'
This good gentleman replied with a snort, which might mean yes, or
no, or anything or nothing, and which Mrs. Tope would have found
highly mystifying, but that her attention was divided by the
service of the table.
'You will take something with me?' said Jasper, as the cloth was
laid.
'I couldn't get a morsel down my throat, I thank you,' answered Mr.
Grewgious.
Jasper both ate and drank almost voraciously. Combined with the
hurry in his mode of doing it, was an evident indifference to the
taste of what he took, suggesting that he ate and drank to fortify
himself against any other failure of the spirits, far more than to
gratify his palate. Mr. Grewgious in the meantime sat upright,
with no expression in his face, and a hard kind of imperturbably
polite protest all over him: as though he would have said, in
reply to some invitation to discourse; 'I couldn't originate the
faintest approach to an observation on any subject whatever, I
thank you.'
'Do you know,' said Jasper, when he had pushed away his plate and
glass, and had sat meditating for a few minutes: 'do you know that
I find some crumbs of comfort in the communication with which you
have so much amazed me?'
'DO you?' returned Mr. Grewgious, pretty plainly adding the
unspoken clause: 'I don't, I thank you!'
'After recovering from the shock of a piece of news of my dear boy,
so entirely unexpected, and so destructive of all the castles I had
built for him; and after having had time to think of it; yes.
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