 acknowledgments.
    »Permit me to add,« said Mrs. General, »that beyond this, I can never resume
the topic. Also that I can accept no second or inferior position. If the honour
were proposed to me of becoming known to Mr. Dorrit's family - I think two
daughters were mentioned? -«
    »Two daughters.«
    »I could only accept it on terms of perfect equality, as a companion,
protector, Mentor, and friend.«
    Mr. Dorrit, in spite of his sense of his importance, felt as if it would be
quite a kindness in her to accept it on any conditions. He almost said as much.
    »I think,« repeated Mrs. General, »two daughters were mentioned?«
    »Two daughters,« said Mr. Dorrit again.
    »It would therefore,« said Mrs. General, »be necessary to add a third more
to the payment (whatever its amount may prove to be), which my friends here have
been accustomed to make to my bankers.«
    Mr. Dorrit lost no time in referring the delicate question to the
county-widower, and, finding that he had been accustomed to pay three hundred
pounds a-year to the credit of Mrs. General, arrived, without any severe strain
on his arithmetic, at the conclusion that he himself must pay four. Mrs. General
being an article of that lustrous surface which suggests that it is worth any
money, he made a formal proposal to be allowed to have the honour and pleasure
of regarding her as a member of his family. Mrs. General conceded that high
privilege, and here she was.
    In person, Mrs. General, including her skirts which had much to do with it,
was of a dignified and imposing appearance; ample, rustling, gravely voluminous;
always upright behind the proprieties. She might have been taken - had been
taken - to the top of the Alps and the bottom of Herculaneum, without
disarranging a fold in her dress, or displacing a pin. If her countenance and
hair had rather a floury appearance, as though from living in some
transcendently genteel Mill, it was rather because she was a chalky creation
altogether, than because she mended her complexion with violet powder, or had
turned grey. If her eyes had no expression, it was probably because they had
nothing to express. If she had few wrinkles, it was because her mind had never
traced its name or any other inscription on her face. A cool, waxy, blown-out
woman, who had never lighted well.
    Mrs
