Maggy was not hurt, but picked herself up immediately, and began to pick up the potatoes, in which both the others helped. Maggy picked up very few potatoes, and a great quantity of mud. She was a curious, overgrown creature of about eight-and-twenty, with a vacant smiling face and a tattered shawl. She seemed twice as large as the child to whom she evidently looked for protection and called "little mother."
Arthur Clennam looked with the expression of one saying, "May I ask who this is?" Little Dorrit, whose hand Maggy had begun to fondle, answered in words. They were under a gateway into which the majority of the potatoes had rolled.
"This is Maggy, sir."
"Maggy, sir," echoed the personage presented. "Little mother!"
"She is the granddaughter—"
"Granddaughter," echoed Maggy.
"Of my old nurse, who has been dead a long time. Maggy, how old are you?"
"Ten, mother," said Maggy.
"You can't think how good she is, sir," said Little Dorrit, with infinite tenderness.
"Good she is," echoed Maggy, transferring the pronoun in a most expressive way from herself to her little mother.