I’ll save you the trouble.  Is my daughter a-washin?  Yes, she is a-washin.  Look at the water.  Smell it!  That’s wot we drinks.  How do you like it, and what do you think of gin instead!  An’t my place dirty?  Yes, it is dirty—­ it’s nat’rally dirty, and it’s nat’rally onwholesome; and we’ve had five dirty and onwholesome children, as is all dead infants, and so much the better for them, and for us besides.  Have I read the little book wot you left?  No, I an’t read the little book wot you left.  There an’t nobody here as knows how to read it; and if there wos, it wouldn’t be suitable to me.  It’s a book fit for a babby, and I’m not a babby.  If you was to leave me a doll, I shouldn’t nuss it.  How have I been conducting of myself?  Why, I’ve been drunk for three days; and I’da been drunk four if I’da had the money.  Don’t I never mean for to go to church?  No, I don’t never mean for to go to church.  I shouldn’t be expected there, if I did; the beadle’s too gen-teel for me.  And how did my wife get that black eye?  Why, I give it her; and if she says I didn’t, she’s a lie!”

He had pulled his pipe out of his mouth to say all this, and he now turned over on his other side and smoked again.  Mrs. Pardiggle, who had been regarding him through her spectacles with a forcible composure, calculated, I could not help thinking, to increase his antagonism, pulled out a good book as if it were a constable’s staff and took the whole family into custody.  I mean into religious custody, of course; but she really did it as if she were an inexorable moral policeman carrying them all off to a station-house.

Ada and I were very uncomfortable.  We both felt intrusive and out of place, and we both thought that Mrs. Pardiggle would have got on infinitely better if she had not had such a mechanical way of taking possession of people.  The children sulked and stared; the family took no notice of us whatever, except when the young man made the dog bark, which he usually did when Mrs. Pardiggle was most emphatic.  We both felt painfully sensible that between us and these people there was an iron barrier which could not be removed by our new friend.  By whom or how it could be removed, we did not know, but we knew that.  Even what she read and said seemed to us to be ill-chosen for such auditors, if it had been imparted ever so modestly and with ever so much tact.  As to the little book to which the man on the floor had referred, we acquired a knowledge of it afterwards, and Mr. Jarndyce said he doubted if Robinson Crusoe could have read it, though he had had no other on his desolate island.

We were much relieved, under these circumstances, when Mrs. Pardiggle left off.

The man on the floor, then turning his head round again, said morosely, “Well!  You’ve done, have you?”

“For to-day, I have, my friend.  But I am never fatigued.  I shall come to you again in your regular order,” returned Mrs. Pardiggle with demonstrative cheerfulness.