I am rather afraid that Doctor Softly was not a clever medical man; for
in spite of his great connections, he did not get a very magnificent
practice as a physician.

As a general practitioner, he might have bought a comfortable business,
with a house and snug surgery-shop attached; but the son-in-law of Lady
Malkinshaw was obliged to hold up his head, and set up his carriage, and
live in a street near a fashionable square, and keep an expensive
and clumsy footman to answer the door, instead of a cheap and tidy
housemaid. How he managed to "maintain his position" (that is the right
phrase, I think), I never could tell. His wife did not bring him a
farthing. When the honorable and gallant baronet, her father, died, he
left the widowed Lady Malkinshaw with her worldly affairs in a curiously
involved state. Her son (of whom I feel truly ashamed to be obliged to
speak again so soon) made an effort to extricate his mother--involved
himself in a series of pecuniary disasters, which commercial people
call, I believe, transactions--struggled for a little while to get out
of them in the character of an independent gentleman--failed--and then
spiritlessly availed himself of the oleaginous refuge of the soap and
candle trade. His mother always looked down upon him after this; but
borrowed money of him also--in order to show, I suppose, that her
maternal interest in her son was not quite extinct. My father tried
to follow her example--in his wife's interests, of course; but the
soap-boiler brutally buttoned up his pockets, and told my father to go
into business for himself. Thus it happened that we were certainly a
poor family, in spite of the fine appearance we made, the fashionable
street we lived in, the neat brougham we kept, and the clumsy and
expensive footman who answered our door.