Low's three rooms in the Old Square, each of
them brown with the binding of law books and with the dust collected
on law papers, and with furniture that had been brown always, and had
become browner with years, were perhaps as unattractive to the eye of
a young pupil as any rooms which were ever entered. And the study of
the Chancery law itself is not an alluring pursuit till the mind has
come to have some insight into the beauty of its ultimate object.
Phineas, during his three years' course of reasoning on these things,
had taught himself to believe that things ugly on the outside might
be very beautiful within; and had therefore come to prefer crossing
Poland Street and Soho Square, and so continuing his travels by the
Seven Dials and Long Acre. His morning walk was of a piece with his
morning studies, and he took pleasure in the gloom of both. But now
the taste of his palate had been already changed by the glare of
the lamps in and about palatial Westminster, and he found that St.
Giles's was disagreeable. The ways about Pall Mall and across the
Park to Parliament Street, or to the Treasury, were much pleasanter,
and the new offices in Downing Street, already half built, absorbed
all that interest which he had hitherto been able to take in
the suggested but uncommenced erection of new Law Courts in the
neighbourhood of Lincoln's Inn.
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