Fortune-Telling

Little Dorrit received a call that same evening from Mr Plornish, who, having intimated that he wished to speak to her privately, in a series of coughs so very noticeable as to favour the idea that her father, as regarded her seamstress occupation, was an illustration of the axiom that there are no such stone- blind men as those who will not see, obtained an audience with her on the common staircase outside the door.

‘There’s been a lady at our place to-day, Miss Dorrit,’ Plornish growled, ‘and another one along with her as is a old vixen if ever I met with such. The way she snapped a person’s head off, dear me!’

The mild Plornish was at first quite unable to get his mind away from Mr F.’s Aunt. ‘For,’ said he, to excuse himself, ‘she is, I do assure you, the winegariest party.’

At length, by a great effort, he detached himself from the subject sufficiently to observe:

‘But she’s neither here nor there just at present. The other lady, she’s Mr Casby’s daughter; and if Mr Casby an’t well off, none better, it an’t through any fault of Pancks. For, as to Pancks, he does, he really does, he does indeed!’

Mr Plornish, after his usual manner, was a little obscure, but conscientiously emphatic.

‘And what she come to our place for,’ he pursued, ‘was to leave word that if Miss Dorrit would step up to that card—which it’s Mr Casby’s house that is, and Pancks he has a office at the back, where he really does, beyond belief—she would be glad for to engage her. She was a old and a dear friend, she said particular, of Mr Clennam, and hoped for to prove herself a useful friend to his friend. Them was her words. Wishing to know whether Miss Dorrit could come to-morrow morning, I said I would see you, Miss, and inquire, and look round there to-night, to say yes, or, if you was engaged to-morrow, when.’

‘I can go to-morrow, thank you,’ said Little Dorrit. ‘This is very kind of you, but you are always kind.’

Mr Plornish, with a modest disavowal of his merits, opened the room door for her readmission, and followed her in with such an exceedingly bald pretence of not having been out at all, that her father might have observed it without being very suspicious. In his affable unconsciousness, however, he took no heed. Plornish, after a little conversation, in which he blended his former duty as a Collegian with his present privilege as a humble outside friend, qualified again by his low estate as a plasterer, took his leave; making the tour of the prison before he left, and looking on at a game of skittles with the mixed feelings of an old inhabitant who had his private reasons for believing that it might be his destiny to come back again.

Early in the morning, Little Dorrit, leaving Maggy in high domestic trust, set off for the Patriarchal tent. She went by the Iron Bridge, though it cost her a penny, and walked more slowly in that part of her journey than in any other. At five minutes before eight her hand was on the Patriarchal knocker, which was quite as high as she could reach.

She gave Mrs Finching’s card to the young woman who opened the door, and the young woman told her that ‘Miss Flora’—Flora having, on her return to the parental roof, reinvested herself with the title under which she had lived there—was not yet out of her bedroom, but she was to please to walk up into Miss Flora’s sitting-room. She walked up into Miss Flora’s sitting-room, as in duty bound, and there found a breakfast-table comfortably laid for two, with a supplementary tray upon it laid for one. The young woman, disappearing for a few moments, returned to say that she was to please to take a chair by the fire, and to take off her bonnet and make herself at home. But Little Dorrit, being bashful, and not used to make herself at home on such occasions, felt at a loss how to do it; so she was still sitting near the door with her bonnet on, when Flora came in in a hurry half an hour afterwards.

Flora was so sorry to have kept her waiting, and good gracious why did she sit out there in the cold when she had expected to find her by the fire reading the paper, and hadn’t that heedless girl given her the message then, and had she really been in her bonnet all this time, and pray for goodness sake let


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