grey, like a fire which the brightness of the sun put out.

The firm of Barbox Brothers had been some offshoot or irregular branch of
the Public Notary and bill-broking tree. It had gained for itself a
griping reputation before the days of Young Jackson, and the reputation
had stuck to it and to him. As he had imperceptibly come into possession
of the dim den up in the corner of a court off Lombard Street, on whose
grimy windows the inscription Barbox Brothers had for many long years
daily interposed itself between him and the sky, so he had insensibly
found himself a personage held in chronic distrust, whom it was essential
to screw tight to every transaction in which he engaged, whose word was
never to be taken without his attested bond, whom all dealers with openly
set up guards and wards against. This character had come upon him
through no act of his own. It was as if the original Barbox had
stretched himself down upon the office floor, and had thither caused to
be conveyed Young Jackson in his sleep, and had there effected a
metempsychosis and exchange of persons with him. The discovery--aided in
its turn by the deceit of the only woman he had ever loved, and the
deceit of the only friend he had ever made: who eloped from him to be
married together--the discovery, so followed up, completed what his
earliest rearing had begun. He shrank, abashed, within the form of
Barbox, and lifted up his head and heart no more.

But he did at last effect one great release in his condition. He broke
the oar he had plied so long, and he scuttled and sank the galley. He
prevented the gradual retirement of an old conventional business from
him, by taking the initiative and retiring from it. With enough to live
on (though, after all, with not too much), he obliterated the firm of
Barbox Brothers from the pages of the Post-Office Directory and the face
of the earth, leaving nothing of it but its name on two portmanteaus.