The change was almost
comically sudden to the mellow tones in which she addressed Alfred the
very next moment, on the very same subject: "Mr. Baker, I believe, sees
the letters: and, where our poor patients (with a glance at Dent) write
in such a way as to wound and perhaps terrify those who are in reality
their best friends, they are not always sent. But I conclude _your_
letters have gone. If you feel you can be calm, why not ask Mr. Baker? He
is in the house now; for a wonder."
Alfred promised to be calm; and she got him an interview with Mr. Baker.
He was a full-blown pawnbroker of Silverton town, whom the legislature,
with that keen knowledge of human nature which marks the British senate,
permitted, and still permits, to speculate in Insanity, stipulating,
however, that the upper servant of all in his asylum should be a doctor;
but omitting to provide against the instant dismissal of the said doctor
should he go and rob his employer of a lodger--by curing a patient.
As you are not the British legislature, I need not tell you that to this
pawnbroker insanity mattered nothing, nor sanity: his trade lay in
catching, and keeping, and stinting, as many lodgers, sane or insane, as
he could hold.
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