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.

 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.

