Chapter 18

CHAPTER 18

Miss Knag, after doting on Kate Nickleby for three whole Days, makes
up her Mind to hate her for evermore. The Causes which led Miss
Knag to form this Resolution

having no stirring interest for any but those who lead them, are
disregarded by persons who do not want thought or feeling, but who
pamper their compassion and need high stimulants to rouse it.

There are not a few among the disciples of charity who require, in
their vocation, scarcely less excitement than the votaries of
pleasure in theirs; and hence it is that diseased sympathy and
compassion are every day expended on out-of-the-way objects, when
only too many demands upon the legitimate exercise of the same
virtues in a healthy state, are constantly within the sight and
hearing of the most unobservant person alive. In short, charity
must have its romance, as the novelist or playwright must have his.
A thief in fustian is a vulgar character, scarcely to be thought of
by persons of refinement; but dress him in green velvet, with a
high-crowned hat, and change the scene of his operations, from a
thickly-peopled city, to a mountain road, and you shall find in him
the very soul of poetry and adventure. So it is with the one great
cardinal virtue, which, properly nourished and exercised, leads to,
if it does not necessarily include, all the others. It must have
its romance; and the less of real, hard, struggling work-a-day life
there is in that romance, the better.

The life to which poor Kate Nickleby was devoted, in consequence of
the unforeseen train of circumstances already developed in this
narrative, was a hard one; but lest the very dulness, unhealthy
confinement, and bodily fatigue, which made up its sum and
substance, should deprive it of any interest with the mass of the
charitable and sympathetic, I would rather keep Miss Nickleby
herself in view just now, than chill them in the outset, by a minute
and lengthened description of the establishment presided over by
Madame Mantalini.

'Well, now, indeed, Madame Mantalini,' said Miss Knag, as Kate was
taking her weary way homewards on the first night of her novitiate;
'that Miss Nickleby is a very creditable young person--a very
creditable young person indeed--hem--upon my word, Madame Mantalini,
it does very extraordinary credit even to your discrimination that
you should have found such a very excellent, very well-behaved,
very--hem--very unassuming young woman to assist in the fitting on.
I have seen some young women when they had the opportunity of
displaying before their betters, behave in such a--oh, dear--well--
but you're always right, Madame Mantalini, always; and as I very
often tell the young ladies, how you do contrive to be always