It was easier for Tip to bring her to her senses than for her to bring

him to understand that the Father of the Marshalsea would be beside

himself if he knew the truth. The thing was incomprehensible to Tip, and

altogether a fanciful notion. He yielded to it in that light only, when

he submitted to her entreaties, backed by those of his uncle and sister.

There was no want of precedent for his return; it was accounted for

to the father in the usual way; and the collegians, with a better

comprehension of the pious fraud than Tip, supported it loyally.

This was the life, and this the history, of the child of the Marshalsea

at twenty-two. With a still surviving attachment to the one miserable

yard and block of houses as her birthplace and home, she passed to and

fro in it shrinkingly now, with a womanly consciousness that she was

pointed out to every one. Since she had begun to work beyond the walls,

she had found it necessary to conceal where she lived, and to come and

go as secretly as she could, between the free city and the iron gates,

outside of which she had never slept in her life. Her original timidity

had grown with this concealment, and her light step and her little

figure shunned the thronged streets while they passed along them.

Worldly wise in hard and poor necessities, she was innocent in all

things else. Innocent, in the mist through which she saw her father,

and the prison, and the turbid living river that flowed through it and

flowed on. This was the life, and this the history, of Little Dorrit; now going

home upon a dull September evening, observed at a distance by Arthur

Clennam. This was the life, and this the history, of Little Dorrit;

turning at the end of London Bridge, recrossing it, going back again,

passing on to Saint George's Church, turning back suddenly once more,

and flitting in at the open outer gate and little court-yard of the

Marshalsea.




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