CHAPTER XIX.
MEESON V. ADDISON AND ANOTHER.
The most wearisome times go by at last if only one lives to see the end
of them, and so it came to pass that at length on one fine morning about
a quarter to ten of the Law Courts' clock, that projects its ghastly
hideousness upon unoffending Fleet-street, Augusta, accompanied by
Eustace, Lady Holmhurst, and Mrs. Thomas, the wife of Captain Thomas, who
had come up from visiting her relatives in the Eastern counties in order
to give evidence, found herself standing in the big entrance to the new
Law Courts, feeling as though she would give five years of her life to be
anywhere else.
"This way, my dear," said Eustace; "Mr. John Short said that he would
meet us by the statue in the hall." Accordingly they passed into the
archway by the oak stand where the cause-lists are displayed. Augusta
glanced at them as she went, and the first thing that her eyes fell on
was "Probate and Divorce Division Court I., at 10.30, Meeson v. Addison
and Another," and the sight made her feel ill. In another moment they had
passed a policeman of gigantic size, "monstrum horrendum, informe,
ingens," who watches and wards the folding-doors through which so much
human learning, wretchedness, and worry pass day by day, and were
standing in the long, but narrow and ill-proportioned hall which appears
to have been the best thing that the architectural talent of the
nineteenth century was capable of producing.
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