Thinking that the display of Caddy’s wardrobe would be the best means of approaching the subject, I invited Mrs. Jellyby to come and look at it spread out on Caddy’s bed in the evening after the unwholesome boy was gone.

“My dear Miss Summerson,” said she, rising from her desk with her usual sweetness of temper, “these are really ridiculous preparations, though your assisting them is a proof of your kindness.  There is something so inexpressibly absurd to me in the idea of Caddy being married!  Oh, Caddy, you silly, silly, silly puss!”

She came upstairs with us notwithstanding and looked at the clothes in her customary far-off manner.  They suggested one distinct idea to her, for she said with her placid smile, and shaking her head, “My good Miss Summerson, at half the cost, this weak child might have been equipped for Africa!”

On our going downstairs again, Mrs. Jellyby asked me whether this troublesome business was really to take place next Wednesday.  And on my replying yes, she said, “Will my room be required, my dear Miss Summerson?  For it’s quite impossible that I can put my papers away.”

I took the liberty of saying that the room would certainly be wanted and that I thought we must put the papers away somewhere.  “Well, my dear Miss Summerson,” said Mrs. Jellyby, “you know best, I dare say.  But by obliging me to employ a boy, Caddy has embarrassed me to that extent, overwhelmed as I am with public business, that I don’t know which way to turn.  We have a Ramification meeting, too, on Wednesday afternoon, and the inconvenience is very serious.”

“It is not likely to occur again,” said I, smiling.  “Caddy will be married but once, probably.”

“That’s true,” Mrs. Jellyby replied; “that’s true, my dear.  I suppose we must make the best of it!”

The next question was how Mrs. Jellyby should be dressed on the occasion.  I thought it very curious to see her looking on serenely from her writing-table while Caddy and I discussed it, occasionally shaking her head at us with a half-reproachful smile like a superior spirit who could just bear with our trifling.

The state in which her dresses were, and the extraordinary confusion in which she kept them, added not a little to our difficulty; but at length we devised something not very unlike what a common-place mother might wear on such an occasion.  The abstracted manner in which Mrs. Jellyby would deliver herself up to having this attire tried on by the dressmaker, and the sweetness with which she would then observe to me how sorry she was that I had not turned my thoughts to Africa, were consistent with the rest of her behaviour.

The lodging was rather confined as to space, but I fancied that if Mrs. Jellyby’s household had been the only lodgers in Saint Paul’s or Saint Peter’s, the sole advantage they would have found in the size of the building would have been its affording a great deal of room to be dirty in.  I believe that nothing belonging to the family which it had been possible to break was unbroken at the time of those preparations for Caddy’s marriage, that nothing which it had been possible to spoil in any way was unspoilt, and that no domestic object which was capable of collecting dirt, from a dear child’s knee to the door-plate, was without as much dirt as could well accumulate upon it.