Brooke Burgess was a clerk in the office of the Ecclesiastical Commissioners in London, and as such had to do with things very solemn, grave, and almost melancholy. He had to deal with the rents of episcopal properties, to correspond with clerical claimants, and to be at home with the circumstances of underpaid vicars and perpetual curates with much less than 300 pounds a-year; but yet he was as jolly and pleasant at his desk as though he were busied about the collection of the malt tax, or wrote his letters to admirals and captains instead of to deans and prebendaries. Brooke Burgess had risen to be a senior clerk, and was held in some respect in his office; but it was not perhaps for the amount of work he did, nor yet on account of the gravity of his demeanour, nor for the brilliancy of his intellect. But if not clever, he was sensible; though he was not a dragon of official virtue, he had a conscience and he possessed those small but most valuable gifts by which a man becomes popular among men. And thus it had come to pass in all those battles as to competitive merit which had taken place in his as in other public offices, that no one had ever dreamed of putting a junior over the head of Brooke Burgess. He was tractable, easy, pleasant, and therefore deservedly successful. All his brother clerks called him Brooke except the young lads who, for the first year or two of their service, still denominated him Mr Burgess.

‘Brooke,’ said one of his juniors, coming into his room and standing before the fireplace with a cigar in his mouth, ‘have you heard who is to be the new Commissioner?’

‘Colenso, to be sure,’ said Brooke.

‘What a lark that would be. And I don’t see why he shouldn’t. But it isn’t Colenso. The name has just come down.’

‘And who is it?’

‘Old Proudie, from Barchester.’

‘Why, we had him here years ago, and he resigned.’

‘But he’s to come on again now for a spell. It always seems to me that the bishops ain’t a bit of use here. They only get blown up, and snubbed, and shoved into corners by the others.’

‘You young reprobate, to talk of shoving an archbishop into a corner.’

‘Well don’t they? It’s only for the name of it they have them. There’s the Bishop of Broomsgrove; he’s always sauntering about the place, looking as though he’d be so much obliged if somebody would give him something to do. He’s always smiling, and so gracious just as if he didn’t feel above half sure that he had any right to be where he is, and he thought that perhaps somebody was going to kick him.’

‘And so old Proudie is coming up again,’ said Brooke.

‘It certainly is very much the same to us whom they send. He’ll get shoved into a corner, as you call it, only that he’ll go into the corner without any shoving.’ Then there came in a messenger with a card, and Brooke learned that Hugh Stanbury was waiting for him in the stranger’s room. In performing the promise made to Dorothy, he had called upon her brother as soon as he was back in London, but had not found him. This now was the return visit.

‘I thought I was sure to find you here,’ said Hugh. ‘Pretty nearly sure from eleven till five,’ said Brooke. ‘A hard stepmother like the Civil Service does not allow one much chance of relief. I do get across to the club sometimes for a glass of sherry and a biscuit but here I am now, at any rate; and I’m very glad you have come.’ Then there was some talk between them about affairs at Exeter; but as they were interrupted before half an hour was over their heads by a summons brought for Burgess from one of the secretaries, it was agreed that they should dine together at Burgess’s club on the following day. ‘We can manage a pretty good beef-steak,’ said Brooke, ‘and have a fair glass of sherry. I don’t think you can get much more than that anywhere nowadays unless you want a dinner for eight at three guineas a head. The magnificence of men has become so intolerable now that one is driven to be humble in one’s self-defence.’ Stanbury assured his acquaintance that he was anything but magnificent in his own ideas, that cold beef and beer was his usual fare, and at last allowed the clerk to wait upon the secretary.

‘I wouldn’t have any other fellow to meet you,’ said Brooke as they sat at their dinners, ‘because in this way we can talk over the dear old woman at Exeter. Yes, our fellow does make good soup, and it’s about all that he does do well. As for getting a potato properly boiled, that’s quite out of the question. Yes, it is a good glass of sherry. I told you we’d a fairish tap of sherry on. Well, I was there, backwards and forwards, for nearly six weeks.’

‘And how did you get on with the old woman?’

‘Like a house on fire,’ said Brooke.

‘She didn’t quarrel with you?’

‘No upon the whole she did not. I always felt that it was touch and go. She might or she might not. Every now and then she looked at me, and said a sharp word, as though it was about to come. But I had determined when I went there altogether to disregard that kind of thing.’

‘It’s rather important to you is it not?’

‘You mean about her money?’

‘Of course, I mean about her money,’ said Stanbury.

‘It is important and so it was to you.’

‘Not in the same degree, or nearly so. And as for me, it was not on the cards that we shouldn’t quarrel. I am so utterly a Bohemian in all my ideas of life, and she is so absolutely the reverse, that not to have quarrelled would have been hypocritical on my part or on hers. She had got it into her head that she had a right to rule my life; and, of course, she quarrelled with me when I made her understand that she should do nothing of the kind. Now, she won’t want to rule you.’

‘I hope not.’

‘She has taken you up,’ continued Stanbury, ‘on altogether a different understanding. You are to her the representative of a family to whom she thinks she owes the restitution of the property which se enjoys. I was simply a member of her own family, to which she owes nothing. She thought it well to help one of us out of what she regarded as her private purse, and she chose me. But the matter is quite different with you.’

‘She might have given everything to you, as well as to me,’ said Brooke.

‘That’s not her idea. She conceives herself bound to leave all she has back to a Burgess, except anything she may save as she says, off her own back, or out of her own belly. She has told me so a score of times.’

‘And what did you say?’

‘I always told her that, let her do as she would, I should never ask any question about her will.’

‘But she hates us all like poison except me,’ said Brooke. ‘I never knew people so absurdly hostile as are your aunt and my uncle Barty. Each thinks the other the most wicked person in the world.’

‘I suppose your uncle was hard upon her once.’

‘Very likely. He is a hard man and has, very warmly, all the feelings of an injured man. I suppose my uncle Brooke’s will was a cruel blow to him. He professes to believe that Miss Stanbury will never leave me a shilling.’

‘He is wrong, then,’ said Stanbury.

‘Oh yes he’s ............