Judy, with her brother's wink, shakes her head, and purses up her mouth into No, without saying it.
“No?” returns the old man. “Why not?”
“She'd want sixpence a-day, and we can do it for less,” says Judy.
“Sure?”
Judy answers with a nod of deepest meaning, and calls, as she scrapes the butter on the loaf with every precaution against waste, and cuts it into slices, “You Charley, where are you?” Timidly obedient to the summons, a little girl in a rough apron and a large bonnet, with her hands covered with soap and water, and a scrubbing brush in one of them, appears, and curtseys.
“What work are you about now?” says Judy, making an ancient snap at her, like a very sharp old beldame.
“I'm a cleaning the upstairs back room, miss,” replies Charley.
“Mind you do it thoroughly, and don't loiter. Shirking won't do for me. Make haste! Go along!” cries Judy, with a stamp upon the ground. “You girls are more trouble than you're worth, by half.”
On this severe matron, as she returns to her task of scraping the butter and cutting the bread, falls the shadow of her brother, looking in at the window. For whom, knife and loaf in hand, she opens the street door.
“Ay, ay, Bart!” says Grandfather Smallweed. “Here you are, hey?”
“Here I am,” says Bart.
“Been along with your friend again, Bart?”
Small nods.
“Dining at his expense, Bart?”
Small nods again.
“That's right. Live at his expense as much as you can, and take warning by his foolish example. That's the use of such a friend. The only use you can put him to,” says the venerable sage.
His grandson, without receiving this good counsel as dutifully as he might, honors it with all such acceptance as may lie in a slight wink and a nod, and takes a chair at the tea-table. The four old faces then hover over tea-cups, like a company of ghastly cherubim; Mrs. Smallweed perpetually twitching her head and chattering at the trivets, and Mr. Smallweed requiring to be repeatedly shaken up like a large black draught.
“Yes, yes,” says the good old gentleman, reverting to his lesson of wisdom. “That's such advice as your father would have given you, Bart. You never saw your father. More's the pity. He was my true son.” Whether it is intended to be conveyed that he was particularly pleasant to look at, on that account, does not appear.
“He was my true son,” repeats the old gentleman, folding his bread and butter on his knee; “a good accountant, and died fifteen years ago.”
Mrs. Smallweed, following her usual instinct, breaks out with “Fifteen hundred pound. Fifteen hundred pound in a black box, fifteen hundred pound locked up, fifteen hundred pound put away and hid!” Her worthy husband, setting aside his bread and butter, immediately discharges the cushion at her, crushes her against the side of her chair, and falls back in his own, overpowered. His appearance, after visiting Mrs. Smallweed with one of these admonitions, is particularly impressive and not wholly prepossessing: firstly, because the exertion generally twists his black skull-cap over one eye and gives him an air of goblin rakishness, secondly,
