I don't want to swing a cat. I never do swing a cat.
Therefore, what does that signify to ME!'

I tried to ascertain whether Mr. Dick had any understanding of the
causes of this sudden and great change in my aunt's affairs. As I might
have expected, he had none at all. The only account he could give of it
was, that my aunt had said to him, the day before yesterday, 'Now, Dick,
are you really and truly the philosopher I take you for?' That then
he had said, Yes, he hoped so. That then my aunt had said, 'Dick, I
am ruined.' That then he had said, 'Oh, indeed!' That then my aunt had
praised him highly, which he was glad of. And that then they had come to
me, and had had bottled porter and sandwiches on the road.

Mr. Dick was so very complacent, sitting on the foot of the bed, nursing
his leg, and telling me this, with his eyes wide open and a surprised
smile, that I am sorry to say I was provoked into explaining to him
that ruin meant distress, want, and starvation; but I was soon bitterly
reproved for this harshness, by seeing his face turn pale, and tears
course down his lengthened cheeks, while he fixed upon me a look of such
unutterable woe, that it might have softened a far harder heart than
mine. I took infinitely greater pains to cheer him up again than I had
taken to depress him; and I soon understood (as I ought to have known at
first) that he had been so confident, merely because of his faith in
the wisest and most wonderful of women, and his unbounded reliance on my
intellectual resources. The latter, I believe, he considered a match for
any kind of disaster not absolutely mortal.

'What can we do, Trotwood?' said Mr. Dick. 'There's the Memorial-'

'To be sure there is,' said I. 'But all we can do just now, Mr. Dick,
is to keep a cheerful countenance, and not let my aunt see that we are
thinking about it.'

He assented to this in the most earnest manner; and implored me, if I
should see him wandering an inch out of the right course, to recall him
by some of those superior methods which were always at my command. But I
regret to state that the fright I had given him proved too much for his
best attempts at concealment. All the evening his eyes wandered to my
aunt's face, with an expression of the most dismal apprehension, as if
he saw her growing thin on the spot. He was conscious of this, and put
a constraint upon his head; but his keeping that immovable, and sitting
rolling his eyes like a piece of machine