Tale of Two Cities, A A. Charles Dickens

flirting with some lighter document; the jackal, with knitted brows and intent face, so deep in his task, that his eyes did not even follow the hand he stretched out for his glass—which often groped about, for a minute or more, before it found the glass for his lips. Two or three times, the matter in hand became so knotty, that the jackal found it imperative on him to get up, and steep his towels anew. From these pilgrimages to the jug and basin, he returned with such eccentricities of damp headgear as no words can describe; which were made the more ludicrous by his anxious gravity.

      At length the jackal had got together a compact repast for the lion, and proceeded to offer it to him. The lion took it with care and caution, made his selections from it, and his remarks upon it, and the jackal assisted both. When the repast was fully discussed, the lion put his hands in his waistband again, and lay down to meditate. The jackal then invigorated himself with a bumper for his throttle, and a fresh application to his head, and applied himself to the collection of a second meal; this was administered to the lion in the same manner, and was not disposed of until the clocks struck three in the morning.

      “And now we have done, Sydney, fill a bumper of punch,” said Mr. Stryver.

      The jackal removed the towels from his head, which had been steaming again, shook himself, yawned, shivered, and complied.

      “You were very sound, Sydney, in the matter of those crown witnesses today. Every question told.”

      “I always am sound; am I not?”

      “I don’t gainsay it. What has roughened your temper? Put some punch to it and smooth it again.”

      With a deprecatory grunt, the jackal again complied.

      “The old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School,” said Stryver, nodding his head over him as he reviewed him in the present and the past, “the old seesaw Sydney. Up one minute and down the next; now in spirits and now in despondency!”

      “Ah!” returned the other, sighing: “yes! The same Sydney, with the same luck. Even then, I did exercises for other boys, and seldom did my own.”

      “And why not?”

      “God knows. It was my way, I suppose.”

      He sat, with his hands in his pockets and his legs stretched out before him, looking at the fire.

      “Carton,” said his friend, squaring himself at him with a bullying air, as if the fire-grate had been the furnace in which sustained endeavour was forged, and the one delicate thing to be done for the old Sydney Carton of old Shrewsbury School was to shoulder him into it, “your way is, and always was, a lame way. You summon no energy and purpose. Look at me.”

      “Oh, botheration!” returned Sydney, with a lighter and more good-humoured laugh, “don’t you be moral!”

      “How have I done what I have done?” said Stryver; “how do I do what I do?”

      “Partly through paying me to help you, I suppose. But it’s not worth your while to apostrophise me, or the air, about it; what you want to do, you do. You were always in the front rank, and I was always behind.”

      “I had to get into the front rank; I was not born there, was I?”

      “I was not present at the ceremony; but my opinion is you were,” said Carton. At this, he laughed again, and they both laughed.

      “Before Shrewsbury, and at Shrewsbury, and ever since Shrewsbury,” pursued Carton, “you have fallen into your rank, and I have fallen into mine. Even when we were fellow-students in the Student-Quarter of Paris, picking up French, and French law, and other French crumbs that we didn’t get much good of, you were always somewhere, and I was always nowhere.”

      “And whose fault was that?”

      “Upon my soul, I am not sure that it was not yours. You were always driving and riving and shouldering and passing, to that restless degree that I had no chance for my life but in rust and repose. It’s a gloomy thing, however, to talk about one’s own past, with the day breaking. Turn me in some other direction before I go.”

      “Well then! Pledge me to the pretty witness,” said Stryver, holding up his glass. “Are you turned in a pleasant direction?”

      Apparently not, for he became gloomy again.

      “Pretty witness,” he muttered, looking down into his glass. “I have had enough of witnesses today and tonight; who’s your pretty witness?”

      “The picturesque doctor’s daughter, Miss Manette.”

      “She pretty?”

      “Is she not?”

      “No.”

      “Why, man alive, she was the admiration of the whole Court!”

      “Rot the admiration of the whole Court! Who made the Old Bailey a judge of beauty? She was a golden-haired doll!”