‘I thought so,’ Tigg retorted.
‘Shall I go?’
‘I think you had better. Stay though! No! remain here, Mr Nadgett, if you please.’
It was remarkable how pale and flurried he had become in an instant. There was nothing to account for it. His eye had fallen on his razors; but what of them!
Mr Chuzzlewit was announced.
‘Show him up directly. Nadgett! don’t you leave us alone together. Mind you don’t, now! By the Lord!’ he added in a whisper to himself: ‘We don’t know what may happen.’
Saying this, he hurriedly took up a couple of hair-brushes, and began to exercise them on his own head, as if his toilet had not been interrupted. Mr Nadgett withdrew to the stove, in which there was a small fire for the convenience of heating curling-irons; and taking advantage of so favourable an opportunity for drying his pocket-handkerchief, produced it without loss of time. There he stood, during the whole interview, holding it before the bars, and sometimes, but not often, glancing over his shoulder.
‘My dear Chuzzlewit!’ cried Montague, as Jonas entered. ‘You rise with the lark. Though you go to bed with the nightingale, you rise with the lark. You have superhuman energy, my dear Chuzzlewit!’
‘Ecod!’ said Jonas, with an air of langour and ill-humour, as he took a chair, ‘I should be very glad not to get up with the lark, if I could help it. But I am a light sleeper; and it’s better to be up than lying awake, counting the dismal old church-clocks, in bed.’
‘A light sleeper!’ cried his friend. ‘Now, what is a light sleeper? I often hear the expression, but upon my life I have not the least conception what a light sleeper is.’