Going up-stairs to Mrs. Jellyby's room (the children were all screaming in the kitchen, and there was no servant to be seen), we found that lady in the midst of a voluminous correspondence, opening, reading, and sorting letters, with a great accumulation of torn covers on the floor. She was so pre-occupied that at first she did not know me, though she sat looking at me with that curious, bright-eyed, far-off look of hers.
“Ah! Miss Summerson!” she said at last. “I was thinking of something so different! I hope you are well. I am happy to see you. Mr. Jarndyce and Miss Clare quite well?”
I hoped in return that Mr. Jellyby was quite well.
“Why, not quite, my dear,” said Mrs. Jellyby, in the calmest manner. “He has been unfortunate in his affairs, and is a little out of spirits. Happily for me, I am so much engaged that I have no time to think about it. We have, at the present moment, one hundred and seventy families. Miss Summerson, averaging five persons in each, either gone or going to the left bank of the Niger.”
I thought of the one family so near us, who were neither gone nor going to the left bank of the Niger, and wondered how she could be so placid.
“You have brought Caddy back, I see,” observed Mrs. Jellyby, with a glance at her daughter. “It has become quite a novelty to see her here. She has almost deserted her old employment, and in fact obliges me to employ a boy.”
“I am sure, Ma,———” began Caddy.
“Now you know, Caddy,” her mother mildly interposed, “that I do employ a boy, who is now at his dinner. What is the use of your contradicting?”
“I was not going to contradict. Ma,” returned Caddy. “I was only going to say, that surely you wouldn't have me be a mere drudge all my life.”
“I believe, my dear,” said Mrs. Jellyby, still opening her letters, casting her bright eyes smilingly over them, and sorting them as she spoke, “that you have a business example before you in your mother. Besides. A mere drudge? If you had any sympathy with the destinies of the human race, it would raise you high above any such idea. But you have none. I have often told you, Caddy, you have no such sympathy.”
“Not if it's Africa, Ma, I have not.”
“Of course you have not. Now, if I were not happily so much engaged, Miss Summerson,” said Mrs. Jellyby, sweetly casting her eyes for a moment on me, and considering where to put the particular letter she had just opened, “this would distress and disappoint me. But I have so much to think of, in connexion with Borrioboola Gha, and it is so necessary I should concentrate myself, that there is my remedy, you see.”
As Caddy gave me a glance of entreaty, and as Mrs. Jellyby was looking far away into Africa straight through my bonnet and head, I thought it a good opportunity to come to the subject of my visit, and to attract Mrs. Jellyby's. attention.
“Perhaps,” I began, “you will wonder what has brought me here to interrupt you.”
“I am always delighted to see Miss Summerson,” said Mrs. Jellyby,
