. To have no work to do was strange, but not half so strange as having

glided into a corner where she had no one to think for, nothing to plan

and contrive, no cares of others to load herself with. Strange as that

was, it was far stranger yet to find a space between herself and her

father, where others occupied themselves in taking care of him, and

where she was never expected to be. At first, this was so much more

unlike her old experience than even the mountains themselves, that she

had been unable to resign herself to it, and had tried to retain her

old place about him.

But he had spoken to her alone, and had said that

people--ha--people in an exalted position, my dear, must scrupulously

exact respect from their dependents; and that for her, his daughter,

Miss Amy Dorrit, of the sole remaining branch of the Dorrits of

Dorsetshire, to be known to--hum--to occupy herself in fulfilling the

functions of--ha hum--a valet, would be incompatible with that respect.

Therefore, my dear, he--ha--he laid his parental injunctions upon

her, to remember that she was a lady, who had now to conduct herself

with--hum--a proper pride, and to preserve the rank of a lady;

and consequently he requested her to abstain from doing what would

occasion--ha--unpleasant and derogatory remarks. She had obeyed without

a murmur. Thus it had been brought about that she now sat in her corner

of the luxurious carriage with her little patient hands folded before

her, quite displaced even from the last point of the old standing ground

in life on which her feet had lingered.

It was from this position that all she saw appeared unreal; the more

surprising the scenes, the more they resembled the unreality of her

own inner life as she went through its vacant places all day long. The

gorges of the Simplon, its enormous depths and thundering waterfalls,

the wonderful road, the points of danger where a loose wheel or a

faltering horse would have been destruction, the descent into Italy, the

opening of that beautiful land as the rugged mountain-chasm widened and

let them out from a gloomy and dark imprisonment--all a dream--only the

old mean Marshalsea a reality. Nay, even the old mean Marshalsea was

shaken to its foundations when she pictured it without her father. She

could scarcely believe that the prisoners were still lingering in the

close yard, that the mean rooms were still every one tenanted, and that

the turnkey still stood in the Lodge letting people in and out, all just

as she well knew it to be.

With a remembrance of her father's old life in prison hanging about her

like the burden of a sorrowful tune, Little Dorrit would wake from a

dream of her birth-place into a whole day's dream. The painted room in

which she awoke, often a humbled state-chamber in a dilapidated palace,

would begin it; with its wild red autumnal vine-leaves overhanging the

glass, its orange-trees on the cracked white terrace outside the window,

a group of monks and peasants in the little street below, misery and

magnificence wrestling with each other upon every rood of ground in

the prospect, no matter how widely diversified, and misery throwing

magnificence with the strength of fate. To this would succeed a

labyrinth of bare passages and pillared galleries, with the family

procession already preparing in the quadrangle below, through the

carriages and luggage being brought together by the servants for the

day's journey.




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