious went on, ’that I feel constantly apologetic towards him.  And he feels (though he doesn’t mention it) that I have reason to be.’

Mr. Grewgious had by this time grown so very mysterious, that Rosa did not know how to go on.  While she was thinking about it Mr. Grewgious suddenly jerked out of himself for the second time: 

’Let’s talk.  We were speaking of Mr. Bazzard.  It’s a secret, and moreover it is Mr. Bazzard’s secret; but the sweet presence at my table makes me so unusually expansive, that I feel I must impart it in inviolable confidence.  What do you think Mr. Bazzard has done?’

‘O dear!’ cried Rosa, drawing her chair a little nearer, and her mind reverting to Jasper, ‘nothing dreadful, I hope?’

‘He has written a play,’ said Mr. Grewgious, in a solemn whisper.  ‘A tragedy.’

Rosa seemed much relieved.

‘And nobody,’ pursued Mr. Grewgious in the same tone, ’will hear, on any account whatever, of bringing it out.’

Rosa looked reflective, and nodded her head slowly; as who should say, ‘Such things are, and why are they!’

‘Now, you know,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ‘I couldn’t write a play.’

‘Not a bad one, sir?’ said Rosa, innocently, with her eyebrows again in action.

’No.  If I was under sentence of decapitation, and was about to be instantly decapitated, and an express arrived with a pardon for the condemned convict Grewgious if he wrote a play, I should be under the necessity of resuming the block, and begging the executioner to proceed to extremities,—­meaning,’ said Mr. Grewgious, passing his hand under his chin, ‘the singular number, and this extremity.’

Rosa appeared to consider what she would do if the awkward supposititious case were hers.

‘Consequently,’ said Mr. Grewgious, ’Mr. Bazzard would have a sense of my inferiority to himself under any circumstances; but when I am his master, you know, the case is greatly aggravated.’

Mr. Grewgious shook his head seriously, as if he felt the offence to be a little too much, though of his own committing.