'No more,' returned Mr Meagles. 'I have been hunting about all day. She
must have gone very early and very silently. I have found no trace of
her down about us.' 'Stay! You want,' said Clennam, after a moment's reflection, 'to see
her? I assume that?' 'Yes, assuredly; I want to give her another chance; Mother and Pet
want to give her another chance; come! You yourself,' said Mr Meagles,
persuasively, as if the provocation to be angry were not his own at all,
'want to give the poor passionate girl another chance, I know, Clennam.'
'It would be strange and hard indeed if I did not,' said Clennam, 'when
you are all so forgiving. What I was going to ask you was, have you
thought of that Miss Wade?'
'I have. I did not think of her until I had pervaded the whole of our
neighbourhood, and I don't know that I should have done so then but
for finding Mother and Pet, when I went home, full of the idea that
Tattycoram must have gone to her. Then, of course, I recalled what she
said that day at dinner when you were first with US.'
'Have you any idea where Miss Wade is to be found?'
'To tell you the truth,' returned Mr Meagles, 'it's because I have an
addled jumble of a notion on that subject that you found me waiting
here. There is one of those odd impressions in my house, which do
mysteriously get into houses sometimes, which nobody seems to have
picked up in a distinct form from anybody, and yet which everybody seems
to have got hold of loosely from somebody and let go again, that she
lives, or was living, thereabouts.' Mr Meagles handed him a slip of
paper, on which was written the name of one of the dull by-streets in
the Grosvenor region, near Park Lane.
'Here is no number,' said Arthur looking over it.
'No number, my dear Clennam?' returned his friend. 'No anything! The
very name of the street may have been floating in the air; for, as I
tell you, none of my people can say where they got it from. However,
it's worth an inquiry; and as I would rather make it in company than
alone, and as you too were a fellow-traveller of that immovable woman's,
I thought perhaps--' Clennam finished the sentence for him by taking up
his hat again, and saying he was ready.
It was now summer-time; a grey, hot, dusty evening. They rode to the top
of Oxford Street, and there alighting, dived in among the great streets
of melancholy stateliness, and the little streets that try to be as
stately and succeed in being more melancholy, of which there is a
labyrinth near Park Lane. Wildernesses of corner houses, with barbarous
old porticoes and appurtenances; horrors that came into existence under
some wrong-headed person in some wrong-headed time, still demanding
the blind admiration of all ensuing generations and determined to do
so until they tumbled down; frowned upon the twilight. Parasite little
tenements, with the cramp in their whole frame, from the dwarf hall-door
on the giant model of His Grace's in the Square to the squeezed window
of the boudoir commanding the dunghills in the Mews, made the evening
doleful.