ses, she folded her small arms and shook her
head, and conveyed a relenting expression into her very-wide-open black
eyes.

'It ain't right of you to ask it, Miss Floy, for you know I can't refuse
you, but Mrs Richards and me will see what can be done, if Mrs Richards
likes, I may wish, you see, to take a voyage to Chaney, Mrs Richards,
but I mayn't know how to leave the London Docks.'

Richards assented to the proposition.

'This house ain't so exactly ringing with merry-making,' said Miss
Nipper, 'that one need be lonelier than one must be. Your Toxes and
your Chickses may draw out my two front double teeth, Mrs Richards, but
that's no reason why I need offer 'em the whole set.'

This proposition was also assented to by Richards, as an obvious one.

'So I'm able, I'm sure,'said Susan Nipper, 'to live friendly, Mrs
Richards, while Master Paul continues a permanency, if the means can be
planned out without going openly against orders, but goodness gracious
Miss Floy, you haven't got your things off yet, you naughty child, you
haven't, come along!'

With these words, Susan Nipper, in a transport of coercion, made a
charge at her young ward, and swept her out of the room.

The child, in her grief and neglect, was so gentle, so quiet, and
uncomplaining; was possessed of so much affection that no one seemed to
care to have, and so much sorrowful intelligence that no one seemed to
mind or think about the wounding of, that Polly's heart was sore when
she was left alone again. In the simple passage that had taken place
between herself and the motherless little girl, her own motherly heart
had been touched no less than the child's; and she felt, as the child
did, that there was something of confidence and interest between them
from that moment.

Notwithstanding Mr Toodle's great reliance on Polly, she was perhaps in
point of artificial accomplishments very little his superior. She had
been good-humouredly working and drudging for her life all her life,
and was a sober steady-going person, with matter-of-fact ideas about the
butcher and baker, and the division of pence into farthings. But she
was a good plain sample of a nature that is ever, in the mass, better,
truer, higher, nobler, quicker to feel, and much more constant to
retain, all tenderness and pity, self-denial and devotion, than the
nature of men. And, perhaps, unlearned as she was, she could have
brought a dawning knowledge home to Mr Dombey at that early da