Now, lad, I'm off to my printer with this. They are working night and day just now: there will be two hundred copies printed in half an hour.”
“And me, doctor,” said Julia. “Am poor I to have no hand in it? How cruel of you? Oh pray, pray, pray let me help a little.”
“Put on your bonnet, then, directly,” said he: “in war never lose a minute.”
“But I am so afraid they may be lying in wait for him outside.”
“Then we'll give them a good hiding: there are three of us; all good men and staunch,” said the indomitable doctor.
“No, no,” said the pugnacious Alfred. “Julia does not like fighting: I heard her screaming all the time I was defending myself on the stairs: let us be prudent: let us throw dust in their eyes. Put me on a bonnet and cloak.”
“And a nice little woman you'll make, ye fathom.”
“Oh, I can stoop—to conquer.”
Julia welcomed this plan almost with glee, and she and Edward very soon made a handsome brazen-looking trollop six feet high. Then it had to stoop, and Edward and Julia helped it out to the carriage, under the very noses of a policeman and a keeper, who were watching for Alfred: seeing which—oh frailty of woman!—the district visitor addressed it aloud as her aunt, and begged it to take care: which she afterwards observed was acting a falsehood, and “where was her Christianity?”
Alfred was actually not recognised: the carriage bowled away to the great printing house; it was on that side the water. The foreman entered into the thing with spirit, and divided the copy, small as it was, among two or three compositors: so a rough proof was ready in an incredibly short time; the doctor corrected it: and soon they began to work off the copies. The foreman found them Mitchell's newspaper list, and envelopes by the hundred, and while the copies were pouring in, all hands were folding and addressing them to the London and provincial editors. The office lent the stamps. The doctor drove Alfred to his own lodgings, and forbade him to reappear in Pembroke Street until the letter should come out in the London journals.