Chapter 20

CHAPTER 20

Moving in Society

If Young John Chivery had had the inclination and the power to
write a satire on family pride, he would have had no need to go for
an avenging illustration out of the family of his beloved. He
would have found it amply in that gallant brother and that dainty
sister, so steeped in mean experiences, and so loftily conscious of
the family name; so ready to beg or borrow from the poorest, to eat
of anybody's bread, spend anybody's money, drink from anybody's cup
and break it afterwards. To have painted the sordid facts of their
lives, and they throughout invoking the death's head apparition of
the family gentility to come and scare their benefactors, would
have made Young John a satirist of the first water.

Tip had turned his liberty to hopeful account by becoming a
billiard-marker. He had troubled himself so little as to the means
of his release, that Clennam scarcely needed to have been at the
pains of impressing the mind of Mr Plornish on that subject.
Whoever had paid him the compliment, he very readily accepted the
compliment with HIS compliments, and there was an end of it.
Issuing forth from the gate on these easy terms, he became a
billiard-marker; and now occasionally looked in at the little
skittle-ground in a green Newmarket coat (second-hand), with a
shining collar and bright buttons (new), and drank the beer of the
Collegians.

One solid stationary point in the looseness of this gentleman's
character was, that he respected and admired his sister Amy. The
feeling had never induced him to spare her a moment's uneasiness,
or to put himself to any restraint or inconvenience on her account;
but with that Marshalsea taint upon his love, he loved her. The
same rank Marshalsea flavour was to be recognised in his distinctly
perceiving that she sacrificed her life to her father, and in his
having no idea that she had done anything for himself.

When this spirited young man and his sister had begun
systematically to produce the family skeleton for the overawing of
the College, this narrative cannot precisely state. Probably at
about the period when they began to dine on the College charity.
It is certain that the more reduced and necessitous they were, the
more pompously the skeleton emerged from its tomb; and that when
there was anything particularly shabby in the wind, the skeleton
always came out with the ghastliest flourish.

Little Dorrit was late on the Monday morning, for her father slept
late, and afterwards there was his breakfast to prepare and his
room to arrange. She had no engagement to go out to work, however,
and therefore stayed with him until, with Maggy's help, she had put
everything right about him, and had seen