‘Can you guess,’ said Little Dorrit, folding her small hands tight in one another, and looking at him with all the earnestness of her soul looking steadily out of her eyes, ‘what I am going to ask you not to do?’
‘I think I can. But I may be wrong.’
‘No, you are not wrong,’ said Little Dorrit, shaking her head. ‘If we should want it so very, very badly that we cannot do without it, let me ask you for it.’
‘I Will,—I Will.’
‘Don’t encourage him to ask. Don’t understand him if he does ask. Don’t give it to him. Save him and spare him that, and you will be able to think better of him!’
Clennam said—not very plainly, seeing those tears glistening in her anxious eyes—that her wish should be sacred with him.
‘You don’t know what he is,’ she said; ‘you don’t know what he really is. How can you, seeing him there all at once, dear love, and not gradually, as I have done! You have been so good to us, so delicately and truly good, that I want him to be better in your eyes than in anybody’s. And I cannot bear to think,’ cried Little Dorrit, covering her tears with her hands, ‘I cannot bear to think that you of all the world should see him in his only moments of degradation.’
‘Pray,’ said Clennam, ‘do not be so distressed. Pray, pray, Little Dorrit! This is quite understood now.’
‘Thank you, sir. Thank you! I have tried very much to keep myself from saying this; I have thought about it, days and nights; but when I knew for certain you were coming again, I made up my mind to speak to you. Not because I am ashamed of him,’ she dried her tears quickly, ‘but because I know him better than any one does, and love him, and am proud of him.’
Relieved of this weight, Little Dorrit was nervously anxious to be gone. Maggy being broad awake, and in the act of distantly gloating over the fruit and cakes with chuckles of anticipation, Clennam made the best diversion in his power by pouring her out a glass of wine, which she drank in a series of loud smacks; putting her hand upon her windpipe after every one, and saying, breathless, with her eyes in a prominent state, ‘Oh, ain’t it d’licious! Ain’t it hospitally!’ When she had finished the wine and these encomiums, he charged her to load her basket (she was never without her basket) with every eatable thing upon the table, and to take especial care to leave no scrap behind. Maggy’s pleasure in doing this and her little mother’s pleasure in seeing Maggy pleased, was as good a turn as circumstances could have given to the late conversation.