Book The Second: Riches Chapter 10 The Dreams of Mrs Flintwinch thicken

The shady waiting-rooms of the Circumlocution Office, where he passed a
good deal of time in company with various troublesome Convicts who were
under sentence to be broken alive on that wheel, had afforded Arthur
Clennam ample leisure, in three or four successive days, to exhaust the
subject of his late glimpse of Miss Wade and Tattycoram.

He had been able to make no more of it and no less of it, and in this unsatisfactory
condition he was fain to leave it.

During this space he had not been to his mother's dismal old house.

One of his customary evenings for repairing thither now coming round,
he left his dwelling and his partner at nearly nine o'clock, and slowly
walked in the direction of that grim home of his youth.

It always affected his imagination as wrathful, mysterious, and sad;
and his imagination was sufficiently impressible to see the whole
neighbourhood under some tinge of its dark shadow. As he went along,
upon a dreary night, the dim streets by which he went, seemed all
depositories of oppressive secrets.

The deserted counting-houses, with
their secrets of books and papers locked up in chests and safes; the
banking-houses, with their secrets of strong rooms and wells, the
keys of which were in a very few secret pockets and a very few secret
breasts; the secrets of all the dispersed grinders in the vast mill,
among whom there were doubtless plunderers, forgers, and trust-betrayers
of many sorts, whom the light of any day that dawned might reveal; he
could have fancied that these things, in hiding, imparted a heaviness
to the air.