prompt:
Chapter: 'No more of yesterday's howling over yonder to-day, Sir; is there?'

'I have heard none.'

'Then you may be sure there _is_ none. When these people howl, they howl
to be heard.'

'Most people do, I suppose.'

'Ah! but these people are always howling. Never happy otherwise.'

'Do you mean the Marseilles people?'

'I mean the French people. They're always at it. As to Marseilles, we
know what Marseilles is. It sent the most insurrectionary tune into the
world that was ever composed. It couldn't exist without allonging and
marshonging to something or other--victory or death, or blazes, or
something.'

The speaker, with a whimsical good humour upon him all the time, looked
over the parapet-wall with the greatest disparagement of Marseilles; and
taking up a determined position by putting his hands in his pockets and
rattling his money at it, apostrophised it with a short laugh.

'Allong and marshong, indeed. It would be more creditable to you,
    I think, to let other people allong and marshong about their lawful
    business, instead of shutting 'em up in quarantine!'

    'Tiresome enough,' said the other. 'But we shall be out to-day.'

    'Out to-day!' repeated the first. 'It's almost an aggravation of the
    enormity, that we shall be out to-day. Out! What have we ever been in
    for?'

    'For no very strong reason, I must say. But as we come from the East,
    and as the East is the country of the plague--'

    'The plague!' repeated the other. 'That's my grievance. I have had the
    plague continually, ever since I have been here. I am like a sane man
    shut up in a madhouse; I can't stand the suspicion of the thing. I came
    here as well as ever I was in my life; but to suspect me of the plague
    is to give me the plague. And I have had it--and I have got it.'

    'You bear it very well, Mr Meagles,' said the second speaker, smiling.

    'No. If you knew the real state of the case, that's the last observation
    you would think of making. I have been waking up night after night, and
    saying, _now_ I have got it, _now_ it has developed itself, _now_ I am
    in for it, _now_ these fellows are making out their case for their
    precautions. Why, I'd as soon have a spit put through me, and be stuck
    upon a card in a collection of beetles, as lead the life I have been
    leading here.'

    'Well, Mr Meagles, say no more about it now it's over,' urged a cheerful
    feminine voice.

    'Over!' repeated Mr Meagles, who appeared (though without any
            ill-nature) to be in that peculiar state of mind in which the last word
    spoken by anybody else is a new injury. 'Over! and why should I say no
    more about it because it's over?'

    It was Mrs Meagles who had spoken to Mr Meagles; and Mrs Meagles was,
    like Mr Meagles, comely and healthy, with a pleasant English face which
    had been looking at homely things for five-and-fifty years or more, and
    shone with a bright reflection of them.

    'There! Never mind, Father, never mind!' said Mrs Meagles. 'For goodness
    sake content yourself with Pet.'

    'With Pet?' repeated Mr Meagles in his injured vein. Pet, however,
    being close behind him, touched him on the shoulder, and Mr Meagles
    immediately forgave Marseilles from the bottom of his heart.

    Pet was about twenty. A fair girl with rich brown hair hanging free in
    natural ringlets. A lovely girl, with a frank face, and wonderful eyes;
    so large, so soft, so bright, set to such perfection in her kind good
    head. She was round and fresh and dimpled and spoilt, and there was in
    Pet an air of timidity and dependence which was the best weakness in
    the world, and gave her the only crowning charm a girl so pretty and
    pleasant could have been without.

    'Now, I ask you,' said Mr Meagles in the blandest confidence, falling
    back a step himself, and handing his daughter a step forward to
    illustrate his question: 'I ask you simply, as between man and man,
    you know, DID you ever hear of such damned nonsense as putting Pet in
    quarantine?'

    'It has had the result of making even quarantine enjoyable.'

    'Come!' said Mr Meagles, 'that's something to be sure. I am obliged to
    you for that remark. Now, Pet, my darling, you had better go along with
    Mother and get ready for the boat. The officer of health, and a variety
    of humbugs in cocked hats, are coming off to let us out of this at last:
    and all we jail-birds are to breakfast together in something approaching
    to a Christian style again, before we take wing for our different
    destinations. Tattycoram, stick you close to your young mistress.'

    He spoke to a handsome girl with lustrous dark hair and eyes, and very
    neatly dressed, who replied with a half curtsey as she passed off in the
    train of Mrs Meagles and Pet. They crossed the bare scorched terrace
    all three together, and disappeared through a staring white archway.
    Mr Meagles's companion, a grave dark man of forty, still stood looking
    towards this archway after they were gone; until Mr Meagles tapped him
    on the arm.

    'I beg your pardon,' said he, starting.

    'Not at all,' said Mr Meagles.

    They took one silent turn backward and forward in the shade of the wall,
    getting, at the height on which the quarantine barracks are placed, what
    cool refreshment of sea breeze there was at seven in the morning. Mr
    Meagles's companion resumed the conversation.

    'May I ask you,' he said, 'what is the name of--'

    'Tattycoram?' Mr Meagles struck in. 'I have not the least idea.'

    'I thought,' said the other, 'that--'

    'Tattycoram?' suggested Mr Meagles again.

    'Thank you--that Tattycoram was a name; and I have several times
    wondered at the oddity of it.'

    'Why, the fact is,' said Mr Meagles, 'Mrs Meagles and myself are, you
    see, practical people.'

    'That you have frequently mentioned in the course of the agreeable and
    interesting conversations we have had together, walking up and down on
    these stones,' said the other, with a half smile breaking through the
    gravity of his dark face.

    'Practical people. So one day, five or six years ago now, when we took
    Pet to church at the Foundling--you have heard of the Foundling Hospital
    in London? Similar to the Institution for the Found Children in Paris?'

    'I have seen it.'

    'Well! One day when we took Pet to church there to hear the
    music--because, as practical people, it is the business of our lives to
    show her everything that we think can please her--Mother (my usual name
            for Mrs Meagles) began to cry so, that it was necessary to take her out.
    "What's the matter, Mother?" said I, when we had brought her a little
    round: "you are frightening Pet, my dear." "Yes, I know that, Father,"
    says Mother, "but I think it's through my loving her so much, that it
    ever came into my head." "That ever what came into your head, Mother?"
    "O dear, dear!" cried Mother, breaking out again, "when I saw all those
    children ranged tier above tier, and appealing from the father none of
    them has ever known on earth, to the great Father of us all in Heaven,
    I thought, does any wretched mother ever come here, and look among those
    young faces, wondering which is the poor child she brought into this
    forlorn world, never through all its life to know her love, her kiss,
    her face, her voice, even her name!" Now that was practical in Mother,
    and I told her so. I said, "Mother, that's what I call practical in you,
    my dear."'

    The other, not unmoved, assented.

    'So I said next day: Now, Mother, I have a proposition to make that I
    think you'll approve of. Let us take one of those same little children
    to be a little maid to Pet. We are practical people. So if we should
    find her temper a little defective, or any of her ways a little wide
    of ours, we shall know what we have to take into account. We shall
    know what an immense deduction must be made from all the influences and
    experiences that have formed us--no parents, no child-brother or sister,
    no individuality of home, no Glass Slipper, or Fairy Godmother. And
    that's the way we came by Tattycoram.'

    'And the name itself--'

    'By George!' said Mr Meagles, 'I was forgetting the name itself. Why,
    she was called in the Institution, Harriet Beadle--an arbitrary name,
    of course. Now, Harriet we changed into Hattey, and then into Tatty,
    because, as practical people, we thought even a playful name might be
    a new thing to her, and might have a softening and affectionate kind of
    effect, don't you see? As to Beadle, that I needn't say was wholly out
    of the question. If there is anything that is not to be tolerated on
    any terms, anything that is a type of Jack-in-office insolence and
    absurdity, anything that represents in coats, waistcoats, and big sticks
    our English holding on by nonsense after every one has found it out, it
    is a beadle. You haven't seen a beadle lately?'

    'As an Englishman who has been more than twenty years in China, no.'

    'Then,' said Mr Meagles, laying his forefinger on his companion's breast
    with great animation, 'don't you see a beadle, now, if you can help it.
    Whenever I see a beadle in full fig, coming down a street on a Sunday
    at the head of a charity school, I am obliged to turn and run away, or
    I should hit him. The name of Beadle being out of the question, and the
    originator of the Institution for these poor foundlings having been a
    blessed creature of the name of Coram, we gave that name to Pet's little
    maid. At one time she was Tatty, and at one time she was Coram, until we
    got into a way of mixing the two names together, and now she is always
    Tattycoram.'

    'Your daughter,' said the other, when they had taken another silent turn
    to and fro, and, after standing for a moment at the wall glancing down
    at the sea, had resumed their walk, 'is your only child, I know, Mr
    Meagles. May I ask you--in no impertinent curiosity, but because I have
    had so much pleasure in your society, may never in this labyrinth of
    a world exchange a quiet word with you again, and wish to preserve an
    accurate remembrance of you and yours--may I ask you, if I have not
    gathered from your good wife that you have had other children?'

    'No. No,' said Mr Meagles. 'Not exactly other children. One other
    child.'

    'I am afraid I have inadvertently touched upon a tender theme.'

    'Never mind,' said Mr Meagles. 'If I am grave about it, I am not at all
    sorrowful. It quiets me for a moment, but does not make me unhappy. Pet
    had a twin sister who died when we could just see her eyes--exactly like
    Pet's--above the table, as she stood on tiptoe holding by it.'

    'Ah! indeed, indeed!'

    'Yes, and being practical people, a result has gradually sprung up in
    the minds of Mrs Meagles and myself which perhaps you may--or perhaps
    you may not--understand. Pet and her baby sister were so exactly alike,
    and so completely one, that in our thoughts we have never been able
    to separate them since. It would be of no use to tell us that our dead
    child was a mere infant. We have changed that child according to the
    changes in the child spared to us and always with us. As Pet has grown,
    that child has grown; as Pet has become more sensible and womanly, her
    sister has become more sensible and womanly by just the same degrees.
    It would be as hard to convince me that if I was to pass into the other
    world to-morrow, I should not, through the mercy of God, be received
    there by a daughter, just like Pet, as to persuade me that Pet herself
    is not a reality at my side.'

    'I understand you,' said the other, gently.

    'As to her,' pursued her father, 'the sudden loss of her little picture
    and playfellow, and her early association with that mystery in which we
    all have our equal share, but which is not often so forcibly presented
    to a child, has necessarily had some influence on her character. Then,
    her mother and I were not young when we married, and Pet has always had
    a sort of grown-up life with us, though we have tried to adapt ourselves
    to her. We have been advised more than once when she has been a
    little ailing, to change climate and air for her as often as we
    could--especially at about this time of her life--and to keep her
    amused. So, as I have no need to stick at a bank-desk now (though I have
            been poor enough in my time I assure you, or I should have married Mrs
            Meagles long before), we go trotting about the world. This is how you
    found us staring at the Nile, and the Pyramids, and the Sphinxes, and
    the Desert, and all the rest of it; and this is how Tattycoram will be a
    greater traveller in course of time than Captain Cook.'

    'I thank you,' said the other, 'very heartily for your confidence.'

    'Don't mention it,' returned Mr Meagles, 'I am sure you are quite
    welcome. And now, Mr Clennam, perhaps I may ask you whether you have yet
    come to a decision where to go next?'

    'Indeed, no. I am such a waif and stray everywhere, that I am liable to
    be drifted where any current may set.'

    'It's extraordinary to me--if you'll excuse my freedom in saying
    so--that you don't go straight to London,' said Mr Meagles, in the tone
    of a confidential adviser.

    'Perhaps I shall.'

    'Ay! But I mean with a will.'

    'I have no will. That is to say,'--he coloured a little,--'next to none
    that I can put in action now. Trained by main force; broken, not bent;
    heavily ironed with an object on which I was never consulted and which
    was never mine; shipped away to the other end of the world before I
    was of age, and exiled there until my father's death there, a year ago;
    always grinding in a mill I always hated; what is to be expected from me
    in middle life? Will, purpose, hope? All those lights were extinguished
    before I could sound the words.'

    'Light 'em up again!' said Mr Meagles.

    'Ah! Easily said. I am the son, Mr Meagles, of a hard father and
    mother. I am the only child of parents who weighed, measured, and priced
    everything; for whom what could not be weighed, measured, and priced,
    had no existence. Strict people as the phrase is, professors of a stern
    religion, their very religion was a gloomy sacrifice of tastes and
    sympathies that were never their own, offered up as a part of a bargain
    for the security of their possessions. Austere faces, inexorable
    discipline, penance in this world and terror in the next--nothing
    graceful or gentle anywhere, and the void in my cowed heart
    everywhere--this was my childhood, if I may so misuse the word as to
    apply it to such a beginning of life.'

    'Really though?' said Mr Meagles, made very uncomfortable by the picture
    offered to his imagination. 'That was a tough commencement. But come!
    You must now study, and profit by, all that lies beyond it, like a
    practical man.'

    'If the people who are usually called practical, were practical in your
    direction--'

    'Why, so they are!' said Mr Meagles.

    'Are they indeed?'

    'Well, I suppose so,' returned Mr Meagles, thinking about it. 'Eh? One
    can but _be_ practical, and Mrs Meagles and myself are nothing else.'

    'My unknown course is easier and more helpful than I had expected to
    find it, then,' said Clennam, shaking his head with his grave smile.
    'Enough of me. Here is the boat.'

    The boat was filled with the cocked hats to which Mr Meagles entertained
    a national objection; and the wearers of those cocked hats landed
    and came up the steps, and all the impounded travellers congregated
    together. There was then a mighty production of papers on the part of
    the cocked hats, and a calling over of names, and great work of signing,
    sealing, stamping, inking, and sanding, with exceedingly blurred,
    gritty, and undecipherable results. Finally, everything was done
    according to rule, and the travellers were at liberty to depart
    whithersoever they would.

    They made little account of stare and glare, in the new pleasure of
    recovering their freedom, but flitted across the harbour in gay boats,
    and reassembled at a great hotel, whence the sun was excluded by closed
    lattices, and where bare paved floors, lofty ceilings, and resounding
    corridors tempered the intense heat. There, a great table in a great
    room was soon profusely covered with a superb repast; and the quarantine
    quarters became bare indeed, remembered among dainty dishes, southern
    fruits, cooled wines, flowers from Genoa, snow from the mountain tops,
    and all the colours of the rainbow flashing in the mirrors.

    'But I bear those monotonous walls no ill-will now,' said Mr Meagles.
    'One always begins to forgive a place as soon as it's left behind; I
    dare say a prisoner begins to relent towards his prison, after he is let
    out.'

    They were about thirty in company, and all talking; but necessarily in
    groups. Father and Mother Meagles sat with their daughter between them,
    the last three on one side of the table: on the opposite side sat Mr
    Clennam; a tall French gentleman with raven hair and beard, of a swart
    and terrible, not to say genteelly diabolical aspect, but who had
    shown himself the mildest of men; and a handsome young Englishwoman,
    travelling quite alone, who had a proud observant face, and had either
    withdrawn herself from the rest or been avoided by the rest--nobody,
    herself excepted perhaps, could have quite decided which. The rest
    of the party were of the usual materials: travellers on business, and
    travellers for pleasure; officers from India on leave; merchants in
    the Greek and Turkey trades; a clerical English husband in a meek
    strait-waistcoat, on a wedding trip with his young wife; a majestic
    English mama and papa, of the patrician order, with a family of three
    growing-up daughters, who were keeping a journal for the confusion of
    their fellow-creatures; and a deaf old English mother, tough in travel,
    with a very decidedly grown-up daughter indeed, which daughter went
    sketching about the universe in the expectation of ultimately toning
    herself off into the married state.

    The reserved Englishwoman took up Mr Meagles in his last remark.

    'Do you mean that a prisoner forgives his prison?' said she, slowly and
    with emphasis.

    'That was my speculation, Miss Wade. I don't pretend to know positively
    how a prisoner might feel. I never was one before.'

    'Mademoiselle doubts,' said the French gentleman in his own language,
    'it's being so easy to forgive?'

    'I do.'

    Pet had to translate this passage to Mr Meagles, who never by any
    accident acquired any knowledge whatever of the language of any country
    into which he travelled. 'Oh!' said he. 'Dear me! But that's a pity,
    isn't it?'

    'That I am not credulous?' said Miss Wade.

    'Not exactly that. Put it another way. That you can't believe it easy to
    forgive.'

    'My experience,' she quietly returned, 'has been correcting my belief
    in many respects, for some years. It is our natural progress, I have
    heard.'

    'Well, well! But it's not natural to bear malice, I hope?' said Mr
    Meagles, cheerily.

    'If I had been shut up in any place to pine and suffer, I should always
    hate that place and wish to burn it down, or raze it to the ground. I
    know no more.'

    'Strong, sir?' said Mr Meagles to the Frenchman; it being another of his
    habits to address individuals of all nations in idiomatic English, with
    a perfect conviction that they were bound to understand it somehow.
    'Rather forcible in our fair friend, you'll agree with me, I think?'

    The French gentleman courteously replied, 'Plait-il?' To which Mr
    Meagles returned with much satisfaction, 'You are right. My opinion.'

    The breakfast beginning by-and-by to languish, Mr Meagles made the
    company a speech. It was short enough and sensible enough, considering
    that it was a speech at all, and hearty. It merely went to the effect
    that as they had all been thrown together by chance, and had all
    preserved a good understanding together, and were now about to disperse,
    and were not likely ever to find themselves all together again, what
    could they do better than bid farewell to one another, and give one
    another good-speed in a simultaneous glass of cool champagne all round
    the table? It was done, and with a general shaking of hands the assembly
    broke up for ever.

    The solitary young lady all this time had said no more. She rose with
    the rest, and silently withdrew to a remote corner of the great room,
    where she sat herself on a couch in a window, seeming to watch the
    reflection of the water as it made a silver quivering on the bars of the
    lattice. She sat, turned away from the whole length of the apartment, as
    if she were lonely of her own haughty choice. And yet it would have been
    as difficult as ever to say, positively, whether she avoided the rest,
    or was avoided.

    The shadow in which she sat, falling like a gloomy veil across her
    forehead, accorded very well with the character of her beauty. One could
    hardly see the face, so still and scornful, set off by the arched
    dark eyebrows, and the folds of dark hair, without wondering what its
    expression would be if a change came over it. That it could soften or
    relent, appeared next to impossible. That it could deepen into anger or
    any extreme of defiance, and that it must change in that direction when
    it changed at all, would have been its peculiar impression upon most
    observers. It was dressed and trimmed into no ceremony of expression.
    Although not an open face, there was no pretence in it. 'I am
    self-contained and self-reliant; your opinion is nothing to me; I have
    no interest in you, care nothing for you, and see and hear you with
    indifference'--this it said plainly. It said so in the proud eyes, in
    the lifted nostril, in the handsome but compressed and even cruel mouth.
    Cover either two of those channels of expression, and the third would
    have said so still. Mask them all, and the mere turn of the head would
    have shown an unsubduable nature.

    Pet had moved up to her (she had been the subject of remark among her
            family and Mr Clennam, who were now the only other occupants of the
            room), and was standing at her side.

    'Are you'--she turned her eyes, and Pet faltered--'expecting any one to
    meet you here, Miss Wade?'

    'I? No.'

    'Father is sending to the Poste Restante. Shall he have the pleasure of
    directing the messenger to ask if there are any letters for you?'

    'I thank him, but I know there can be none.'

    'We are afraid,' said Pet, sitting down beside her, shyly and half
    tenderly, 'that you will feel quite deserted when we are all gone.'

    'Indeed!'

    'Not,' said Pet, apologetically and embarrassed by her eyes, 'not, of
    course, that we are any company to you, or that we have been able to be
    so, or that we thought you wished it.'

    'I have not intended to make it understood that I did wish it.'

    'No. Of course. But--in short,' said Pet, timidly touching her hand as
    it lay impassive on the sofa between them, 'will you not allow Father to
    tender you any slight assistance or service? He will be very glad.'

    'Very glad,' said Mr Meagles, coming forward with his wife and Clennam.
    'Anything short of speaking the language, I shall be delighted to
    undertake, I am sure.'

    'I am obliged to you,' she returned, 'but my arrangements are made, and
    I prefer to go my own way in my own manner.'

    '_Do_ you?' said Mr Meagles to himself, as he surveyed her with a puzzled
    look. 'Well! There's character in that, too.'

    'I am not much used to the society of young ladies, and I am afraid I
    may not show my appreciation of it as others might. A pleasant journey
    to you. Good-bye!'

    She would not have put out her hand, it seemed, but that Mr Meagles put
    out his so straight before her that she could not pass it. She put hers
    in it, and it lay there just as it had lain upon the couch.

    'Good-bye!' said Mr Meagles. 'This is the last good-bye upon the list,
    for Mother and I have just said it to Mr Clennam here, and he only waits
    to say it to Pet. Good-bye! We may never meet again.'

    'In our course through life we shall meet the people who are coming to
    meet _us_, from many strange places and by many strange roads,' was the
    composed reply; 'and what it is set to us to do to them, and what it is
    set to them to do to us, will all be done.'

    There was something in the manner of these words that jarred upon Pet's
    ear. It implied that what was to be done was necessarily evil, and it
    caused her to say in a whisper, 'O Father!' and to shrink childishly, in
    her spoilt way, a little closer to him. This was not lost on the
    speaker.

    'Your pretty daughter,' she said, 'starts to think of such things. Yet,'
    looking full upon her, 'you may be sure that there are men and women
    already on their road, who have their business to do with _you_, and who
    will do it. Of a certainty they will do it. They may be coming hundreds,
    thousands, of miles over the sea there; they may be close at hand now;
they may be coming, for anything you know or anything you can do to
prevent it, from the vilest sweepings of this very town.'

With the coldest of farewells, and with a certain worn expression on her
beauty that gave it, though scarcely yet in its prime, a wasted look,
       she left the room.

       Now, there were many stairs and passages that she had to traverse in
       passing from that part of the spacious house to the chamber she had
       secured for her own occupation. When she had almost completed the
       journey, and was passing along the gallery in which her room was, she
       heard an angry sound of muttering and sobbing. A door stood open, and
       within she saw the attendant upon the girl she had just left; the maid
       with the curious name.

       She stood still, to look at this maid. A sullen, passionate girl! Her
       rich black hair was all about her face, her face was flushed and hot,
       and as she sobbed and raged, she plucked at her lips with an unsparing
       hand.

       'Selfish brutes!' said the girl, sobbing and heaving between whiles.
       'Not caring what becomes of me! Leaving me here hungry and thirsty and
       tired, to starve, for anything they care! Beasts! Devils! Wretches!'

       'My poor girl, what is the matter?'

       She looked up suddenly, with reddened eyes, and with her hands
       suspended, in the act of pinching her neck, freshly disfigured with
       great scarlet blots. 'It's nothing to you what's the matter. It don't
       signify to any one.'

       'O yes it does; I am sorry to see you so.'

       'You are not sorry,' said the girl. 'You are glad. You know you are
       glad. I never was like this but twice over in the quarantine yonder; and
       both times you found me. I am afraid of you.'

       'Afraid of me?'

       'Yes. You seem to come like my own anger, my own malice, my
       own--whatever it is--I don't know what it is. But I am ill-used, I am
       ill-used, I am ill-used!' Here the sobs and the tears, and the tearing
       hand, which had all been suspended together since the first surprise,
       went on together anew.

       The visitor stood looking at her with a strange attentive smile. It was
       wonderful to see the fury of the contest in the girl, and the bodily
       struggle she made as if she were rent by the Demons of old.

       'I am younger than she is by two or three years, and yet it's me that
       looks after her, as if I was old, and it's she that's always petted and
       called Baby! I detest the name. I hate her! They make a fool of her,
       they spoil her. She thinks of nothing but herself, she thinks no more of
       me than if I was a stock and a stone!' So the girl went on.

       'You must have patience.'

       'I _won't_ have patience!'

       'If they take much care of themselves, and little or none of you, you
       must not mind it.'

       I _will_ mind it.'

       'Hush! Be more prudent. You forget your dependent position.'

       'I don't care for that. I'll run away. I'll do some mischief. I won't
       bear it; I can't bear it; I shall die if I try to bear it!'

       The observer stood with her hand upon her own bosom, looking at the
       girl, as one afflicted with a diseased part might curiously watch the
       dissection and exposition of an analogous case.

       The girl raged and battled with all the force of her youth and fulness
       of life, until by little and little her passionate exclamations trailed
       off into broken murmurs as if she were in pain. By corresponding degrees
       she sank into a chair, then upon her knees, then upon the ground beside
       the bed, drawing the coverlet with her, half to hide her shamed head and
       wet hair in it, and half, as it seemed, to embrace it, rather than have
       nothing to take to her repentant breast.

       'Go away from me, go away from me! When my temper comes upon me, I
       am mad. I know I might keep it off if I only tried hard enough, and
       sometimes I do try hard enough, and at other times I don't and won't.
       What have I said! I knew when I said it, it was all lies. They think I
       am being taken care of somewhere, and have all I want. They are nothing
       but good to me. I love them dearly; no people could ever be kinder to a
       thankless creature than they always are to me. Do, do go away, for I am
       afraid of you. I am afraid of myself when I feel my temper coming, and I
       am as much afraid of you. Go away from me, and let me pray and cry
       myself better!'

       The day passed on; and again the wide stare stared itself out; and the
       hot night was on Marseilles; and through it the caravan of the morning,
       all dispersed, went their appointed ways. And thus ever by day and
       night, under the sun and under the stars, climbing the dusty hills and
       toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by
       sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and react on one
       another, move all we restless travellers through the pilgrimage of life.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Everyone is stuck in Marseilles in quarantine together before being allowed to cross the English Channel. Mr. Meagles is having a hissy fit about what a superboring quarantine is. He's kind of offended at the idea that he might have the plague, but also generally in a good mood - so it's a weird mix of joking around and actually ranting. Finally he calms down when he sees his daughter, Pet. She's a lovely, spoiled, bratty young woman. He sends her off with her mother and her maid Tattycoram to get ready to pack up. Arthur Clennam is all, "Tatty-what?" And so Meagles launches into the story of how Tattycoram got her name. Basically, the Meagleses went to the orphanage one day and were so sad to see all the sad orphans that they took one to be their maid. Since the only name she had was a randomly assigned one from the orphanage, they took part of it , and mushed it onto the last name of the orphanage's founder. Yeah, that really is about as crazy as it sounds. Actually, it's hard to know how to read the whole Tattycoram storyline throughout the novel. It seems like the Meagleses are good people, and this whole orphan-maid thing was meant to be a generous action... but clearly it's also got exploitation written all over it. The novel leaves it ambiguous, so you decide. So anyway. Meagles adds that the other reason they took in Tattycoram is that Pet had a twin sister who died as a very young girl, and they couldn't have any more children - so they wanted a companion for her. Seems like TMI to us, but Arthur is cool with it. He overshares right back, telling Meagles that he had a crappy childhood with bitter, cold, unloving, completely materialistic parents who "weighed, measured, and priced everything: for whom what could not be weighed, measured and priced, had no existence" . Yikes. Arthur has been in China for 20 years, and is now about 40. His dad died a year ago there and so he's coming back to mom in London. Finally quarantine is over. Meagles says he's over being imprisoned. Miss Wade, a beautiful woman traveling alone, says she'd never get over it. A French guy agrees. As everyone is leaving, Pet offers to help Miss Wade. Miss Wade doesn't need help and mostly wants everyone to just leave her alone. Meagles is kind of freaked out by the idea of a woman not wanting to be accompanied by someone. Miss Wade goes to pack and walks by a room where Tattycoram is throwing a temper tantrum on the floor. She is raving about being a servant, having to take care of Pet, and being treated crappily by the Meagleses. Miss Wade is fascinated. She kind of tries to calm her down in a perfunctory way, but mostly she just watches. Finally Tattycoram calms down, says that actually the Meagleses are really nice to her, and that she just has an anger management problem. Um, OK. See what we meant about the ambiguity of this situation?


prompt:
Chapter: It was a Sunday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening
church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked
and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous.
Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of
the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire
despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down
almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling,
       as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round.
       Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish
       relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no
       rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient
       world--all _taboo_ with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South
       Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home
       again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe
       but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind,
       or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the
       monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think
       what a weary life he led, and make the best of it--or the worst,
       according to the probabilities.

       At such a happy time, so propitious to the interests of religion and
       morality, Mr Arthur Clennam, newly arrived from Marseilles by way of
       Dover, and by Dover coach the Blue-eyed Maid, sat in the window of a
       coffee-house on Ludgate Hill. Ten thousand responsible houses surrounded
       him, frowning as heavily on the streets they composed, as if they were
       every one inhabited by the ten young men of the Calender's story, who
       blackened their faces and bemoaned their miseries every night. Fifty
       thousand lairs surrounded him where people lived so unwholesomely that
       fair water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be
       corrupt on Sunday morning; albeit my lord, their county member, was
       amazed that they failed to sleep in company with their butcher's meat.
       Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped
       for air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass. Through
       the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of
       a fine fresh river. What secular want could the million or so of
       human beings whose daily labour, six days in the week, lay among these
       Arcadian objects, from the sweet sameness of which they had no escape
       between the cradle and the grave--what secular want could they possibly
       have upon their seventh day? Clearly they could want nothing but a
       stringent policeman.

       Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill,
       counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of
       songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick
       people it might be the death of in the course of the year. As the hour
       approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating.
       At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively
       importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church,
       Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware
       that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low
       spirits, They _won't_ come, they _won't_ come, they _won't_ come! At the
       five minutes, it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the
       neighbourhood for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per
       second, as a groan of despair.

       'Thank Heaven!' said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell
       stopped.

       But its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the
       procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march on.
       'Heaven forgive me,' said he, 'and those who trained me. How I have
       hated this day!'

       There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his hands
       before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced
       business with the poor child by asking him in its title, why he was
       going to Perdition?--a piece of curiosity that he really, in a frock and
       drawers, was not in a condition to satisfy--and which, for the further
       attraction of his infant mind, had a parenthesis in every other line
       with some such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. c. iii, v. 6 &
       7. There was the sleepy Sunday of his boyhood, when, like a military
       deserter, he was marched to chapel by a picquet of teachers three times
       a day, morally handcuffed to another boy; and when he would willingly
       have bartered two meals of indigestible sermon for another ounce or
       two of inferior mutton at his scanty dinner in the flesh. There was the
       interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of face and
       unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible--bound, like her
       own construction of it, in the hardest, barest, and straitest boards,
       with one dinted ornament on the cover like the drag of a chain, and a
       wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of the leaves--as if it, of
       all books! were a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural
       affection, and gentle intercourse. There was the resentful Sunday of a
       little later, when he sat down glowering and glooming through the tardy
       length of the day, with a sullen sense of injury in his heart, and no
       more real knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament than
       if he had been bred among idolaters. There was a legion of Sundays,
       all days of unserviceable bitterness and mortification, slowly passing
       before him.

       'Beg pardon, sir,' said a brisk waiter, rubbing the table. 'Wish see
       bed-room?'

       'Yes. I have just made up my mind to do it.'

       'Chaymaid!' cried the waiter. 'Gelen box num seven wish see room!'

       'Stay!' said Clennam, rousing himself. 'I was not thinking of what I
       said; I answered mechanically. I am not going to sleep here. I am going
       home.'

       'Deed, sir? Chaymaid! Gelen box num seven, not go sleep here, gome.'

       He sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull houses
       opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants
       were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old
       places of imprisonment. Sometimes a face would appear behind the dingy
       glass of a window, and would fade away into the gloom as if it had seen
       enough of life and had vanished out of it. Presently the rain began to
       fall in slanting lines between him and those houses, and people began
       to collect under cover of the public passage opposite, and to look out
       hopelessly at the sky as the rain dropped thicker and faster. Then wet
       umbrellas began to appear, draggled skirts, and mud. What the mud had
       been doing with itself, or where it came from, who could say? But it
       seemed to collect in a moment, as a crowd will, and in five minutes to
       have splashed all the sons and daughters of Adam. The lamplighter was
       going his rounds now; and as the fiery jets sprang up under his touch,
       one might have fancied them astonished at being suffered to introduce
       any show of brightness into such a dismal scene.

       Mr Arthur Clennam took up his hat and buttoned his coat, and walked out.
       In the country, the rain would have developed a thousand fresh scents,
       and every drop would have had its bright association with some beautiful
       form of growth or life. In the city, it developed only foul stale
       smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt-stained, wretched addition to
       the gutters.

       He crossed by St Paul's and went down, at a long angle, almost to the
       water's edge, through some of the crooked and descending streets which
       lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between the river and
       Cheapside. Passing, now the mouldy hall of some obsolete Worshipful
       Company, now the illuminated windows of a Congregationless Church that
       seemed to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it out and
       discover its history; passing silent warehouses and wharves, and here
       and there a narrow alley leading to the river, where a wretched little
       bill, FOUND DROWNED, was weeping on the wet wall; he came at last to the
       house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black,
       standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square court-yard
       where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying
               much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty; behind it,
       a jumble of roots. It was a double house, with long, narrow,
       heavily-framed windows. Many years ago, it had had it in its mind to
       slide down sideways; it had been propped up, however, and was leaning on
       some half-dozen gigantic crutches: which gymnasium for the neighbouring
       cats, weather-stained, smoke-blackened, and overgrown with weeds,
       appeared in these latter days to be no very sure reliance.

       'Nothing changed,' said the traveller, stopping to look round. 'Dark and
       miserable as ever. A light in my mother's window, which seems never to
       have been extinguished since I came home twice a year from school, and
       dragged my box over this pavement. Well, well, well!'

       He went up to the door, which had a projecting canopy in carved work
       of festooned jack-towels and children's heads with water on the brain,
       designed after a once-popular monumental pattern, and knocked. A
       shuffling step was soon heard on the stone floor of the hall, and the
       door was opened by an old man, bent and dried, but with keen eyes.

       He had a candle in his hand, and he held it up for a moment to assist
       his keen eyes. 'Ah, Mr Arthur?' he said, without any emotion, 'you are
       come at last? Step in.'

       Mr Arthur stepped in and shut the door.

       'Your figure is filled out, and set,' said the old man, turning to look
       at him with the light raised again, and shaking his head; 'but you don't
       come up to your father in my opinion. Nor yet your mother.'

       'How is my mother?'

       'She is as she always is now. Keeps her room when not actually
       bedridden, and hasn't been out of it fifteen times in as many years,
       Arthur.' They had walked into a spare, meagre dining-room. The old man
       had put the candlestick upon the table, and, supporting his right elbow
       with his left hand, was smoothing his leathern jaws while he looked at
       the visitor. The visitor offered his hand. The old man took it coldly
       enough, and seemed to prefer his jaws, to which he returned as soon as
       he could.

       'I doubt if your mother will approve of your coming home on the Sabbath,
       Arthur,' he said, shaking his head warily.

       'You wouldn't have me go away again?'

       'Oh! I? I? I am not the master. It's not what _I_ would have. I have
       stood between your father and mother for a number of years. I don't
       pretend to stand between your mother and you.'

       'Will you tell her that I have come home?'

       'Yes, Arthur, yes. Oh, to be sure! I'll tell her that you have come
       home. Please to wait here. You won't find the room changed.' He took
       another candle from a cupboard, lighted it, left the first on the table,
       and went upon his errand. He was a short, bald old man, in a
       high-shouldered black coat and waistcoat, drab breeches, and long drab
       gaiters. He might, from his dress, have been either clerk or servant,
       and in fact had long been both. There was nothing about him in the way
       of decoration but a watch, which was lowered into the depths of its
       proper pocket by an old black ribbon, and had a tarnished copper key
       moored above it, to show where it was sunk. His head was awry, and
       he had a one-sided, crab-like way with him, as if his foundations had
       yielded at about the same time as those of the house, and he ought to
       have been propped up in a similar manner.

       'How weak am I,' said Arthur Clennam, when he was gone, 'that I could
       shed tears at this reception! I, who have never experienced anything
       else; who have never expected anything else.'

       He not only could, but did. It was the momentary yielding of a nature
       that had been disappointed from the dawn of its perceptions, but had not
       quite given up all its hopeful yearnings yet. He subdued it, took up the
       candle, and examined the room. The old articles of furniture were in
       their old places; the Plagues of Egypt, much the dimmer for the fly and
       smoke plagues of London, were framed and glazed upon the walls. There
       was the old cellaret with nothing in it, lined with lead, like a sort of
       coffin in compartments; there was the old dark closet, also with nothing
       in it, of which he had been many a time the sole contents, in days of
       punishment, when he had regarded it as the veritable entrance to that
       bourne to which the tract had found him galloping. There was the large,
       hard-featured clock on the sideboard, which he used to see bending its
       figured brows upon him with a savage joy when he was behind-hand with
       his lessons, and which, when it was wound up once a week with an iron
       handle, used to sound as if it were growling in ferocious anticipation
       of the miseries into which it would bring him. But here was the old man
       come back, saying, 'Arthur, I'll go before and light you.'

       Arthur followed him up the staircase, which was panelled off into spaces
       like so many mourning tablets, into a dim bed-chamber, the floor of
       which had gradually so sunk and settled, that the fire-place was in a
       dell. On a black bier-like sofa in this hollow, propped up behind with
       one great angular black bolster like the block at a state execution in
       the good old times, sat his mother in a widow's dress.

       She and his father had been at variance from his earliest remembrance.
       To sit speechless himself in the midst of rigid silence, glancing in
       dread from the one averted face to the other, had been the peacefullest
       occupation of his childhood. She gave him one glassy kiss, and four
       stiff fingers muffled in worsted. This embrace concluded, he sat down on
       the opposite side of her little table. There was a fire in the grate,
       as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a kettle on
       the hob, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a
       little mound of damped ashes on the top of the fire, and another little
       mound swept together under the grate, as there had been night and day
       for fifteen years. There was a smell of black dye in the airless room,
       which the fire had been drawing out of the crape and stuff of the
       widow's dress for fifteen months, and out of the bier-like sofa for
       fifteen years.

       'Mother, this is a change from your old active habits.'

       'The world has narrowed to these dimensions, Arthur,' she replied,
       glancing round the room. 'It is well for me that I never set my heart
       upon its hollow vanities.'

       The old influence of her presence and her stern strong voice, so
       gathered about her son, that he felt conscious of a renewal of the timid
       chill and reserve of his childhood.

       'Do you never leave your room, mother?'

       'What with my rheumatic affection, and what with its attendant debility
       or nervous weakness--names are of no matter now--I have lost the use
       of my limbs. I never leave my room. I have not been outside this door
       for--tell him for how long,' she said, speaking over her shoulder.

       'A dozen year next Christmas,' returned a cracked voice out of the
       dimness behind.

       'Is that Affery?' said Arthur, looking towards it.

       The cracked voice replied that it was Affery: and an old woman came
       forward into what doubtful light there was, and kissed her hand once;
       then subsided again into the dimness.

       'I am able,' said Mrs Clennam, with a slight motion of her
       worsted-muffled right hand toward a chair on wheels, standing before a
       tall writing cabinet close shut up, 'I am able to attend to my business
       duties, and I am thankful for the privilege. It is a great privilege.
       But no more of business on this day. It is a bad night, is it not?'

       'Yes, mother.'

       'Does it snow?'

       'Snow, mother? And we only yet in September?'

       'All seasons are alike to me,' she returned, with a grim kind of
       luxuriousness. 'I know nothing of summer and winter, shut up here.
       The Lord has been pleased to put me beyond all that.' With her cold grey
       eyes and her cold grey hair, and her immovable face, as stiff as the
       folds of her stony head-dress,--her being beyond the reach of the
       seasons seemed but a fit sequence to her being beyond the reach of all
       changing emotions.

       On her little table lay two or three books, her handkerchief, a pair of
       steel spectacles newly taken off, and an old-fashioned gold watch in a
       heavy double case. Upon this last object her son's eyes and her own now
       rested together.

       'I see that you received the packet I sent you on my father's death,
       safely, mother.'

       'You see.'

       'I never knew my father to show so much anxiety on any subject, as that
       his watch should be sent straight to you.'

       'I keep it here as a remembrance of your father.'

       'It was not until the last, that he expressed the wish; when he could
       only put his hand upon it, and very indistinctly say to me "your
       mother." A moment before, I thought him wandering in his mind, as he
       had been for many hours--I think he had no consciousness of pain in his
       short illness--when I saw him turn himself in his bed and try to open
       it.'

       'Was your father, then, not wandering in his mind when he tried to open
       it?'

       'No. He was quite sensible at that time.'

       Mrs Clennam shook her head; whether in dismissal of the deceased or
       opposing herself to her son's opinion, was not clearly expressed.

       'After my father's death I opened it myself, thinking there might be,
       for anything I knew, some memorandum there. However, as I need not tell
       you, mother, there was nothing but the old silk watch-paper worked in
       beads, which you found (no doubt) in its place between the cases, where
       I found and left it.'

       Mrs Clennam signified assent; then added, 'No more of business on this
       day,' and then added, 'Affery, it is nine o'clock.'

       Upon this, the old woman cleared the little table, went out of the room,
       and quickly returned with a tray on which was a dish of little rusks and
       a small precise pat of butter, cool, symmetrical, white, and plump. The
       old man who had been standing by the door in one attitude during the
       whole interview, looking at the mother up-stairs as he had looked at the
       son down-stairs, went out at the same time, and, after a longer absence,
       returned with another tray on which was the greater part of a bottle
       of port wine (which, to judge by his panting, he had brought from the
               cellar), a lemon, a sugar-basin, and a spice box. With these materials
       and the aid of the kettle, he filled a tumbler with a hot and
       odorous mixture, measured out and compounded with as much nicety as a
       physician's prescription. Into this mixture Mrs Clennam dipped certain
       of the rusks, and ate them; while the old woman buttered certain other
       of the rusks, which were to be eaten alone. When the invalid had eaten
       all the rusks and drunk all the mixture, the two trays were removed;
       and the books and the candle, watch, handkerchief, and spectacles were
       replaced upon the table. She then put on the spectacles and read certain
       passages aloud from a book--sternly, fiercely, wrathfully--praying that
       her enemies (she made them by her tone and manner expressly hers) might
       be put to the edge of the sword, consumed by fire, smitten by plagues
       and leprosy, that their bones might be ground to dust, and that they
       might be utterly exterminated. As she read on, years seemed to fall
       away from her son like the imaginings of a dream, and all the old dark
       horrors of his usual preparation for the sleep of an innocent child to
       overshadow him.

       She shut the book and remained for a little time with her face shaded by
       her hand. So did the old man, otherwise still unchanged in attitude; so,
       probably, did the old woman in her dimmer part of the room. Then the
       sick woman was ready for bed.

       'Good night, Arthur. Affery will see to your accommodation. Only touch
       me, for my hand is tender.' He touched the worsted muffling of her
       hand--that was nothing; if his mother had been sheathed in brass there
       would have been no new barrier between them--and followed the old man
       and woman down-stairs.

       The latter asked him, when they were alone together among the heavy
       shadows of the dining-room, would he have some supper?

       'No, Affery, no supper.'

       'You shall if you like,' said Affery. 'There's her tomorrow's partridge
       in the larder--her first this year; say the word and I'll cook it.'

       No, he had not long dined, and could eat nothing.

       'Have something to drink, then,' said Affery; 'you shall have some of
       her bottle of port, if you like. I'll tell Jeremiah that you ordered me
       to bring it you.'

       No; nor would he have that, either.

       'It's no reason, Arthur,' said the old woman, bending over him to
       whisper, 'that because I am afeared of my life of 'em, you should be.
       You've got half the property, haven't you?'

       'Yes, yes.'

       'Well then, don't you be cowed. You're clever, Arthur, an't you?'

       He nodded, as she seemed to expect an answer in the affirmative.

       'Then stand up against them! She's awful clever, and none but a clever
       one durst say a word to her. _He's_ a clever one--oh, he's a clever
       one!--and he gives it her when he has a mind to't, he does!'

       'Your husband does?'

       'Does? It makes me shake from head to foot, to hear him give it her. My
       husband, Jeremiah Flintwinch, can conquer even your mother. What can he
       be but a clever one to do that!'

       His shuffling footstep coming towards them caused her to retreat to the
       other end of the room. Though a tall, hard-favoured, sinewy old woman,
       who in her youth might have enlisted in the Foot Guards without much
       fear of discovery, she collapsed before the little keen-eyed crab-like
       old man.

       'Now, Affery,' said he, 'now, woman, what are you doing? Can't you find
       Master Arthur something or another to pick at?'

       Master Arthur repeated his recent refusal to pick at anything.

       'Very well, then,' said the old man; 'make his bed. Stir yourself.' His
       neck was so twisted that the knotted ends of his white cravat usually
       dangled under one ear; his natural acerbity and energy, always
       contending with a second nature of habitual repression, gave his
       features a swollen and suffused look; and altogether, he had a weird
       appearance of having hanged himself at one time or other, and of having
       gone about ever since, halter and all, exactly as some timely hand had
       cut him down.

       'You'll have bitter words together to-morrow, Arthur; you and your
       mother,' said Jeremiah. 'Your having given up the business on your
       father's death--which she suspects, though we have left it to you to
       tell her--won't go off smoothly.'

       'I have given up everything in life for the business, and the time came
       for me to give up that.'

       'Good!' cried Jeremiah, evidently meaning Bad. 'Very good! only don't
       expect me to stand between your mother and you, Arthur. I stood between
       your mother and your father, fending off this, and fending off that, and
       getting crushed and pounded betwixt em; and I've done with such work.'

       'You will never be asked to begin it again for me, Jeremiah.'

       'Good. I'm glad to hear it; because I should have had to decline it, if
       I had been. That's enough--as your mother says--and more than enough of
       such matters on a Sabbath night. Affery, woman, have you found what you
       want yet?'

       She had been collecting sheets and blankets from a press, and hastened
       to gather them up, and to reply, 'Yes, Jeremiah.' Arthur Clennam helped
       her by carrying the load himself, wished the old man good night, and
       went up-stairs with her to the top of the house.

       They mounted up and up, through the musty smell of an old close house,
       little used, to a large garret bed-room. Meagre and spare, like all the
       other rooms, it was even uglier and grimmer than the rest, by being the
       place of banishment for the worn-out furniture. Its movables were ugly
       old chairs with worn-out seats, and ugly old chairs without any seats;
       a threadbare patternless carpet, a maimed table, a crippled wardrobe,
       a lean set of fire-irons like the skeleton of a set deceased, a
       washing-stand that looked as if it had stood for ages in a hail of
       dirty soapsuds, and a bedstead with four bare atomies of posts, each
       terminating in a spike, as if for the dismal accommodation of lodgers
       who might prefer to impale themselves. Arthur opened the long low
       window, and looked out upon the old blasted and blackened forest of
       chimneys, and the old red glare in the sky, which had seemed to him once
       upon a time but a nightly reflection of the fiery environment that was
       presented to his childish fancy in all directions, let it look where it
       would.

       He drew in his head again, sat down at the bedside, and looked on at
       Affery Flintwinch making the bed.

       'Affery, you were not married when I went away.'

       She screwed her mouth into the form of saying 'No,' shook her head, and
       proceeded to get a pillow into its case.

       'How did it happen?'

       'Why, Jeremiah, o' course,' said Affery, with an end of the pillow-case
       between her teeth.

       'Of course he proposed it, but how did it all come about? I should have
       thought that neither of you would have married; least of all should I
       have thought of your marrying each other.'

       'No more should I,' said Mrs Flintwinch, tying the pillow tightly in its
       case.

       'That's what I mean. When did you begin to think otherwise?'

       'Never begun to think otherwise at all,' said Mrs Flintwinch.

       Seeing, as she patted the pillow into its place on the bolster, that he
       was still looking at her as if waiting for the rest of her reply,
       she gave it a great poke in the middle, and asked, 'How could I help
       myself?'

       'How could you help yourself from being married!'

       'O' course,' said Mrs Flintwinch. 'It was no doing o' mine. I'd never
       thought of it. I'd got something to do, without thinking, indeed! She
       kept me to it (as well as he) when she could go about, and she could go
       about then.'

       'Well?'

       'Well?' echoed Mrs Flintwinch. 'That's what I said myself. Well! What's
       the use of considering? If them two clever ones have made up their minds
       to it, what's left for _me_ to do? Nothing.'

       'Was it my mother's project, then?'

       'The Lord bless you, Arthur, and forgive me the wish!' cried Affery,
       speaking always in a low tone. 'If they hadn't been both of a mind in
       it, how could it ever have been? Jeremiah never courted me; t'ant likely
       that he would, after living in the house with me and ordering me
       about for as many years as he'd done. He said to me one day, he said,
       "Affery," he said, "now I am going to tell you something. What do you
       think of the name of Flintwinch?" "What do I think of it?" I says.
       "Yes," he said, "because you're going to take it," he said. "Take it?" I
       says. "Jere-_mi_-ah?" Oh! he's a clever one!'

       Mrs Flintwinch went on to spread the upper sheet over the bed, and the
       blanket over that, and the counterpane over that, as if she had quite
       concluded her story.

       'Well?' said Arthur again.

       'Well?' echoed Mrs Flintwinch again. 'How could I help myself? He said
       to me, "Affery, you and me must be married, and I'll tell you why. She's
       failing in health, and she'll want pretty constant attendance up in
       her room, and we shall have to be much with her, and there'll be nobody
       about now but ourselves when we're away from her, and altogether it will
       be more convenient. She's of my opinion," he said, "so if you'll put
       your bonnet on next Monday morning at eight, we'll get it over."' Mrs
       Flintwinch tucked up the bed.

       'Well?'

       'Well?' repeated Mrs Flintwinch, 'I think so! I sits me down and says
       it. Well!--Jeremiah then says to me, "As to banns, next Sunday being the
       third time of asking (for I've put 'em up a fortnight), is my reason for
       naming Monday. She'll speak to you about it herself, and now she'll find
       you prepared, Affery." That same day she spoke to me, and she said, "So,
       Affery, I understand that you and Jeremiah are going to be married. I
       am glad of it, and so are you, with reason. It is a very good thing for
       you, and very welcome under the circumstances to me. He is a sensible
       man, and a trustworthy man, and a persevering man, and a pious man."
       What could I say when it had come to that? Why, if it had been--a
       smothering instead of a wedding,' Mrs Flintwinch cast about in her mind
       with great pains for this form of expression, 'I couldn't have said a
       word upon it, against them two clever ones.'

       'In good faith, I believe so.'

       'And so you may, Arthur.'

       'Affery, what girl was that in my mother's room just now?'

       'Girl?' said Mrs Flintwinch in a rather sharp key.

       'It was a girl, surely, whom I saw near you--almost hidden in the dark
       corner?'

       'Oh! She? Little Dorrit? _She_'s nothing; she's a whim of--hers.' It was a
       peculiarity of Affery Flintwinch that she never spoke of Mrs Clennam
       by name. 'But there's another sort of girls than that about. Have you
       forgot your old sweetheart? Long and long ago, I'll be bound.'

       'I suffered enough from my mother's separating us, to remember her.
       I recollect her very well.'

       'Have you got another?'

       'No.'

       'Here's news for you, then. She's well to do now, and a widow. And if
       you like to have her, why you can.'

       'And how do you know that, Affery?'

       'Them two clever ones have been speaking about it.--There's Jeremiah on
       the stairs!' She was gone in a moment.

       Mrs Flintwinch had introduced into the web that his mind was busily
       weaving, in that old workshop where the loom of his youth had stood, the
       last thread wanting to the pattern. The airy folly of a boy's love had
       found its way even into that house, and he had been as wretched under
       its hopelessness as if the house had been a castle of romance. Little
       more than a week ago at Marseilles, the face of the pretty girl from
       whom he had parted with regret, had had an unusual interest for him, and
       a tender hold upon him, because of some resemblance, real or imagined,
       to this first face that had soared out of his gloomy life into the
       bright glories of fancy. He leaned upon the sill of the long low window,
       and looking out upon the blackened forest of chimneys again, began to
       dream; for it had been the uniform tendency of this man's life--so much
       was wanting in it to think about, so much that might have been better
       directed and happier to speculate upon--to make him a dreamer, after
       all.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Arthur gets to London on Sunday. The narrator has a little aside to talk about how dumb it is that everything is closed on Sundays, the one day of the week that laborers have off. So anyway. Arthur sits at an inn thinking back on his miserable childhood. His mom was a crazy religious nutcase, and she and his dad were constantly fighting. Also, he went to some hardcore fundamentalist school. He decides not to stay at the inn but to go home. Home is a miserable falling-down wreck of a place. It's also where the Clennams' lending and financial services business is. Flintwinch, the old, nasty servant, answers the door, totally not excited to see Arthur. Flintwinch tells Arthur that Mrs. Clennam is now an invalid who hasn't left her room in fifteen years. And she is still a horrible, horrible, horrible old woman. Mrs. Clennam couldn't care less that Arthur is back. She seems weirdly proud of being kind of a quadriplegic. She asks if it's snowing outside, and Arthur is all, "Um, it's September." She says haughtily that she's forgotten all about the seasons. OK, wacko. Arthur reminds his mom about the watch his dad sent her with his final words on the back. She eats dinner, then reads a section from the Bible that is all about smiting enemies as violently as possible. Affery, the elderly maid, takes Arthur to his room. There, Affery tells Arthur how while he was gone Mrs. Clennam and Flintwinch decided he would marry her . Affery is totally terrified of both of them and repeats over and over how she clearly had no choice but to do whatever they told her. She does seem kind of hopeful that Arthur will stand up to them, since he owns half the business. Arthur asks about the tiny girl he saw in his mom's room doing embroidery, and Affery tells him that that's Little Dorrit, who is "nothing; a whim" of Mrs. Clennam . Flintwinch comes and tells Arthur that he knows he wants out of the firm, and that his mom is going to be totally mad about it. Honestly, though, we're not sure his mom is ever not mad, so, not a big deal there. Just before he goes to sleep, Affery tells Arthur that his old girlfriend, who he left behind when he went to China, is now a rich widow and can be his for the asking. Arthur falls asleep dreaming of her pretty face.


prompt:
Chapter: When Mrs Flintwinch dreamed, she usually dreamed, unlike the son of her
old mistress, with her eyes shut. She had a curiously vivid dream that
night, and before she had left the son of her old mistress many hours.
In fact it was not at all like a dream; it was so very real in every
respect. It happened in this wise.

The bed-chamber occupied by Mr and Mrs Flintwinch was within a few paces
of that to which Mrs Clennam had been so long confined. It was not on
the same floor, for it was a room at the side of the house, which was
approached by a steep descent of a few odd steps, diverging from the
main staircase nearly opposite to Mrs Clennam's door. It could scarcely
be said to be within call, the walls, doors, and panelling of the old
place were so cumbrous; but it was within easy reach, in any undress,
      at any hour of the night, in any temperature. At the head of the bed
      and within a foot of Mrs Flintwinch's ear, was a bell, the line of which
      hung ready to Mrs Clennam's hand. Whenever this bell rang, up started
      Affery, and was in the sick room before she was awake.

      Having got her mistress into bed, lighted her lamp, and given her good
      night, Mrs Flintwinch went to roost as usual, saving that her lord had
      not yet appeared. It was her lord himself who became--unlike the
      last theme in the mind, according to the observation of most
      philosophers--the subject of Mrs Flintwinch's dream.

      It seemed to her that she awoke after sleeping some hours, and found
      Jeremiah not yet abed. That she looked at the candle she had left
      burning, and, measuring the time like King Alfred the Great, was
      confirmed by its wasted state in her belief that she had been asleep for
      some considerable period. That she arose thereupon, muffled herself up
      in a wrapper, put on her shoes, and went out on the staircase, much
      surprised, to look for Jeremiah.

      The staircase was as wooden and solid as need be, and Affery went
      straight down it without any of those deviations peculiar to dreams.
      She did not skim over it, but walked down it, and guided herself by the
      banisters on account of her candle having died out. In one corner of
      the hall, behind the house-door, there was a little waiting-room, like a
      well-shaft, with a long narrow window in it as if it had been ripped up.
      In this room, which was never used, a light was burning.

      Mrs Flintwinch crossed the hall, feeling its pavement cold to her
      stockingless feet, and peeped in between the rusty hinges on the door,
      which stood a little open. She expected to see Jeremiah fast asleep or
      in a fit, but he was calmly seated in a chair, awake, and in his usual
      health. But what--hey?--Lord forgive us!--Mrs Flintwinch muttered some
      ejaculation to this effect, and turned giddy.

      For, Mr Flintwinch awake, was watching Mr Flintwinch asleep. He sat on
      one side of the small table, looking keenly at himself on the other side
      with his chin sunk on his breast, snoring. The waking Flintwinch had his
      full front face presented to his wife; the sleeping Flintwinch was
      in profile. The waking Flintwinch was the old original; the sleeping
      Flintwinch was the double, just as she might have distinguished between
      a tangible object and its reflection in a glass, Affery made out this
      difference with her head going round and round.

      If she had had any doubt which was her own Jeremiah, it would have been
      resolved by his impatience. He looked about him for an offensive weapon,
      caught up the snuffers, and, before applying them to the cabbage-headed
      candle, lunged at the sleeper as though he would have run him through
      the body.

      'Who's that? What's the matter?' cried the sleeper, starting.

      Mr Flintwinch made a movement with the snuffers, as if he would have
      enforced silence on his companion by putting them down his throat; the
      companion, coming to himself, said, rubbing his eyes, 'I forgot where I
      was.'

      'You have been asleep,' snarled Jeremiah, referring to his watch, 'two
      hours. You said you would be rested enough if you had a short nap.'

      'I have had a short nap,' said Double.

      'Half-past two o'clock in the morning,' muttered Jeremiah. 'Where's your
      hat? Where's your coat? Where's the box?'

      'All here,' said Double, tying up his throat with sleepy carefulness in
      a shawl. 'Stop a minute. Now give me the sleeve--not that sleeve, the
      other one. Ha! I'm not as young as I was.' Mr Flintwinch had pulled
      him into his coat with vehement energy. 'You promised me a second glass
      after I was rested.'

      'Drink it!' returned Jeremiah, 'and--choke yourself, I was going
      to say--but go, I mean.' At the same time he produced the identical
      port-wine bottle, and filled a wine-glass.

      'Her port-wine, I believe?' said Double, tasting it as if he were in the
      Docks, with hours to spare. 'Her health.'

      He took a sip.

      'Your health!'

      He took another sip.

      'His health!'

      He took another sip.

      'And all friends round St Paul's.' He emptied and put down the
      wine-glass half-way through this ancient civic toast, and took up the
      box. It was an iron box some two feet square, which he carried under his
      arms pretty easily. Jeremiah watched his manner of adjusting it, with
      jealous eyes; tried it with his hands, to be sure that he had a firm
      hold of it; bade him for his life be careful what he was about; and then
      stole out on tiptoe to open the door for him. Affery, anticipating
      the last movement, was on the staircase. The sequence of things was
      so ordinary and natural, that, standing there, she could hear the door
      open, feel the night air, and see the stars outside.

      But now came the most remarkable part of the dream. She felt so afraid
      of her husband, that being on the staircase, she had not the power to
      retreat to her room (which she might easily have done before he had
              fastened the door), but stood there staring. Consequently when he came
      up the staircase to bed, candle in hand, he came full upon her. He
      looked astonished, but said not a word. He kept his eyes upon her, and
      kept advancing; and she, completely under his influence, kept retiring
      before him. Thus, she walking backward and he walking forward, they
      came into their own room. They were no sooner shut in there, than Mr
      Flintwinch took her by the throat, and shook her until she was black in
      the face.

      'Why, Affery, woman--Affery!' said Mr Flintwinch. 'What have you been
      dreaming of? Wake up, wake up! What's the matter?'

      'The--the matter, Jeremiah?' gasped Mrs Flintwinch, rolling her eyes.

      'Why, Affery, woman--Affery! You have been getting out of bed in your
      sleep, my dear! I come up, after having fallen asleep myself, below, and
      find you in your wrapper here, with the nightmare. Affery, woman,' said
      Mr Flintwinch, with a friendly grin on his expressive countenance, 'if
      you ever have a dream of this sort again, it'll be a sign of your being
      in want of physic. And I'll give you such a dose, old woman--such a
      dose!'

      Mrs Flintwinch thanked him and crept into bed.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Affery goes to bed. Then she has what she thinks is a dream. She "dreams" that she goes downstairs and sees Flintwinch talking to himself - no, literally, talking to a double of himself. She totally freaks out and becomes sort of catatonic and paralyzed with fear. The double picks up an iron box and goes out the door. Flintwinch sees Affery on the stairs and pushes her back to the bedroom silently. Then he chokes the living daylights out of her, while shaking her awake. He tells her she's been having a nightmare and if she has another one, he's going to give her a big dose of medicine. You know, the beating-the-crap-out-of-you kind of medicine.