It was easier for Tip to bring her to her senses than for her to bring
him to understand that the Father of the Marshalsea would be beside
himself if he knew the truth. The thing was incomprehensible to Tip, and
altogether a fanciful notion. He yielded to it in that light only, when
he submitted to her entreaties, backed by those of his uncle and sister.
There was no want of precedent for his return; it was accounted for
to the father in the usual way; and the collegians, with a better
comprehension of the pious fraud than Tip, supported it loyally.
This was the life, and this the history, of the child of the Marshalsea
at twenty-two. With a still surviving attachment to the one miserable
yard and block of houses as her birthplace and home, she passed to and
fro in it shrinkingly now, with a womanly consciousness that she was
pointed out to every one. Since she had begun to work beyond the walls,
she had found it necessary to conceal where she lived, and to come and
go as secretly as she could, between the free city and the iron gates,
outside of which she had never slept in her life. Her original timidity
had grown with this concealment, and her light step and her little
figure shunned the thronged streets while they passed along them.
Worldly wise in hard and poor necessities, she was innocent in all
things else. Innocent, in the mist through which she saw her father,
and the prison, and the turbid living river that flowed through it and
flowed on. This was the life, and this the history, of Little Dorrit; now going
home upon a dull September evening, observed at a distance by Arthur
Clennam. This was the life, and this the history, of Little Dorrit;
turning at the end of London Bridge, recrossing it, going back again,
passing on to Saint George's Church, turning back suddenly once more,
and flitting in at the open outer gate and little court-yard of the
Marshalsea.