Little Dorrit, page 209 by Charles Dickens
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, and calmly waited for an answer.
'So long as Little Dorrit is quiet and industrious, and stands in need of the slight help I can give her, and deserves it; so long, I suppose, unless she withdraws of her own act, she will continue to come here, I being spared.'
'Nothing more than that?' said Flintwinch, stroking his mouth and chin.
'What should there be more than that! What could there be more than that!' she ejaculated in her sternly wondering way.
Mrs Flintwinch dreamed, that, for the space of a minute or two, they remained looking at each other with the candle between them, and that she somehow derived an impression that they looked at each other fixedly.
'Do you happen to know, Mrs Clennam,' Affery's liege lord then demanded in a much lower voice, and with an amount of expression that seemed quite out of proportion to the simple purpose of his words, 'where she lives?'
'No.'
'Would you--now, would you like to know?' said Jeremiah with a pounce as if he had sprung upon her.
'If I cared to know, I should know already. Could I not have asked her any day?'
'Then you don't care to know?'
'I do not.'
Mr Flintwinch, having expelled a long significant breath said, with his former emphasis, 'For I have accidentally--mind!--found out.'
'Wherever she lives,' said Mrs Clennam, speaking in one unmodulated hard voice, and separating her words as distinctly as if she were reading them off from separate bits of metal that she took up one by one, 'she has made a secret of it, and she shall always keep her secret from me.'
'After all, perhaps you would rather not have known the fact, any how?' said Jeremiah; and he said it with a twist, as if his words had come out of him in his own wry shape.
'Flintwinch,' said his mistress and partner, flashing into a sudden energy that made Affery start, 'why do you goad me? Look round this room. If it is any compensation for my long confinement within these narrow limits--not that I complain