Then there was old Mr. Turveydrop, who was from morning to night and from night to morning the subject of innumerable precautions.  If the baby cried, it was nearly stifled lest the noise should make him uncomfortable.  If the fire wanted stirring in the night, it was surreptitiously done lest his rest should be broken.  If Caddy required any little comfort that the house contained, she first carefully discussed whether he was likely to require it too.  In return for this consideration he would come into the room once a day, all but blessing it—­showing a condescension, and a patronage, and a grace of manner in dispensing the light of his high-shouldered presence from which I might have supposed him (if I had not known better) to have been the benefactor of Caddy’s life.

“My Caroline,” he would say, making the nearest approach that he could to bending over her.  “Tell me that you are better to-day.”

“Oh, much better, thank you, Mr. Turveydrop,” Caddy would reply.

“Delighted!  Enchanted!  And our dear Miss Summerson.  She is not quite prostrated by fatigue?” Here he would crease up his eyelids and kiss his fingers to me, though I am happy to say he had ceased to be particular in his attentions since I had been so altered.

“Not at all,” I would assure him.

“Charming!  We must take care of our dear Caroline, Miss Summerson.  We must spare nothing that will restore her.  We must nourish her.  My dear Caroline”—­he would turn to his daughter-in-law with infinite generosity and protection—­“want for nothing, my love.  Frame a wish and gratify it, my daughter.  Everything this house contains, everything my room contains, is at your service, my dear.  Do not,” he would sometimes add in a burst of deportment, “even allow my simple requirements to be considered if they should at any time interfere with your own, my Caroline.  Your necessities are greater than mine.”

He had established such a long prescriptive right to this deportment (his son’s inheritance from his mother) that I several times knew both Caddy and her husband to be melted to tears by these affectionate self-sacrifices.

“Nay, my dears,” he would remonstrate; and when I saw Caddy’s thin arm about his fat neck as he said it, I would be melted too, though not by the same process.  “Nay, nay!  I have promised never to leave ye.  Be dutiful and affectionate towards me, and I ask no other return.  Now, bless ye!  I am going to the Park.”

He would take the air there presently and get an appetite for his hotel dinner.  I hope I do old Mr. Turveydrop no wrong, but I never saw any better traits in him than these I faithfully record, except that he certainly conceived a liking for Peepy and would take the child out walking with great pomp, always on those occasions sending him home before he went to dinner himself, and occasionally with a halfpenny in his pocket.  But even this disinterestedness was attended with no inconsiderable cost, to my knowledge, for before Peepy was sufficiently decorated to walk hand in hand with the professor of deportment, he had to be newly dressed, at the expense of Caddy and her husband, from top to toe.