with the ease and clearness of a person tumbling up the treadmill.
That done, Miss Pankey was borne away to be shampoo'd; and Master
Bitherstone to have something else done to him with salt water, from
which he always returned very blue and dejected. Paul and Florence went
out in the meantime on the beach with Wickam--who was constantly in
tears--and at about noon Mrs Pipchin presided over some Early Readings.
It being a part of Mrs Pipchin's system not to encourage a child's mind
to develop and expand itself like a young flower, but to open it by
force like an oyster, the moral of these lessons was usually of a
violent and stunning character: the hero--a naughty boy--seldom, in the
mildest catastrophe, being finished off anything less than a lion, or a
bear.

Such was life at Mrs Pipchin's. On Saturday Mr Dombey came down; and
Florence and Paul would go to his Hotel, and have tea They passed the
whole of Sunday with him, and generally rode out before dinner; and on
these occasions Mr Dombey seemed to grow, like Falstaff's assailants,
and instead of being one man in buckram, to become a dozen. Sunday
evening was the most melancholy evening in the week; for Mrs Pipchin
always made a point of being particularly cross on Sunday nights. Miss
Pankey was generally brought back from an aunt's at Rottingdean, in deep
distress; and Master Bitherstone, whose relatives were all in India, and
who was required to sit, between the services, in an erect position
with his head against the parlour wall, neither moving hand nor foot,
suffered so acutely in his young spirits that he once asked Florence,
on a Sunday night, if she could give him any idea of the way back to
Bengal.

But it was generally said that Mrs Pipchin was a woman of system with
children; and no doubt she was. Certainly the wild ones went home tame
enough, after sojourning for a few months beneath her hospitable roof.
It was generally said, too, that it was highly creditable of Mrs Pipchin
to have devoted herself to this way of life, and to have made such
a sacrifice of her feelings, and such a resolute stand against her
troubles, when Mr Pipchin broke his heart in the Peruvian mines.

At this exemplary old lady, Paul would sit staring in his little
arm-chair by the fire, for any length of time. He never seemed to know
what weariness was, when he was looking fixedly at Mrs Pipchin. He was
not fond of her; he was not afraid of her; but in those old, old moods
of his,