'It's a troublesome property.

Don't pay you badly, but rents are very hard to get there.

You have more trouble with that one place than with all the places belonging to you.' Just as the big ship in tow gets the credit, with most spectators, of being the powerful object, so the Patriarch usually seemed to have said himself whatever Pancks said for him.
'Indeed ?' returned Clennam, upon whom this impression was so efficiently made by a mere gleam of the polished head that he spoke the ship instead of the Tug.

'The people are so poor there ?' 'You can't say, you know,' snorted Pancks, taking one of his dirty hands out of his rusty iron-grey pockets to bite his nails, if he could find any, and turning his beads of eyes upon his employer, 'whether they're poor or not.

They say they are, but they all say that.