iting and wearing, and things would be very
different.

At which identical evening hour and minute, the Patriarch--who had
floated serenely through the Yard in the forenoon before the harrying
began, with the express design of getting up this trustfulness in his
shining bumps and silken locks--at which identical hour and minute,
that first-rate humbug of a thousand guns was heavily floundering in the
little Dock of his exhausted Tug at home, and was saying, as he turned
his thumbs:

'A very bad day's work, Pancks, very bad day's work. It seems to me,
sir, and I must insist on making this observation forcibly in justice to
myself, that you ought to have got much more money, much more money.'

CHAPTER 24. 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 wixen 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