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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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Support the Monkey! Tell All your Friends and Teachers |
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127 knowing whether he was expected to retire into the passage, or to remain where he was. He was now relieved from his perplexity by Mr Squeers. ‘This is the new young man, my dear,’ said that gentleman. ‘Oh,’ replied Mrs Squeers, nodding her head at Nicholas, and eyeing him coldly from top to toe. ‘He’ll take a meal with us tonight,’ said Squeers, ‘and go among the boys tomorrow morning. You can give him a shake-down here, tonight, can’t you?’ ‘We must manage it somehow,’ replied the lady. ‘You don’t much mind how you sleep, I suppose, sir?’ No, indeed,’ replied Nicholas, ‘I am not particular.’ ‘That’s lucky,’ said Mrs Squeers. And as the lady’s humour was considered to lie chiefly in retort, Mr Squeers laughed heartily, and seemed to expect that Nicholas should do the same. After some further conversation between the master and mistress relative to the success of Mr Squeers’s trip and the people who had paid, and the people who had made default in payment, a young servant girl brought in a Yorkshire pie and some cold beef, which being set upon the table, the boy Smike appeared with a jug of ale. Mr Squeers was emptying his great-coat pockets of letters to different boys, and other small documents, which he had brought down in them. The boy glanced, with an anxious and timid expression, at the papers, as if with a sickly hope that one among them might relate to him. The look was a very painful one, and went to Nicholas’s heart at once; for it told a long and very sad history. It induced him to consider the boy more attentively, and he was |
