 and that for her, his
daughter, Miss Amy Dorrit, of the sole remaining branch of the Dorrits of
Dorsetshire, to be known to - hum - to occupy herself in fulfilling the
functions of - ha hum - a valet, would be incompatible with that respect.
Therefore, my dear, he - ha - he laid his parental injunctions upon her, to
remember that she was a lady, who had now to conduct herself with - hum - a
proper pride, and to preserve the rank of a lady; and consequently he requested
her to abstain from doing what would occasion - ha - unpleasant and derogatory
remarks. She had obeyed without a murmur. Thus it had been brought about that
she now sat in her corner of the luxurious carriage with her little patient
hands folded before her, quite displaced even from the last point of the old
standing ground in life on which her feet had lingered.
    It was from this position that all she saw appeared unreal; the more
surprising the scenes, the more they resembled the unreality of her own inner
life as she went through its vacant places all day long. The gorges of the
Simplon, its enormous depths and thundering waterfalls, the wonderful road, the
points of danger where a loose wheel or a faltering horse would have been
destruction, the descent into Italy, the opening of that beautiful land, as the
rugged mountain-chasm widened and let them out from a gloomy and dark
imprisonment - all a dream - only the old mean Marshalsea a reality. Nay, even
the old mean Marshalsea was shaken to its foundations, when she pictured it
without her father. She could scarcely believe that the prisoners were still
lingering in the close yard, that the mean rooms were still every one tenanted,
and that the turnkey still stood in the Lodge letting people in and out, all
just as she well knew it to be.
    With a remembrance of her father's old life in prison hanging about her like
the burden of a sorrowful tune, Little Dorrit would wake from a dream of her
birth-place into a whole day's dream. The painted room in which she awoke, often
a humbled state-chamber in a dilapidated palace, would begin it; with its wild
red autumnal vine-leaves overhanging the glass, its orange-trees on the cracked
white terrace outside the window, a group of monks and peasants in the little
street below, misery and magnificence wrestling with each other upon every rood
of ground in the prospect, no matter how widely diversified, and misery throwing
magnificence with the strength of fate. To this would succeed
