Chapter 16

CHAPTER 16

Nobody's Weakness

The time being come for the renewal of his acquaintance with the
Meagles family, Clennam, pursuant to contract made between himself
and Mr Meagles within the precincts of Bleeding Heart Yard, turned
his face on a certain Saturday towards Twickenham, where Mr Meagles
had a cottage-residence of his own. The weather being fine and
dry, and any English road abounding in interest for him who had
been so long away, he sent his valise on by the coach, and set out
to walk. A walk was in itself a new enjoyment to him, and one that
had rarely diversified his life afar off.

He went by Fulham and Putney, for the pleasure of strolling over
the heath. It was bright and shining there; and when he found
himself so far on his road to Twickenham, he found himself a long
way on his road to a number of airier and less substantial
destinations. They had risen before him fast, in the healthful
exercise and the pleasant road. It is not easy to walk alone in
the country without musing upon something. And he had plenty of
unsettled subjects to meditate upon, though he had been walking to
the Land's End.

First, there was the subject seldom absent from his mind, the
question, what he was to do henceforth in life; to what occupation
he should devote himself, and in what direction he had best seek
it. He was far from rich, and every day of indecision and inaction
made his inheritance a source of greater anxiety to him. As often
as he began to consider how to increase this inheritance, or to lay
it by, so often his misgiving that there was some one with an
unsatisfied claim upon his justice, returned; and that alone was a
subject to outlast the longest walk. Again, there was the subject
of his relations with his mother, which were now upon an equable
and peaceful but never confidential footing, and whom he saw
several times a week. Little Dorrit was a leading and a constant
subject: for the circumstances of his life, united to those of her
own story, presented the little creature to him as the only person
between whom and himself there were ties of innocent reliance on
one hand, and affectionate protection on the other; ties of
compassion, respect, unselfish interest, gratitude, and pity.
Thinking of her, and of the possibility of her father's release
from prison by the unbarring hand of death--the only change of
circumstance he could foresee that might enable him to be such a
friend to her as he wished to be, by altering her whole manner of
life, smoothing her rough road, and giving her a home--he regarded
her, in that perspective, as his adopted daughter, his poor child
of the Marshalsea hushed to rest. If there were a last subject in
his thoughts, and it lay