Chapter 5

CHAPTER 5

Something Wrong Somewhere

The family had been a month or two at Venice, when Mr Dorrit, who
was much among Counts and Marquises, and had but scant leisure, set
an hour of one day apart, beforehand, for the purpose of holding
some conference with Mrs General.

The time he had reserved in his mind arriving, he sent Mr Tinkler,
his valet, to Mrs General's apartment (which would have absorbed
about a third of the area of the Marshalsea), to present his
compliments to that lady, and represent him as desiring the favour
of an interview. It being that period of the forenoon when the
various members of the family had coffee in their own chambers,
some couple of hours before assembling at breakfast in a faded hall
which had once been sumptuous, but was now the prey of watery
vapours and a settled melancholy, Mrs General was accessible to the
valet. That envoy found her on a little square of carpet, so
extremely diminutive in reference to the size of her stone and
marble floor that she looked as if she might have had it spread for
the trying on of a ready-made pair of shoes; or as if she had come
into possession of the enchanted piece of carpet, bought for forty
purses by one of the three princes in the Arabian Nights, and had
that moment been transported on it, at a wish, into a palatial
saloon with which it had no connection.

Mrs General, replying to the envoy, as she set down her empty
coffee-cup, that she was willing at once to proceed to Mr Dorrit's
apartment, and spare him the trouble of coming to her (which, in
his gallantry, he had proposed), the envoy threw open the door, and
escorted Mrs General to the presence. It was quite a walk, by
mysterious staircases and corridors, from Mrs General's apartment,
--hoodwinked by a narrow side street with a low gloomy bridge in
it, and dungeon-like opposite tenements, their walls besmeared with
a thousand downward stains and streaks, as if every crazy aperture
in them had been weeping tears of rust into the Adriatic for
centuries--to Mr Dorrit's apartment: with a whole English house-
front of window, a prospect of beautiful church-domes rising into
the blue sky sheer out of the water which reflected them, and a
hushed murmur of the Grand Canal laving the doorways below, where
his gondolas and gondoliers attended his pleasure, drowsily
swinging in a little forest of piles.

Mr Dorrit, in a resplendent dressing-gown and cap--the dormant grub
that had so long bided its time among the Collegians had burst into
a rare butterfly--rose to receive Mrs General. A chair to Mrs
General. An easier chair, sir; what are you doing, what are you
about, what do you mean? Now, leave us!

'Mrs General,' said Mr Dorrit, 'I took the