't hear.
Good-bye, my love! Good-bye!«
    The last words were spoken aloud, as the vigilant Blandois stopped, turned
his head, and looked at them from the bottom of the staircase. Assuredly he did
look then, though he looked his politest, as if any real philanthropist could
have desired no better employment than to lash a great stone to his neck, and
drop him into the water flowing beyond the dark arched gateway in which he
stood. No such benefactor to mankind being on the spot, he handed Mrs. Gowan to
her boat, and stood there until it had shot out of the narrow view; when he
handed himself into his own boat and followed.
    Little Dorrit had sometimes thought, and now thought again as she retraced
her steps up the staircase, that he had made his way too easily into her
father's house. But so many and such varieties of people did the same, through
Mr. Dorrit's participation in his elder daughter's society mania, that it was
hardly an exceptional case. A perfect fury for making acquaintances on whom to
impress their riches and importance, had seized the House of Dorrit.
    It appeared on the whole, to Little Dorrit herself, that this same society
in which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea. Numbers of
people seemed to come abroad, pretty much as people had come into the prison;
through debt, through idleness, relationship, curiosity, and general unfitness
for getting on at home. They were brought into these foreign towns in the
custody of couriers and local followers, just as the debtors had been brought
into the prison. They prowled about the churches and picture-galleries, much in
the old, dreary, prison-yard manner. They were usually going away again to- or
next week, and rarely knew their own minds, and seldom did what they said they
would do, or went where they said they would go: in all this again, very like
the prison debtors. They paid high for poor accommodation, and disparaged a
place while they pretended to like it: which was exactly the Marshalsea custom.
They were envied when they went away, by people left behind feigning not to want
to go: and that again was the Marshalsea habit invariably. A certain set of
words and phrases, as much belonging to tourists as the College and the Snuggery
belonged to the jail, was always in their mouths. They had precisely the same
incapacity for settling down to anything, as the prisoners used to have; they
rather deteriorated one another,