nothing but wearing costly dresses and "going into society,"
and Tip did little but play cards and bet on horse-races. Only Little
Dorrit, through all, kept her old sweet self unchanged.

Wherever they went they lived in splendid hotels. In Venice the palace
they occupied was six times as big as the whole Marshalsea. Mr. Dorrit,
when he remembered Arthur Clennam at all, spoke of him as an upstart who
had intruded his presence upon them in their poverty, and quickly
forgot all his kindness and his efforts to help and comfort them.

But Little Dorrit never forgot. Her present existence seemed a dream.
She tried to care for her father as she used to do, but he was afraid
people would think he had not been used to servants (foolish man!) so
she lost even the little pleasure of her old prison life in the
Marshalsea. There were valets and maids now to do all the little things
she had once loved to do with her own hands, and she seemed to be no
longer of use to him. She loved her father as dearly as she always had,
but now she had begun to feel that she could never see him as he used to
be before his prison days, because first poverty and now wealth had
changed him. The old sad shadow came over her. He grew angry at her and
chid her, and hurt her. It seemed he had entirely forgotten the old days
when she slaved so for him.

Poor little Dorrit! She was far lonelier now than she had ever been
before in the debtors' prison--lonelier and unhappier than Arthur
Clennam in London could have guessed. The gay, fashionable life of her
brother and sister did not attract her. She was timid of joining in
their gaieties. She asked leave only to be left alone, and went about
the city in a gondola in a quiet, scared, lost manner. It often seemed
to her as if the Marshalsea must be just behind the next big building,
or Mrs. Clennam's house, where she had first met Arthur, just around
the next corner. And she used to look into gondolas as they passed, as
if she might see Arthur any minute.

In the days of their prison-poverty Fanny had occasionally earned some
money by dancing at a theater. There she had met a silly, chuckle-headed
young man, the son of a Mrs. Merdle, and he had been fascinated by her
beauty. Now, in their wealth, he saw Fanny again and fell even more
deeply in love with her. Mrs. Merdle was a cold-hearted, artificial
woman, who kept a parrot that was always shrieking, and who thought of
nothing but riches and society. She w