Chapter: As the city clocks struck nine on Monday morning, Mrs Clennam was
wheeled by Jeremiah Flintwinch of the cut-down aspect to her tall
cabinet. When she had unlocked and opened it, and had settled herself
at its desk, Jeremiah withdrew--as it might be, to hang himself more
effectually--and her son appeared.

'Are you any better this morning, mother?'

She shook her head, with the same austere air of luxuriousness that she
had shown over-night when speaking of the weather. 'I shall never be
better any more. It is well for me, Arthur, that I know it and can bear
it.'

Sitting with her hands laid separately upon the desk, and the tall
cabinet towering before her, she looked as if she were performing on a
dumb church organ. Her son thought so (it was an old thought with him),
     while he took his seat beside it.

     She opened a drawer or two, looked over some business papers, and put
     them back again. Her severe face had no thread of relaxation in it, by
     which any explorer could have been guided to the gloomy labyrinth of her
     thoughts.

     'Shall I speak of our affairs, mother? Are you inclined to enter upon
     business?'

     'Am I inclined, Arthur? Rather, are you? Your father has been dead a
     year and more. I have been at your disposal, and waiting your pleasure,
     ever since.'

     'There was much to arrange before I could leave; and when I did leave, I
     travelled a little for rest and relief.'

     She turned her face towards him, as not having heard or understood his
     last words.

     'For rest and relief.'

     She glanced round the sombre room, and appeared from the motion of her
     lips to repeat the words to herself, as calling it to witness how little
     of either it afforded her.

     'Besides, mother, you being sole executrix, and having the direction and
     management of the estate, there remained little business, or I might say
     none, that I could transact, until you had had time to arrange matters
     to your satisfaction.'

     'The accounts are made out,' she returned. 'I have them here. The
     vouchers have all been examined and passed. You can inspect them when
     you like, Arthur; now, if you please.'

     'It is quite enough, mother, to know that the business is completed.
     Shall I proceed then?'

     'Why not?' she said, in her frozen way.

     'Mother, our House has done less and less for some years past, and our
     dealings have been progressively on the decline. We have never shown
     much confidence, or invited much; we have attached no people to us; the
     track we have kept is not the track of the time; and we have been
     left far behind. I need not dwell on this to you, mother. You know it
     necessarily.'

     'I know what you mean,' she answered, in a qualified tone.

     'Even this old house in which we speak,' pursued her son, 'is an
     instance of what I say. In my father's earlier time, and in his uncle's
     time before him, it was a place of business--really a place of business,
     and business resort. Now, it is a mere anomaly and incongruity here, out
     of date and out of purpose. All our consignments have long been made to
     Rovinghams' the commission-merchants; and although, as a check upon
     them, and in the stewardship of my father's resources, your judgment and
     watchfulness have been actively exerted, still those qualities would
     have influenced my father's fortunes equally, if you had lived in any
     private dwelling: would they not?'

     'Do you consider,' she returned, without answering his question, 'that
     a house serves no purpose, Arthur, in sheltering your infirm and
     afflicted--justly infirm and righteously afflicted--mother?'

     'I was speaking only of business purposes.'

     'With what object?'

     'I am coming to it.'

     'I foresee,' she returned, fixing her eyes upon him, 'what it is.
     But the Lord forbid that I should repine under any visitation. In my
     sinfulness I merit bitter disappointment, and I accept it.'

     'Mother, I grieve to hear you speak like this, though I have had my
     apprehensions that you would--'

     'You knew I would. You knew _me_,' she interrupted.

     Her son paused for a moment. He had struck fire out of her, and was
     surprised. 'Well!' she said, relapsing into stone. 'Go on. Let me hear.'

     'You have anticipated, mother, that I decide for my part, to abandon
     the business. I have done with it. I will not take upon myself to advise
     you; you will continue it, I see. If I had any influence with you, I
     would simply use it to soften your judgment of me in causing you this
     disappointment: to represent to you that I have lived the half of a long
     term of life, and have never before set my own will against yours. I
     cannot say that I have been able to conform myself, in heart and spirit,
     to your rules; I cannot say that I believe my forty years have been
     profitable or pleasant to myself, or any one; but I have habitually
     submitted, and I only ask you to remember it.'

     Woe to the suppliant, if such a one there were or ever had been, who had
     any concession to look for in the inexorable face at the cabinet. Woe to
     the defaulter whose appeal lay to the tribunal where those severe eyes
     presided. Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion,
     veiled in gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and
     destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts as
     we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her. Smite
     Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I would do,
     and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower of stone she
     built up to scale Heaven.

     'Have you finished, Arthur, or have you anything more to say to me? I
     think there can be nothing else. You have been short, but full of matter!'

     'Mother, I have yet something more to say. It has been upon my mind,
     night and day, this long time. It is far more difficult to say than what
     I have said. That concerned myself; this concerns us all.'

     'Us all! Who are us all?'

     'Yourself, myself, my dead father.'

     She took her hands from the desk; folded them in her lap; and sat
     looking towards the fire, with the impenetrability of an old Egyptian
     sculpture.

     'You knew my father infinitely better than I ever knew him; and his
     reserve with me yielded to you. You were much the stronger, mother, and
     directed him. As a child, I knew it as well as I know it now. I knew
     that your ascendancy over him was the cause of his going to China to
     take care of the business there, while you took care of it here (though
             I do not even now know whether these were really terms of separation
             that you agreed upon); and that it was your will that I should remain
     with you until I was twenty, and then go to him as I did. You will not
     be offended by my recalling this, after twenty years?'

     'I am waiting to hear why you recall it.'

     He lowered his voice, and said, with manifest reluctance, and against
     his will:

     'I want to ask you, mother, whether it ever occurred to you to
     suspect--'

     At the word Suspect, she turned her eyes momentarily upon her son, with
     a dark frown. She then suffered them to seek the fire, as before; but
     with the frown fixed above them, as if the sculptor of old Egypt had
     indented it in the hard granite face, to frown for ages.

     '--that he had any secret remembrance which caused him trouble of
     mind--remorse? Whether you ever observed anything in his conduct
     suggesting that; or ever spoke to him upon it, or ever heard him hint at
     such a thing?'

     'I do not understand what kind of secret remembrance you mean to infer
     that your father was a prey to,' she returned, after a silence. 'You
     speak so mysteriously.'

     'Is it possible, mother,' her son leaned forward to be the nearer to her
     while he whispered it, and laid his hand nervously upon her desk, 'is
     it possible, mother, that he had unhappily wronged any one, and made no
     reparation?'

     Looking at him wrathfully, she bent herself back in her chair to keep
     him further off, but gave him no reply.

     'I am deeply sensible, mother, that if this thought has never at any
     time flashed upon you, it must seem cruel and unnatural in me, even in
     this confidence, to breathe it. But I cannot shake it off. Time and
     change (I have tried both before breaking silence) do nothing to wear it
     out.  Remember, I was with my father. Remember, I saw his face when he
     gave the watch into my keeping, and struggled to express that he sent it
     as a token you would understand, to you. Remember, I saw him at the last
     with the pencil in his failing hand, trying to write some word for you
     to read, but to which he could give no shape. The more remote and cruel
     this vague suspicion that I have, the stronger the circumstances that
     could give it any semblance of probability to me. For Heaven's sake, let
     us examine sacredly whether there is any wrong entrusted to us to set
     right. No one can help towards it, mother, but you.'

     Still so recoiling in her chair that her overpoised weight moved it,
     from time to time, a little on its wheels, and gave her the appearance
     of a phantom of fierce aspect gliding away from him, she interposed her
     left arm, bent at the elbow with the back of her hand towards her face,
     between herself and him, and looked at him in a fixed silence.

     'In grasping at money and in driving hard bargains--I have begun, and I
     must speak of such things now, mother--some one may have been grievously
     deceived, injured, ruined. You were the moving power of all this
     machinery before my birth; your stronger spirit has been infused into
     all my father's dealings for more than two score years. You can set
     these doubts at rest, I think, if you will really help me to discover
     the truth. Will you, mother?'

     He stopped in the hope that she would speak. But her grey hair was not
     more immovable in its two folds, than were her firm lips.

     'If reparation can be made to any one, if restitution can be made to any
     one, let us know it and make it. Nay, mother, if within my means, let _me_
     make it. I have seen so little happiness come of money; it has brought
     within my knowledge so little peace to this house, or to any one
     belonging to it, that it is worth less to me than to another. It can buy
     me nothing that will not be a reproach and misery to me, if I am haunted
     by a suspicion that it darkened my father's last hours with remorse, and
     that it is not honestly and justly mine.'

     There was a bell-rope hanging on the panelled wall, some two or three yards
     from the cabinet. By a swift and sudden action of her foot, she drove her
     wheeled chair rapidly back to it and pulled it violently--still holding her
     arm up in its shield-like posture, as if he were striking at her, and she
     warding off the blow.

     A girl came hurrying in, frightened.

     'Send Flintwinch here!'

     In a moment the girl had withdrawn, and the old man stood within the
     door. 'What! You're hammer and tongs, already, you two?' he said, coolly
     stroking his face. 'I thought you would be. I was pretty sure of it.'

     'Flintwinch!' said the mother, 'look at my son. Look at him!'

     'Well, I _am_ looking at him,' said Flintwinch.

     She stretched out the arm with which she had shielded herself, and as
     she went on, pointed at the object of her anger.

     'In the very hour of his return almost--before the shoe upon his foot is
     dry--he asperses his father's memory to his mother! Asks his mother
     to become, with him, a spy upon his father's transactions through a
     lifetime! Has misgivings that the goods of this world which we have
     painfully got together early and late, with wear and tear and toil and
     self-denial, are so much plunder; and asks to whom they shall be given
     up, as reparation and restitution!'

     Although she said this raging, she said it in a voice so far from being
     beyond her control that it was even lower than her usual tone. She also
     spoke with great distinctness.

     'Reparation!' said she. 'Yes, truly! It is easy for him to talk of
     reparation, fresh from journeying and junketing in foreign lands, and
     living a life of vanity and pleasure. But let him look at me, in prison,
     and in bonds here. I endure without murmuring, because it is appointed
     that I shall so make reparation for my sins. Reparation! Is there none
     in this room? Has there been none here this fifteen years?'

     Thus was she always balancing her bargains with the Majesty of heaven,
     posting up the entries to her credit, strictly keeping her set-off, and
     claiming her due. She was only remarkable in this, for the force
     and emphasis with which she did it. Thousands upon thousands do it,
     according to their varying manner, every day.

     'Flintwinch, give me that book!'

     The old man handed it to her from the table. She put two fingers between
     the leaves, closed the book upon them, and held it up to her son in
     a threatening way.

     'In the days of old, Arthur, treated of in this commentary, there were
     pious men, beloved of the Lord, who would have cursed their sons for
     less than this: who would have sent them forth, and sent whole nations
     forth, if such had supported them, to be avoided of God and man, and
     perish, down to the baby at the breast. But I only tell you that if you
     ever renew that theme with me, I will renounce you; I will so dismiss
     you through that doorway, that you had better have been motherless from
     your cradle. I will never see or know you more. And if, after all, you
     were to come into this darkened room to look upon me lying dead, my body
     should bleed, if I could make it, when you came near me.'

     In part relieved by the intensity of this threat, and in part (monstrous
             as the fact is) by a general impression that it was in some sort a
     religious proceeding, she handed back the book to the old man, and was
     silent.

    'Now,' said Jeremiah; 'premising that I'm not going to stand between you
two, will you let me ask (as I _have_ been called in, and made a third)
    what is all this about?'

    'Take your version of it,' returned Arthur, finding it left to him to
    speak, 'from my mother. Let it rest there. What I have said, was said to
    my mother only.'

    'Oh!' returned the old man. 'From your mother? Take it from your mother?
    Well! But your mother mentioned that you had been suspecting your father.
    That's not dutiful, Mr Arthur. Who will you be suspecting next?'

    'Enough,' said Mrs Clennam, turning her face so that it was addressed
    for the moment to the old man only. 'Let no more be said about this.'

    'Yes, but stop a bit, stop a bit,' the old man persisted. 'Let us see
    how we stand. Have you told Mr Arthur that he mustn't lay offences at
    his father's door? That he has no right to do it? That he has no ground
    to go upon?'

    'I tell him so now.'

    'Ah! Exactly,' said the old man. 'You tell him so now. You hadn't told
    him so before, and you tell him so now. Ay, ay! That's right! You know I
    stood between you and his father so long, that it seems as if death had
    made no difference, and I was still standing between you. So I will, and
    so in fairness I require to have that plainly put forward. Arthur, you
    please to hear that you have no right to mistrust your father, and have
    no ground to go upon.'

    He put his hands to the back of the wheeled chair, and muttering to
    himself, slowly wheeled his mistress back to her cabinet. 'Now,' he
    resumed, standing behind her: 'in case I should go away leaving things
    half done, and so should be wanted again when you come to the other half
    and get into one of your flights, has Arthur told you what he means to
    do about the business?'

    'He has relinquished it.'

    'In favour of nobody, I suppose?'

    Mrs Clennam glanced at her son, leaning against one of the windows. He
    observed the look and said, 'To my mother, of course. She does what she
    pleases.'

    'And if any pleasure,' she said after a short pause, 'could arise for me
    out of the disappointment of my expectations that my son, in the prime
    of his life, would infuse new youth and strength into it, and make it
    of great profit and power, it would be in advancing an old and faithful
    servant. Jeremiah, the captain deserts the ship, but you and I will sink
    or float with it.'

    Jeremiah, whose eyes glistened as if they saw money, darted a sudden
    look at the son, which seemed to say, 'I owe _you_ no thanks for this;
    _you_ have done nothing towards it!' and then told the mother that he
    thanked her, and that Affery thanked her, and that he would never desert
    her, and that Affery would never desert her. Finally, he hauled up his
    watch from its depths, and said, 'Eleven. Time for your oysters!' and with
    that change of subject, which involved no change of expression or manner,
    rang the bell.

    But Mrs Clennam, resolved to treat herself with the greater rigour for
    having been supposed to be unacquainted with reparation, refused to
    eat her oysters when they were brought. They looked tempting; eight in
    number, circularly set out on a white plate on a tray covered with a
    white napkin, flanked by a slice of buttered French roll, and a little
    compact glass of cool wine and water; but she resisted all persuasions,
    and sent them down again--placing the act to her credit, no doubt, in
    her Eternal Day-Book.

    This refection of oysters was not presided over by Affery, but by the
    girl who had appeared when the bell was rung; the same who had been in
    the dimly-lighted room last night. Now that he had an opportunity of
    observing her, Arthur found that her diminutive figure, small features,
    and slight spare dress, gave her the appearance of being much younger
    than she was. A woman, probably of not less than two-and-twenty, she
    might have been passed in the street for little more than half that
    age. Not that her face was very youthful, for in truth there was more
    consideration and care in it than naturally belonged to her utmost
    years; but she was so little and light, so noiseless and shy, and
    appeared so conscious of being out of place among the three hard elders,
    that she had all the manner and much of the appearance of a subdued
    child.

    In a hard way, and in an uncertain way that fluctuated between patronage
    and putting down, the sprinkling from a watering-pot and hydraulic
    pressure, Mrs Clennam showed an interest in this dependent. Even in the
    moment of her entrance, upon the violent ringing of the bell, when the
    mother shielded herself with that singular action from the son, Mrs
    Clennam's eyes had had some individual recognition in them, which seemed
    reserved for her. As there are degrees of hardness in the hardest metal,
    and shades of colour in black itself, so, even in the asperity of Mrs
    Clennam's demeanour towards all the rest of humanity and towards Little
    Dorrit, there was a fine gradation.

    Little Dorrit let herself out to do needlework. At so much a day--or at
    so little--from eight to eight, Little Dorrit was to be hired. Punctual
    to the moment, Little Dorrit appeared; punctual to the moment, Little
    Dorrit vanished. What became of Little Dorrit between the two eights was
    a mystery.

    Another of the moral phenomena of Little Dorrit. Besides her
    consideration money, her daily contract included meals. She had an
    extraordinary repugnance to dining in company; would never do so, if
    it were possible to escape. Would always plead that she had this bit of
    work to begin first, or that bit of work to finish first; and would, of
    a certainty, scheme and plan--not very cunningly, it would seem, for she
    deceived no one--to dine alone. Successful in this, happy in carrying
    off her plate anywhere, to make a table of her lap, or a box, or the
    ground, or even as was supposed, to stand on tip-toe, dining moderately
    at a mantel-shelf; the great anxiety of Little Dorrit's day was set at
    rest.

    It was not easy to make out Little Dorrit's face; she was so retiring,
    plied her needle in such removed corners, and started away so scared if
    encountered on the stairs. But it seemed to be a pale transparent face,
    quick in expression, though not beautiful in feature, its soft hazel
    eyes excepted. A delicately bent head, a tiny form, a quick little pair
    of busy hands, and a shabby dress--it must needs have been very shabby
    to look at all so, being so neat--were Little Dorrit as she sat at work.

    For these particulars or generalities concerning Little Dorrit, Mr
    Arthur was indebted in the course of the day to his own eyes and to Mrs
    Affery's tongue. If Mrs Affery had had any will or way of her own, it
    would probably have been unfavourable to Little Dorrit. But as 'them two
    clever ones'--Mrs Affery's perpetual reference, in whom her personality
    was swallowed up--were agreed to accept Little Dorrit as a matter of
    course, she had nothing for it but to follow suit. Similarly, if the
    two clever ones had agreed to murder Little Dorrit by candlelight, Mrs
    Affery, being required to hold the candle, would no doubt have done it.

    In the intervals of roasting the partridge for the invalid chamber, and
    preparing a baking-dish of beef and pudding for the dining-room, Mrs
    Affery made the communications above set forth; invariably putting
    her head in at the door again after she had taken it out, to enforce
    resistance to the two clever ones. It appeared to have become a perfect
    passion with Mrs Flintwinch, that the only son should be pitted against
    them.

    In the course of the day, too, Arthur looked through the whole house.
    Dull and dark he found it. The gaunt rooms, deserted for years upon
    years, seemed to have settled down into a gloomy lethargy from which
    nothing could rouse them again. The furniture, at once spare and
    lumbering, hid in the rooms rather than furnished them, and there was
    no colour in all the house; such colour as had ever been there, had long
    ago started away on lost sunbeams--got itself absorbed, perhaps, into
    flowers, butterflies, plumage of birds, precious stones, what not. There
    was not one straight floor from the foundation to the roof; the ceilings
    were so fantastically clouded by smoke and dust, that old women might
    have told fortunes in them better than in grouts of tea; the dead-cold
    hearths showed no traces of having ever been warmed but in heaps of soot
    that had tumbled down the chimneys, and eddied about in little
    dusky whirlwinds when the doors were opened. In what had once been
    a drawing-room, there were a pair of meagre mirrors, with dismal
    processions of black figures carrying black garlands, walking round
    the frames; but even these were short of heads and legs, and one
    undertaker-like Cupid had swung round on its own axis and got upside
    down, and another had fallen off altogether. The room Arthur Clennam's
    deceased father had occupied for business purposes, when he first
    remembered him, was so unaltered that he might have been imagined still
    to keep it invisibly, as his visible relict kept her room up-stairs;
    Jeremiah Flintwinch still going between them negotiating. His picture,
    dark and gloomy, earnestly speechless on the wall, with the eyes
    intently looking at his son as they had looked when life departed from
    them, seemed to urge him awfully to the task he had attempted; but as
    to any yielding on the part of his mother, he had now no hope, and as to
    any other means of setting his distrust at rest, he had abandoned hope a
    long time. Down in the cellars, as up in the bed-chambers, old objects
    that he well remembered were changed by age and decay, but were still in
    their old places; even to empty beer-casks hoary with cobwebs, and empty
    wine-bottles with fur and fungus choking up their throats. There, too,
    among unusual bottle-racks and pale slants of light from the yard above,
    was the strong room stored with old ledgers, which had as musty and
    corrupt a smell as if they were regularly balanced, in the dead small
    hours, by a nightly resurrection of old book-keepers.

    The baking-dish was served up in a penitential manner on a shrunken
    cloth at an end of the dining-table, at two o'clock, when he dined with
    Mr Flintwinch, the new partner. Mr Flintwinch informed him that his
    mother had recovered her equanimity now, and that he need not fear her
    again alluding to what had passed in the morning. 'And don't you lay
    offences at your father's door, Mr Arthur,' added Jeremiah, 'once for
    all, don't do it! Now, we have done with the subject.'

    Mr Flintwinch had been already rearranging and dusting his own
    particular little office, as if to do honour to his accession to new
    dignity. He resumed this occupation when he was replete with beef, had
    sucked up all the gravy in the baking-dish with the flat of his knife,
    and had drawn liberally on a barrel of small beer in the scullery. Thus
    refreshed, he tucked up his shirt-sleeves and went to work again; and Mr
    Arthur, watching him as he set about it, plainly saw that his father's
    picture, or his father's grave, would be as communicative with him as
    this old man.

    'Now, Affery, woman,' said Mr Flintwinch, as she crossed the hall. 'You
    hadn't made Mr Arthur's bed when I was up there last. Stir yourself.
    Bustle.'

    But Mr Arthur found the house so blank and dreary, and was so unwilling
    to assist at another implacable consignment of his mother's enemies
    (perhaps himself among them) to mortal disfigurement and immortal ruin,
    that he announced his intention of lodging at the coffee-house where he
    had left his luggage. Mr Flintwinch taking kindly to the idea of getting
    rid of him, and his mother being indifferent, beyond considerations of
    saving, to most domestic arrangements that were not bounded by the walls
    of her own chamber, he easily carried this point without new offence.
    Daily business hours were agreed upon, which his mother, Mr Flintwinch,
    and he, were to devote together to a necessary checking of books and
    papers; and he left the home he had so lately found, with depressed
    heart.

    But Little Dorrit?

    The business hours, allowing for intervals of invalid regimen of oysters
    and partridges, during which Clennam refreshed himself with a walk,
    were from ten to six for about a fortnight. Sometimes Little Dorrit was
    employed at her needle, sometimes not, sometimes appeared as a humble
    visitor: which must have been her character on the occasion of his
    arrival. His original curiosity augmented every day, as he watched for
    her, saw or did not see her, and speculated about her. Influenced by his
    predominant idea, he even fell into a habit of discussing with himself
    the possibility of her being in some way associated with it. At last he
    resolved to watch Little Dorrit and know more of her story.

 The next day Arthur tells his mom that he doesn't want to work for the Clennam House of Terror - ahem, we mean the Clennam House of Banking or Some Other Kind of Unspecified Financial Stuff - any longer. As predicted, Mrs. C. gets mad. But she gets a grip and declares that this is exactly the kind of God-sent punishment that she deserves. She gets a kick out of keeping kind of a balance sheet with Heaven, with her own sins on one side and whatever punishments she inflicts on herself or thinks are inflicted on her on the other. Arthur then asks if it's possible that his dad had some kind of regret that he hadn't dealt with. Maybe a person he did something bad to? Someone their company had ripped off? Arthur begs his mom to help him figure this out and promises to pay restitution to the wronged person out of his own pocket. Mrs. Clennam calls Flintwinch, then throws a tantrum. How dare Arthur accuse his dead father of anything? And how is she supposed to spy on her dead husband? Flintwinch kind of doesn't get involved, but he tells Arthur his father never did anything wrong and says not to accuse or suspect him. Then he makes Mrs. Clennam tell Arthur the same thing. Little Dorrit brings in Mrs. Clennam's food, but Mrs. C. decides to punish herself by not eating. Meanwhile, Arthur is shocked to realize that Little Dorrit is not actually a young girl, like he'd thought, but a 22-year-old woman who is so tiny that she looks like a kid. Affery gives Arthur the deets on Little Dorrit. She does needlework at the Clennam house for twelve hours a day. No one knows what she does with the other twelve hours. She refuses to eat in public or in front of anyone else. Arthur also notices that his mom seems slightly nicer to Little Dorrit than to anyone else. Arthur decides that the house is so depressing that he'd rather stay at the inn after all. Also, he decides to start stalking Little Dorrit to find out more about her. And since this is way before he could just Google her or read her Facebook page, he has to actually physically follow her around.

