lways respected me and ordered
himself dutifully to me. He does to this hour. With an empty place in
his heart that he has never known the meaning of, he has turned
away from me and gone his separate road; but even that he has done
considerately and with deference. These have been his relations towards
me. Yours have been of a much slighter kind, spread over a much shorter
time. When you have sat at your needle in my room, you have been in fear
of me, but you have supposed me to have been doing you a kindness; you
are better informed now, and know me to have done you an injury. Your
misconstruction and misunderstanding of the cause in which, and the
motives with which, I have worked out this work, is lighter to endure
than his would be. I would not, for any worldly recompense I can
imagine, have him in a moment, however blindly, throw me down from the
station I have held before him all his life, and change me altogether
into something he would cast out of his respect, and think detected and
exposed. Let him do it, if it must be done, when I am not here to see
it. Let me never feel, while I am still alive, that I die before his
face, and utterly perish away from him, like one consumed by lightning
and swallowed by an earthquake.'

Her pride was very strong in her, the pain of it and of her old passions
was very sharp with her, when she thus expressed herself. Not less so,
when she added:

'Even now, I see YOU shrink from me, as if I had been cruel.'

Little Dorrit could not gainsay it. She tried not to show it, but she
recoiled with dread from the state of mind that had burnt so fiercely
and lasted so long. It presented itself to her, with no sophistry upon
it, in its own plain nature.

'I have done,' said Mrs Clennam,'what it was given to me to do. I have
set myself against evil; not against good. I have been an instrument
of severity against sin. Have not mere sinners like myself been
commissioned to lay it low in all time?'

'In all time?' repeated Little Dorrit.

'Even if my own wrong had prevailed with me, and my own vengeance had
moved me, could I have found no justification? None in the old days
when the innocent perished with the guilty 2 a thousand to one? When the
wrath of the hater of the unrighteous was not slaked even in blood, and
yet found favour?'

'O, Mrs Clennam, Mrs Clennam,' said Little Dorrit, 'angry feelings and
unforgiving deeds are no comfort and no guide to you and me. My life
has been p