up, and more than justifies my good opinion, and I remain her guardian
and her friend. What is there in all this?"

He soon began to talk to me confidentially as if I had been in the habit
of conversing with him every morning for I don't know how long.

"Of course, Esther," he said, "you don't understand this Chancery
business?"

I shook my head.

"I don't know who does," he returned. "The lawyers have twisted it into
such a state of bedevilment that the original merits of the case have
long disappeared. Its about a will, and the trusts under a will--or it
was once. It's about nothing but costs now. It was about a will when it
was about anything. A certain Jarndyce, in an evil hour, made a great
fortune and made a great will. In the question how the trusts under that
will are to be administered, the fortune left by the will is squandered
away; the legatees under the will are reduced to such a miserable
condition that they would be sufficiently punished if they had committed
an enormous crime in having money left them, and the will itself is made
a dead letter. All through the deplorable cause everybody must have
copies, over and over again, of everything that has accumulated about it
in the way of cartloads of papers, and must go down the middle and up
again, through such an infernal country-dance of costs and fees and
nonsense and corruption as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions
of a witch's sabbath. And we can't get out of the suit on any terms, for
we are made parties to it, and _must be_ parties to it, whether we like
it or not. But it won't do to think of it! Thinking of it drove my
great-uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, to blow his brains out."