to do with Miss Blake and her letters, when no person was liable
for the rent.

All lawyers--I am one myself, and can speak from a long and varied
experience--all lawyers, even the very hardest, have one client, at all
events, towards whom they exhibit much forbearance, for whom they feel a
certain sympathy, and in whose interests they take a vast deal of
trouble for very little pecuniary profit.

A client of this kind favours me with his business--he has favoured me
with it for many years past. Each first of January I register a vow he
shall cost me no more time or money. On each last day of December I
find he is deeper in my debt than he was on the same date a
twelvemonth previous.

I often wonder how this is--why we, so fierce to one human being,
possibly honest and well-meaning enough, should be as wax in the hand of
the moulder, when another individual, perhaps utterly disreputable,
refuses to take "No" for an answer.

Do we purchase our indulgences in this way? Do we square our accounts
with our own consciences by remembering that, if we have been as stone
to Dick, Tom, and Harry, we have melted at the first appeal of Jack?

My principal, Mr. Craven--than whom a better man never breathed--had an
unprofitable client, for whom he entertained feelings of the profoundest
pity, whom he treated with a rare courtesy. That lady was Miss Blake;
and when the old house on the Thames stood tenantless, Mr. Craven's bed
did not prove one of roses.