customers as found it more convenient to take away their dinners in
stomachs than in their hands, Packed their purchases in solitude. Fanny
opening her reticule, as they surveyed these things, produced from that
repository a shilling and handed it to Uncle. Uncle, after not looking
at it a little while, divined its object, and muttering 'Dinner? Ha!
Yes, yes, yes!' slowly vanished from them into the mist.

'Now, Amy,' said her sister, 'come with me, if you are not too tired to
walk to Harley Street, Cavendish Square.'

The air with which she threw off this distinguished address and the toss
she gave to her new bonnet (which was more gauzy than serviceable), made
her sister wonder; however, she expressed her readiness to go to Harley
Street, and thither they directed their steps. Arrived at that grand
destination, Fanny singled out the handsomest house, and knocking at the
door, inquired for Mrs Merdle. The footman who opened the door, although
he had powder on his head and was backed up by two other footmen
likewise powdered, not only admitted Mrs Merdle to be at home, but asked
Fanny to walk in. Fanny walked in, taking her sister with her; and they
went up-stairs with powder going before and powder stopping behind,
and were left in a spacious semicircular drawing-room, one of several
drawing-rooms, where there was a parrot on the outside of a golden cage
holding on by its beak, with its scaly legs in the air, and putting
itself into many strange upside-down postures. This peculiarity has been
observed in birds of quite another feather, climbing upon golden wires.

The room was far more splendid than anything Little Dorrit had ever
imagined, and would have been splendid and costly in any eyes. She
looked in amazement at her sister and would have asked a question,
but that Fanny with a warning frown pointed to a curtained doorway of
communication with another room. The curtain shook next moment, and a
lady, raising it with a heavily ringed hand, dropped it behind her again
as she entered.

The lady was not young and fresh from the hand of Nature, but was young
and fresh from the hand of her maid. She had large unfeeling handsome
eyes, and dark unfeeling handsome hair, and a broad unfeeling handsome
bosom, and was made the most of in every particular. Either because she
had a cold, or because it suited her face, she wore a rich white
fillet tied over her head and under her chin. And if ever there were
an unfeeling han