me for standing on my own
defence against a crew of plunderers, who could suck me dry by driblets?
Not blaming me for getting a little hoard together?'

He came up to them, and his wife folded her hands upon his shoulder, and
shook her head as she laid it on her hands.

'There, there, there!' urged Mr Boffin, not unkindly. 'Don't take on,
old lady.'

'But I can't bear to see you so, my dear.'

'Nonsense! Recollect we are not our old selves. Recollect, we must
scrunch or be scrunched. Recollect, we must hold our own. Recollect,
money makes money. Don't you be uneasy, Bella, my child; don't you be
doubtful. The more I save, the more you shall have.'

Bella thought it was well for his wife that she was musing with her
affectionate face on his shoulder; for there was a cunning light in
his eyes as he said all this, which seemed to cast a disagreeable
illumination on the change in him, and make it morally uglier.

Chapter 6

THE GOLDEN DUSTMAN FALLS INTO WORSE COMPANY

It had come to pass that Mr Silas Wegg now rarely attended the minion of
fortune and the worm of the hour, at his (the worm's and minion's) own
house, but lay under general instructions to await him within a certain
margin of hours at the Bower. Mr Wegg took this arrangement in great
dudgeon, because the appointed hours were evening hours, and those he
considered precious to the progress of the friendly move. But it was
quite in character, he bitterly remarked to Mr Venus, that the upstart
who had trampled on those eminent creatures, Miss Elizabeth, Master
George, Aunt Jane, and Uncle Parker, should oppress his literary man.

The Roman Empire having worked out its destruction, Mr Boffin next
appeared in a cab with Rollin's Ancient History, which valuable work
being found to possess lethargic properties, broke down, at about the
period when the whole of the army of Alexander the Macedonian (at that
time about forty thousand strong) burst into tears simultaneously, on
his being taken with a shivering fit after bathing. The Wars of the
Jews, likewise languishing under Mr Wegg's generalship, Mr Boffin
arrived in another cab with Plutarch: whose Lives he found in the sequel
extremely entertaining, though he hoped Plutarch might not expect him to
believe them all. What to believe, in the course of his reading, was Mr
Boffin's chief literary difficulty indeed; for some time he was divided
in his mind between half, all, or none; at length, when he dec