第一，企业请你来是解决问题而不是制造问题的；

第二，如果你不能解决问题，你本身就是问题；

第三，你能解决多大的问题就能坐多高的位置。

有个自媒体人粥左罗，大家应该都很熟了，现在创业年入几百万，昨天深夜发了一条视频说感到很丧，觉得做什么事都没有意义。

我还有一个创业的朋友，叫阿川，人前光鲜亮丽，是个几十人公司的老板，刚拉到近一千万的投资，周五的晚上给我发微信，几乎是痛哭流涕地说：没病千万不要创业。

从1921年建党，到毛泽东在党内逐步取得领导地位，至少过了15年，和党内其他大佬相比，他的资历、学历、职位，并没有明显优势。

他能一步步走出来，打败博古、王明、张国焘，靠的就是强到可怕的思维能力。

翻阅《毛泽东传》，你会发现一个令人震惊的现象，在长征之前，有两个词出现的频率非常高——“反对”、“不同意”，而前面往往还跟着三个字“毛泽东”。

那时的他经常一开会就开群嘲：你们说的都不对，下面听我说blabla……

瞿秋白曾经评价说：我党有独立意见的要算泽东。

其实，革命时期，大家的想法都很简单：你说得对，我们就跟你走。

而毛泽东，就总能在面对很多重大关头的时候，通过自己的思考，为大家指出正确的路；或者在跟着其他人走错了路，受到挫折时，回头发现还是毛泽东说的对。

提辖杨志送It wAs the  clocks struck nine on Monday morning, Mrs Clennam was wheeled by Jeremiah Flintwinch of the cut-down aspect to her tall cabinet. When she had unlocked and opened it, and had settled herself at its desk, Jeremiah withdrew—as it might be, to hang himself more effectually—and her son appeared. ‘Are you any better this morning, mother?’ She shook her head, with the same austere air of luxuriousness that she had shown over-night when speaking of the weather. ‘I shall never be better any more. It is well for me, Arthur, that I know it and can bear it.’ Sitting with her hands laid separately upon the desk, and the tall cabinet towering before her, she looked as if she were performing on a dumb church organ. Her son thought so (it was an old thought with him), while he took his seat beside it. She opened a drawer or two, looked over some business papers, and put them back again. Her severe face had no thread of relaxation in it, by which any explorer could have been guided to the gloomy labyrinth of her thoughts. ‘Shall I speak of our affairs, mother? Are you inclined to enter upon business?’ ‘Am I inclined, Arthur? Rather, are you? Your father has been dead a year and more. I have been at your disposal, and waiting your pleasure, ever since.’ ‘There was much to arrange before I could leave; and when I did leave, I travelled a little for rest and relief.’ She turned her face towards him, as not having heard or understood his last words. ‘For rest and relief.’ She glanced round the sombre room, and appeared from the motion of her lips to repeat the words to herself, as calling it to witness how little of either it afforded her. ‘Besides, mother, you being sole executrix, and having the direction and management of the estate, there remained little business, or I might say none, that I could transact, until you had had time to arrange matters to your satisfaction.’ ‘The accounts are made out,’ she returned. ‘I have them here. The vouchers have all been examined and passed. You can inspect them when you like, Arthur; now, if you please.’ ‘It is quite enough, mother, to know that the business is completed. Shall I proceed then?’ ‘Why not?’ she said, in her frozen way. ‘Mother, our House has done less and less for some years past, and our dealings have been progressively on the decline. We have never shown much confidence, or invited much; we have attached no people to us; the track we have kept is not the track of the time; and we have been left far behind. I need not dwell on this to you, mother. You know it necessarily.’ ‘I know what you mean,’ she answered, in a qualified tone. ‘Even this old house in which we speak,’ pursued her son, ‘is an instance of what I say. In my father’s earlier time, and in his uncle’s time before him, it was a place of business—really a place of business, and business resort. Now, it is a mere anomaly and incongruity here, out of date and out of purpose. All our consignments have long been made to Rovinghams’ the commission-merchants; and although, as a check upon them, and in the stewardship of my father’s resources, your judgment and watchfulness have been actively exerted, still those qualities would have influenced my father’s fortunes equally, if you had lived in any private dwelling: would they not?’ ‘Do you consider,’ she returned, without answering his question, ‘that a house serves no purpose, Arthur, in sheltering your infirm and afflicted—justly infirm and righteously afflicted—mother?’ ‘I was speaking only of business purposes.’ ‘With what object?’ ‘I am coming to it.’ ‘I foresee,’ she returned, fixing her eyes upon him, ‘what it is. But the Lord forbid that I should repine under any visitation. In my sinfulness I merit bitter disappointment, and I accept it.’ ‘Mother, I grieve to hear you speak like this, though I have had my apprehensions that you would—’ ‘You knew I would. You knew me,’ she interrupted. Her son paused for a moment. He had struck fire out of her, and was surprised. ‘Well!’ she said, relapsing into stone. ‘Go on. Let me hear.’ ‘You have anticipated, mother, that I decide for my part, to abandon the business. I have done with it. I will not take upon myself to advise you; you will continue it, I see. If I had any influence with you, I would simply use it to soften your judgment of me in causing you this disappointment: to represent to you that I have lived the half of a long term of life, and have never before set my own will against yours. I cannot say that I have been able to conform myself, in heart and spirit, to your rules; I cannot say that I believe my forty years have been profitable or pleasant to myself, or any one; but I have habitually submitted, and I only ask you to remember it.’ Woe to the suppliant, if such a one there were or ever had been, who had any concession to look for in the inexorable face at the cabinet. Woe to the defaulter whose appeal lay to the tribunal where those severe eyes presided. Great need had the rigid woman of her mystical religion, veiled in gloom and darkness, with lightnings of cursing, vengeance, and destruction, flashing through the sable clouds. Forgive us our debts as we forgive our debtors, was a prayer too poor in spirit for her. Smite Thou my debtors, Lord, wither them, crush them; do Thou as I would do, and Thou shalt have my worship: this was the impious tower of stone she built up to scale Heaven. ‘Have you finished, Arthur, or have you anything more to say to me? I think there can be nothing else. You have been short, but full of matter!’ ‘Mother, I have yet something more to say. It has been upon my mind, night and day, this long time. It is far more difficult to say than what I have said. That concerned myself; this concerns us all.’ ‘Us all! Who are us all?’ ‘Yourself, myself, my dead father.’ She took her hands from the desk; folded them in her lap; and sat looking towards the fire, with the impenetrability of an old Egyptian sculpture. ‘You knew my father infinitely better than I ever knew him; and his reserve with me yielded to you. You were much the stronger, mother, and directed him. As a child, I knew it as well as I know it now. I knew that your ascendancy over him was the cause of his going to China to take care of the business there, while you took care of it here (though I do not even now know whether these were really terms of separation that you agreed upon); and that it was your will that I should remain with you until I was twenty, and then go to him as I did. You will not be offended by my recalling this, after twenty years?’ ‘I am waiting to hear why you recall it.’ He lowered his voice, and said, with manifest reluctance, and against his will: ‘I want to ask you, mother, whether it ever occurred to you to suspect—’ At the word Suspect, she turned her eyes momentarily upon her son, with a dark frown. She then suffered them to seek the fire, as before; but with the frown fixed above them, as if the sculptor of old Egypt had indented it in the hard granite face, to frown for ages. ‘—that he had any secret remembrance which caused him trouble of mind—remorse? Whether you ever observed anything in his conduct suggesting that; or ever spoke to him upon it, or ever heard him hint at such a thing?’ ‘I do not understand what kind of secret remembrance you mean to infer that your father was a prey to,’ she returned, after a silence. ‘You speak so mysteriously.’ ‘Is it possible, mother,’ her son leaned forward to be the nearer to her while he whispered it, and laid his hand nervously upon her desk, ‘is it possible, mother, that he had unhappily wronged any one, and made no reparation?’ Looking at him wrathfully, she bent herself back in her chair to keep him further off, but gave him no reply. ‘I am deeply sensible, mother, that if this thought has never at any time flashed upon you, it must seem cruel and unnatural in me, even in this confidence, to breathe it. But I cannot shake it off. Time and change (I have tried both before breaking silence) do nothing to wear it out. Remember, I was with my father. Remember, I saw his face when he gave the watch into my keeping, and struggled to express that he sent it as a token you would understand, to you. Remember, I saw him at the last with the pencil in his failing hand, trying to write some word for you to read, but to which he could give no shape. The more remote and cruel this vague suspicion that I have, the stronger the circumstances that could give it any semblance of probability to me. For Heaven’s sake, let us examine sacredly whether there is any wrong entrusted to us to set right. No one can help towards it, mother, but you.’ Still so recoiling in her chair that her overpoised weight moved it, from time to time, a little on its wheels, and gave her the appearance of a phantom of fierce aspect gliding away from him, she interposed her left arm, bent at the elbow with the back of her hand towards her face, between herself and him, and looked at him in a fixed silence. ‘In grasping at money and in driving hard bargains—I have begun, and I must speak of such things now, mother—some one may have been grievously deceived, injured, ruined. You were the moving power of all this machinery before my birth; your stronger spirit has been infused into all my father’s dealings for more than two score years. You can set these doubts at rest, I think, if you will really help me to discover the truth. Will you, mother?’ He stopped in the hope that she would speak. But her grey hair was not more immovable in its two folds, than were her firm lips. ‘If reparation can be made to any one, if restitution can be made to any one, let us know it and make it. Nay, mother, if within my means, let me make it. I have seen so little happiness come of money; it has brought within my knowledge so little peace to this house, or to any one belonging to it, that it is worth less to me than to another. It can buy me nothing that will not be a reproach and misery to me, if I am haunted by a suspicion that it darkened my father’s last hours with remorse, and that it is not honestly and justly mine.’ There was a bell-rope hanging on the panelled wall, some two or three yards from the cabinet. By a swift and sudden action of her foot, she drove her wheeled chair rapidly back to it and pulled it violently—still holding her arm up in its shield-like posture, as if he were striking at her, and she warding off the blow. A girl came hurrying in, frightened. ‘Send Flintwinch here!’ In a moment the girl had withdrawn, and the old man stood within the door. ‘What! You’re hammer and tongs, already, you two?’ he said, coolly stroking his face. ‘I thought you would be. I was pretty sure of it.’ ‘Flintwinch!’ said the mother, ‘look at my son. Look at him!’ ‘Well, I am looking at him,’ said Flintwinch. She stretched out the arm with which she had shielded herself, and as she went on, pointed at the object of her anger. ‘In the very hour of his return almost—before the shoe upon his foot is dry—he asperses his father’s memory to his mother! Asks his mother to become, with him, a spy upon his father’s transactions through a lifetime! Has misgivings that the goods of this world which we have painfully got together early and late, with wear and tear and toil and self-denial, are so much plunder; and asks to whom they shall be given up, as reparation and restitution!’ Although she said this raging, she said it in a voice so far from being beyond her control that it was even lower than her usual tone. She also spoke with great distinctness. ‘Reparation!’ said she. ‘Yes, truly! It is easy for him to talk of reparation, fresh from journeying and junketing in foreign lands, and living a life of vanity and pleasure. But let him look at me, in prison, and in bonds here. I endure without murmuring, because it is appointed that I shall so make reparation for my sins. Reparation! Is there none in this room? Has there been none here this fifteen years?’ Thus was she always balancing her bargains with the Majesty of heaven, posting up the entries to her credit, strictly keeping her set-off, and claiming her due. She was only remarkable in this, for the force and emphasis with which she did it. Thousands upon thousands do it, according to their varying manner, every day. ‘Flintwinch, give me that book!’ The old man handed it to her from the table. She put two fingers between the leaves, closed the book upon them, and held it up to her son in a threatening way. ‘In the days of old, Arthur, treated of in this commentary, there were pious men, beloved of the Lord, who would have cursed their sons for less than this: who would have sent them forth, and sent whole nations forth, if such had supported them, to be avoided of God and man, and perish, down to the baby at the breast. But I only tell you that if you ever renew that theme with me, I will renounce you; I will so dismiss you through that doorway, that you had better have been motherless from your cradle. I will never see or know you more. And if, after all, you were to come into this darkened room to look upon me lying dead, my body should bleed, if I could make it, when you came near me.’ In part relieved by the intensity of this threat, and in part (monstrous as the fact is) by a general impression that it was in some sort a religious proceeding, she handed back the book to the old man, and was silent. ‘Now,’ said Jeremiah; ‘premising that I’m not going to stand between you two, will you let me ask (as I have been called in, and made a third) what is all this about?’ 0066m Original ‘Take your version of it,’ returned Arthur, finding it left to him to speak, ‘from my mother. Let it rest there. What I have said, was said to my mother only.’ ‘Oh!’ returned the old man. ‘From your mother? Take it from your mother? Well! But your mother mentioned that you had been suspecting your father. That’s not dutiful, Mr Arthur. Who will you be suspecting next?’ ‘Enough,’ said Mrs Clennam, turning her face so that it was addressed for the moment to the old man only. ‘Let no more be said about this.’ ‘Yes, but stop a bit, stop a bit,’ the old man persisted. ‘Let us see how we stand. Have you told Mr Arthur that he mustn’t lay offences at his father’s door? That he has no right to do it? That he has no ground to go upon?’ ‘I tell him so now.’ ‘Ah! Exactly,’ said the old man. ‘You tell him so now. You hadn’t told him so before, and you tell him so now. Ay, ay! That’s right! You know I stood between you and his father so long, that it seems as if death had made no difference, and I was still standing between you. So I will, and so in fairness I require to have that plainly put forward. Arthur, you please to hear that you have no right to mistrust your father, and have no ground to go upon.’ He put his hands to the back of the wheeled chair, and muttering to himself, slowly wheeled his mistress back to her cabinet. ‘Now,’ he resumed, standing behind her: ‘in case I should go away leaving things half done, and so should be wanted again when you come to the other half and get into one of your flights, has Arthur told you what he means to do about the business?’ ‘He has relinquished it.’ ‘In favour of nobody, I suppose?’ Mrs Clennam glanced at her son, leaning against one of the windows. He observed the look and said, ‘To my mother, of course. She does what she pleases.’ ‘And if any pleasure,’ she said after a short pause, ‘could arise for me out of the disappointment of my expectations that my son, in the prime of his life, would infuse new youth and strength into it, and make it of great profit and power, it would be in advancing an old and faithful servant. Jeremiah, the captain deserts the ship, but you and I will sink or float with it.’ Jeremiah, whose eyes glistened as if they saw money, darted a sudden look at the son, which seemed to say, ‘I owe you no thanks for this; you have done nothing towards it!’ and then told the mother that he thanked her, and that Affery thanked her, and that he would never desert her, and that Affery would never desert her. Finally, he hauled up his watch from its depths, and said, ‘Eleven. Time for your oysters!’ and with that change of subject, which involved no change of expression or manner, rang the bell. But Mrs Clennam, resolved to treat herself with the greater rigour for having been supposed to be unacquainted with reparation, refused to eat her oysters when they were brought. They looked tempting; eight in number, circularly set out on a white plate on a tray covered with a white napkin, flanked by a slice of buttered French roll, and a little compact glass of cool wine and water; but she resisted all persuasions, and sent them down again—placing the act to her credit, no doubt, in her Eternal Day-Book. This refection of oysters was not presided over by Affery, but by the girl who had appeared when the bell was rung; the same who had been in the dimly-lighted room last night. Now that he had an opportunity of observing her, Arthur found that her diminutive figure, small features, and slight spare dress, gave her the appearance of being much younger than she was. A woman, probably of not less than two-and-twenty, she might have been passed in the street for little more than half that age. Not that her face was very youthful, for in truth there was more consideration and care in it than naturally belonged to her utmost years; but she was so little and light, so noiseless and shy, and appeared so conscious of being out of place among the three hard elders, that she had all the manner and much of the appearance of a subdued child. In a hard way, and in an uncertain way that fluctuated between patronage and putting down, the sprinkling from a watering-pot and hydraulic pressure, Mrs Clennam showed an interest in this dependent. Even in the moment of her entrance, upon the violent ringing of the bell, when the mother shielded herself with that singular action from the son, Mrs Clennam’s eyes had had some individual recognition in them, which seemed reserved for her. As there are degrees of hardness in the hardest metal, and shades of colour in black itself, so, even in the asperity of Mrs Clennam’s demeanour towards all the rest of humanity and towards Little Dorrit, there was a fine gradation. Little Dorrit let herself out to do needlework. At so much a day—or at so little—from eight to eight, Little Dorrit was to be hired. Punctual to the moment, Little Dorrit appeared; punctual to the moment, Little Dorrit vanished. What became of Little Dorrit between the two eights was a mystery. Another of the moral phenomena of Little Dorrit. Besides her consideration money, her daily contract included meals. She had an extraordinary repugnance to dining in company; would never do so, if it were possible to escape. Would always plead that she had this bit of work to begin first, or that bit of work to finish first; and would, of a certainty, scheme and plan—not very cunningly, it would seem, for she deceived no one—to dine alone. Successful in this, happy in carrying off her plate anywhere, to make a table of her lap, or a box, or the ground, or even as was supposed, to stand on tip-toe, dining moderately at a mantel-shelf; the great anxiety of Little Dorrit’s day was set at rest. It was not easy to make out Little Dorrit’s face; she was so retiring, plied her needle in such removed corners, and started away so scared if encountered on the stairs. But it seemed to be a pale transparent face, quick in expression, though not beautiful in feature, its soft hazel eyes excepted. A delicately bent head, a tiny form, a quick little pair of busy hands, and a shabby dress—it must needs have been very shabby to look at all so, being so neat—were Little Dorrit as she sat at work. For these particulars or generalities concerning Little Dorrit, Mr Arthur was indebted in the course of the day to his own eyes and to Mrs Affery’s tongue. If Mrs Affery had had any will or way of her own, it would probably have been unfavourable to Little Dorrit. But as ‘them two clever ones’—Mrs Affery’s perpetual reference, in whom her personality was swallowed up—were agreed to accept Little Dorrit as a matter of course, she had nothing for it but to follow suit. Similarly, if the two clever ones had agreed to murder Little Dorrit by candlelight, Mrs Affery, being required to hold the candle, would no doubt have done it. In the intervals of roasting the partridge for the invalid chamber, and preparing a baking-dish of beef and pudding for the dining-room, Mrs Affery made the communications above set forth; invariably putting her head in at the door again after she had taken it out, to enforce resistance to the two clever ones. It appeared to have become a perfect passion with Mrs Flintwinch, that the only son should be pitted against them. In the course of the day, too, Arthur looked through the whole house. Dull and dark he found it. The gaunt rooms, deserted for years upon years, seemed to have settled down into a gloomy lethargy from which nothing could rouse them again. The furniture, at once spare and lumbering, hid in the rooms rather than furnished them, and there was no colour in all the house; such colour as had ever been there, had long ago started away on lost sunbeams—got itself absorbed, perhaps, into flowers, butterflies, plumage of birds, precious stones, what not. There was not one straight floor from the foundation to the roof; the ceilings were so fantastically clouded by smoke and dust, that old women might have told fortunes in them better than in grouts of tea; the dead-cold hearths showed no traces of having ever been warmed but in heaps of soot that had tumbled down the chimneys, and eddied about in little dusky whirlwinds when the doors were opened. In what had once been a drawing-room, there were a pair of meagre mirrors, with dismal processions of black figures carrying black garlands, walking round the frames; but even these were short of heads and legs, and one undertaker-like Cupid had swung round on its own axis and got upside down, and another had fallen off altogether. The room Arthur Clennam’s deceased father had occupied for business purposes, when he first remembered him, was so unaltered that he might have been imagined still to keep it invisibly, as his visible relict kept her room up-stairs; Jeremiah Flintwinch still going between them negotiating. 0071m Original His picture, dark and gloomy, earnestly speechless on the wall, with the eyes intently looking at his son as they had looked when life departed from them, seemed to urge him awfully to the task he had attempted; but as to any yielding on the part of his mother, he had now no hope, and as to any other means of setting his distrust at rest, he had abandoned hope a long time. Down in the cellars, as up in the bed-chambers, old objects that he well remembered were changed by age and decay, but were still in their old places; even to empty beer-casks hoary with cobwebs, and empty wine-bottles with fur and fungus choking up their throats. There, too, among unusual bottle-racks and pale slants of light from the yard above, was the strong room stored with old ledgers, which had as musty and corrupt a smell as if they were regularly balanced, in the dead small hours, by a nightly resurrection of old book-keepers. The baking-dish was served up in a penitential manner on a shrunken cloth at an end of the dining-table, at two o’clock, when he dined with Mr Flintwinch, the new partner. Mr Flintwinch informed him that his mother had recovered her equanimity now, and that he need not fear her again alluding to what had passed in the morning. ‘And don’t you lay offences at your father’s door, Mr Arthur,’ added Jeremiah, ‘once for all, don’t do it! Now, we have done with the subject.’ Mr Flintwinch had been already rearranging and dusting his own particular little office, as if to do honour to his accession to new dignity. He resumed this occupation when he was replete with beef, had sucked up all the gravy in the baking-dish with the flat of his knife, and had drawn liberally on a barrel of small beer in the scullery. Thus refreshed, he tucked up his shirt-sleeves and went to work again; and Mr Arthur, watching him as he set about it, plainly saw that his father’s picture, or his father’s grave, would be as communicative with him as this old man. ‘Now, Affery, woman,’ said Mr Flintwinch, as she crossed the hall. ‘You hadn’t made Mr Arthur’s bed when I was up there last. Stir yourself. Bustle.’ But Mr Arthur found the house so blank and dreary, and was so unwilling to assist at another implacable consignment of his mother’s enemies (perhaps himself among them) to mortal disfigurement and immortal ruin, that he announced his intention of lodging at the coffee-house where he had left his luggage. Mr Flintwinch taking kindly to the idea of getting rid of him, and his mother being indifferent, beyond considerations of saving, to most domestic arrangements that were not bounded by the walls of her own chamber, he easily carried this point without new offence. Daily business hours were agreed upon, which his mother, Mr Flintwinch, and he, were to devote together to a necessary checking of books and papers; and he left the home he had so lately found, with depressed heart. But Little Dorrit? The business hours, allowing for intervals of invalid regimen of oysters and partridges, during which Clennam refreshed himself with a walk, were from ten to six for about a fortnight. Sometimes Little Dorrit was employed at her needle, sometimes not, sometimes appeared as a humble visitor: which must have been her character on the occasion of his arrival. His original curiosity augmented every day, as he watched for her, saw or did not see her, and speculated about her. Influenced by his predominant idea, he even fell into a habit of discussing with himself the possibility of her being in some way associated with it. At last he resolved to watch Little Dorrit and know more of her story.nday evening in London, gloomy, close, and stale. Maddening church bells of all degrees of dissonance, sharp and flat, cracked and clear, fast and slow, made the brick-and-mortar echoes hideous. Melancholy streets, in a penitential garb of soot, steeped the souls of the people who were condemned to look at them out of windows, in dire despondency. In every thoroughfare, up almost every alley, and down almost every turning, some doleful bell was throbbing, jerking, tolling, as if the Plague were in the city and the dead-carts were going round. Everything was bolted and barred that could by possibility furnish relief to an overworked people. No pictures, no unfamiliar animals, no rare plants or flowers, no natural or artificial wonders of the ancient world—all taboo with that enlightened strictness, that the ugly South Sea gods in the British Museum might have supposed themselves at home again. Nothing to see but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to breathe but streets, streets, streets. Nothing to change the brooding mind, or raise it up. Nothing for the spent toiler to do, but to compare the monotony of his seventh day with the monotony of his six days, think what a weary life he led, and make the best of it—or the worst, according to the probabilities. At such a happy time, so propitious to the interests of religion and morality, Mr Arthur Clennam, newly arrived from Marseilles by way of Dover, and by Dover coach the Blue-eyed Maid, sat in the window of a coffee-house on Ludgate Hill. Ten thousand responsible houses surrounded him, frowning as heavily on the streets they composed, as if they were every one inhabited by the ten young men of the Calender’s story, who blackened their faces and bemoaned their miseries every night. Fifty thousand lairs surrounded him where people lived so unwholesomely that fair water put into their crowded rooms on Saturday night, would be corrupt on Sunday morning; albeit my lord, their county member, was amazed that they failed to sleep in company with their butcher’s meat. Miles of close wells and pits of houses, where the inhabitants gasped for air, stretched far away towards every point of the compass. Through the heart of the town a deadly sewer ebbed and flowed, in the place of a fine fresh river. What secular want could the million or so of human beings whose daily labour, six days in the week, lay among these Arcadian objects, from the sweet sameness of which they had no escape between the cradle and the grave—what secular want could they possibly have upon their seventh day? Clearly they could want nothing but a stringent policeman. Mr Arthur Clennam sat in the window of the coffee-house on Ludgate Hill, counting one of the neighbouring bells, making sentences and burdens of songs out of it in spite of himself, and wondering how many sick people it might be the death of in the course of the year. As the hour approached, its changes of measure made it more and more exasperating. At the quarter, it went off into a condition of deadly-lively importunity, urging the populace in a voluble manner to Come to church, Come to church, Come to church! At the ten minutes, it became aware that the congregation would be scanty, and slowly hammered out in low spirits, They won’t come, they won’t come, they won’t come! At the five minutes, it abandoned hope, and shook every house in the neighbourhood for three hundred seconds, with one dismal swing per second, as a groan of despair. ‘Thank Heaven!’ said Clennam, when the hour struck, and the bell stopped. But its sound had revived a long train of miserable Sundays, and the procession would not stop with the bell, but continued to march on. ‘Heaven forgive me,’ said he, ‘and those who trained me. How I have hated this day!’ There was the dreary Sunday of his childhood, when he sat with his hands before him, scared out of his senses by a horrible tract which commenced business with the poor child by asking him in its title, why he was going to Perdition?—a piece of curiosity that he really, in a frock and drawers, was not in a condition to satisfy—and which, for the further attraction of his infant mind, had a parenthesis in every other line with some such hiccupping reference as 2 Ep. Thess. c. iii, v. 6 & 7. There was the sleepy Sunday of his boyhood, when, like a military deserter, he was marched to chapel by a picquet of teachers three times a day, morally handcuffed to another boy; and when he would willingly have bartered two meals of indigestible sermon for another ounce or two of inferior mutton at his scanty dinner in the flesh. There was the interminable Sunday of his nonage; when his mother, stern of face and unrelenting of heart, would sit all day behind a Bible—bound, like her own construction of it, in the hardest, barest, and straitest boards, with one dinted ornament on the cover like the drag of a chain, and a wrathful sprinkling of red upon the edges of the leaves—as if it, of all books! were a fortification against sweetness of temper, natural affection, and gentle intercourse. There was the resentful Sunday of a little later, when he sat down glowering and glooming through the tardy length of the day, with a sullen sense of injury in his heart, and no more real knowledge of the beneficent history of the New Testament than if he had been bred among idolaters. There was a legion of Sundays, all days of unserviceable bitterness and mortification, slowly passing before him. ‘Beg pardon, sir,’ said a brisk waiter, rubbing the table. ‘Wish see bed-room?’ ‘Yes. I have just made up my mind to do it.’ ‘Chaymaid!’ cried the waiter. ‘Gelen box num seven wish see room!’ ‘Stay!’ said Clennam, rousing himself. ‘I was not thinking of what I said; I answered mechanically. I am not going to sleep here. I am going home.’ ‘Deed, sir? Chaymaid! Gelen box num seven, not go sleep here, gome.’ He sat in the same place as the day died, looking at the dull houses opposite, and thinking, if the disembodied spirits of former inhabitants were ever conscious of them, how they must pity themselves for their old places of imprisonment. Sometimes a face would appear behind the dingy glass of a window, and would fade away into the gloom as if it had seen enough of life and had vanished out of it. Presently the rain began to fall in slanting lines between him and those houses, and people began to collect under cover of the public passage opposite, and to look out hopelessly at the sky as the rain dropped thicker and faster. Then wet umbrellas began to appear, draggled skirts, and mud. What the mud had been doing with itself, or where it came from, who could say? But it seemed to collect in a moment, as a crowd will, and in five minutes to have splashed all the sons and daughters of Adam. The lamplighter was going his rounds now; and as the fiery jets sprang up under his touch, one might have fancied them astonished at being suffered to introduce any show of brightness into such a dismal scene. Mr Arthur Clennam took up his hat and buttoned his coat, and walked out. In the country, the rain would have developed a thousand fresh scents, and every drop would have had its bright association with some beautiful form of growth or life. In the city, it developed only foul stale smells, and was a sickly, lukewarm, dirt-stained, wretched addition to the gutters. He crossed by St Paul’s and went down, at a long angle, almost to the water’s edge, through some of the crooked and descending streets which lie (and lay more crookedly and closely then) between the river and Cheapside. Passing, now the mouldy hall of some obsolete Worshipful Company, now the illuminated windows of a Congregationless Church that seemed to be waiting for some adventurous Belzoni to dig it out and discover its history; passing silent warehouses and wharves, and here and there a narrow alley leading to the river, where a wretched little bill, FOUND DROWNED, was weeping on the wet wall; he came at last to the house he sought. An old brick house, so dingy as to be all but black, standing by itself within a gateway. Before it, a square court-yard where a shrub or two and a patch of grass were as rank (which is saying much) as the iron railings enclosing them were rusty; behind it, a jumble of roots. It was a double house, with long, narrow, heavily-framed windows. Many years ago, it had had it in its mind to slide down sideways; it had been propped up, however, and was leaning on some half-dozen gigantic crutches: which gymnasium for the neighbouring cats, weather-stained, smoke-blackened, and overgrown with weeds, appeared in these latter days to be no very sure reliance. ‘Nothing changed,’ said the traveller, stopping to look round. ‘Dark and miserable as ever. A light in my mother’s window, which seems never to have been extinguished since I came home twice a year from school, and dragged my box over this pavement. Well, well, well!’ He went up to the door, which had a projecting canopy in carved work of festooned jack-towels and children’s heads with water on the brain, designed after a once-popular monumental pattern, and knocked. A shuffling step was soon heard on the stone floor of the hall, and the door was opened by an old man, bent and dried, but with keen eyes. He had a candle in his hand, and he held it up for a moment to assist his keen eyes. ‘Ah, Mr Arthur?’ he said, without any emotion, ‘you are come at last? Step in.’ Mr Arthur stepped in and shut the door. ‘Your figure is filled out, and set,’ said the old man, turning to look at him with the light raised again, and shaking his head; ‘but you don’t come up to your father in my opinion. Nor yet your mother.’ ‘How is my mother?’ ‘She is as she always is now. Keeps her room when not actually bedridden, and hasn’t been out of it fifteen times in as many years, Arthur.’ They had walked into a spare, meagre dining-room. The old man had put the candlestick upon the table, and, supporting his right elbow with his left hand, was smoothing his leathern jaws while he looked at the visitor. The visitor offered his hand. The old man took it coldly enough, and seemed to prefer his jaws, to which he returned as soon as he could. ‘I doubt if your mother will approve of your coming home on the Sabbath, Arthur,’ he said, shaking his head warily. ‘You wouldn’t have me go away again?’ ‘Oh! I? I? I am not the master. It’s not what I would have. I have stood between your father and mother for a number of years. I don’t pretend to stand between your mother and you.’ ‘Will you tell her that I have come home?’ ‘Yes, Arthur, yes. Oh, to be sure! I’ll tell her that you have come home. Please to wait here. You won’t find the room changed.’ He took another candle from a cupboard, lighted it, left the first on the table, and went upon his errand. He was a short, bald old man, in a high-shouldered black coat and waistcoat, drab breeches, and long drab gaiters. He might, from his dress, have been either clerk or servant, and in fact had long been both. There was nothing about him in the way of decoration but a watch, which was lowered into the depths of its proper pocket by an old black ribbon, and had a tarnished copper key moored above it, to show where it was sunk. His head was awry, and he had a one-sided, crab-like way with him, as if his foundations had yielded at about the same time as those of the house, and he ought to have been propped up in a similar manner. ‘How weak am I,’ said Arthur Clennam, when he was gone, ‘that I could shed tears at this reception! I, who have never experienced anything else; who have never expected anything else.’ He not only could, but did. It was the momentary yielding of a nature that had been disappointed from the dawn of its perceptions, but had not quite given up all its hopeful yearnings yet. He subdued it, took up the candle, and examined the room. The old articles of furniture were in their old places; the Plagues of Egypt, much the dimmer for the fly and smoke plagues of London, were framed and glazed upon the walls. There was the old cellaret with nothing in it, lined with lead, like a sort of coffin in compartments; there was the old dark closet, also with nothing in it, of which he had been many a time the sole contents, in days of punishment, when he had regarded it as the veritable entrance to that bourne to which the tract had found him galloping. There was the large, hard-featured clock on the sideboard, which he used to see bending its figured brows upon him with a savage joy when he was behind-hand with his lessons, and which, when it was wound up once a week with an iron handle, used to sound as if it were growling in ferocious anticipation of the miseries into which it would bring him. But here was the old man come back, saying, ‘Arthur, I’ll go before and light you.’ Arthur followed him up the staircase, which was panelled off into spaces like so many mourning tablets, into a dim bed-chamber, the floor of which had gradually so sunk and settled, that the fire-place was in a dell. On a black bier-like sofa in this hollow, propped up behind with one great angular black bolster like the block at a state execution in the good old times, sat his mother in a widow’s dress. She and his father had been at variance from his earliest remembrance. To sit speechless himself in the midst of rigid silence, glancing in dread from the one averted face to the other, had been the peacefullest occupation of his childhood. She gave him one glassy kiss, and four stiff fingers muffled in worsted. This embrace concluded, he sat down on the opposite side of her little table. There was a fire in the grate, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a kettle on the hob, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a little mound of damped ashes on the top of the fire, and another little mound swept together under the grate, as there had been night and day for fifteen years. There was a smell of black dye in the airless room, which the fire had been drawing out of the crape and stuff of the widow’s dress for fifteen months, and out of the bier-like sofa for fifteen years. ‘Mother, this is a change from your old active habits.’ ‘The world has narrowed to these dimensions, Arthur,’ she replied, glancing round the room. ‘It is well for me that I never set my heart upon its hollow vanities.’ The old influence of her presence and her stern strong voice, so gathered about her son, that he felt conscious of a renewal of the timid chill and reserve of his childhood. ‘Do you never leave your room, mother?’ ‘What with my rheumatic affection, and what with its attendant debility or nervous weakness—names are of no matter now—I have lost the use of my limbs. I never leave my room. I have not been outside this door for—tell him for how long,’ she said, speaking over her shoulder. ‘A dozen year next Christmas,’ returned a cracked voice out of the dimness behind. ‘Is that Affery?’ said Arthur, looking towards it. The cracked voice replied that it was Affery: and an old woman came forward into what doubtful light there was, and kissed her hand once; then subsided again into the dimness. ‘I am able,’ said Mrs Clennam, with a slight motion of her worsted-muffled right hand toward a chair on wheels, standing before a tall writing cabinet close shut up, ‘I am able to attend to my business duties, and I am thankful for the privilege. It is a great privilege. But no more of business on this day. It is a bad night, is it not?’ ‘Yes, mother.’ ‘Does it snow?’ ‘Snow, mother? And we only yet in September?’ ‘All seasons are alike to me,’ she returned, with a grim kind of luxuriousness. ‘I know nothing of summer and winter, shut up here. The Lord has been pleased to put me beyond all that.’ With her cold grey eyes and her cold grey hair, and her immovable face, as stiff as the folds of her stony head-dress,—her being beyond the reach of the seasons seemed but a fit sequence to her being beyond the reach of all changing emotions. On her little table lay two or three books, her handkerchief, a pair of steel spectacles newly taken off, and an old-fashioned gold watch in a heavy double case. Upon this last object her son’s eyes and her own now rested together. ‘I see that you received the packet I sent you on my father’s death, safely, mother.’ ‘You see.’ ‘I never knew my father to show so much anxiety on any subject, as that his watch should be sent straight to you.’ ‘I keep it here as a remembrance of your father.’ ‘It was not until the last, that he expressed the wish; when he could only put his hand upon it, and very indistinctly say to me “your mother.” A moment before, I thought him wandering in his mind, as he had been for many hours—I think he had no consciousness of pain in his short illness—when I saw him turn himself in his bed and try to open it.’ ‘Was your father, then, not wandering in his mind when he tried to open it?’ ‘No. He was quite sensible at that time.’ Mrs Clennam shook her head; whether in dismissal of the deceased or opposing herself to her son’s opinion, was not clearly expressed. ‘After my father’s death I opened it myself, thinking there might be, for anything I knew, some memorandum there. However, as I need not tell you, mother, there was nothing but the old silk watch-paper worked in beads, which you found (no doubt) in its place between the cases, where I found and left it.’ Mrs Clennam signified assent; then added, ‘No more of business on this day,’ and then added, ‘Affery, it is nine o’clock.’ Upon this, the old woman cleared the little table, went out of the room, and quickly returned with a tray on which was a dish of little rusks and a small precise pat of butter, cool, symmetrical, white, and plump. The old man who had been standing by the door in one attitude during the whole interview, looking at the mother up-stairs as he had looked at the son down-stairs, went out at the same time, and, after a longer absence, returned with another tray on which was the greater part of a bottle of port wine (which, to judge by his panting, he had brought from the cellar), a lemon, a sugar-basin, and a spice box. With these materials and the aid of the kettle, he filled a tumbler with a hot and odorous mixture, measured out and compounded with as much nicety as a physician’s prescription. Into this mixture Mrs Clennam dipped certain of the rusks, and ate them; while the old woman buttered certain other of the rusks, which were to be eaten alone. When the invalid had eaten all the rusks and drunk all the mixture, the two trays were removed; and the books and the candle, watch, handkerchief, and spectacles were replaced upon the table. She then put on the spectacles and read certain passages aloud from a book—sternly, fiercely, wrathfully—praying that her enemies (she made them by her tone and manner expressly hers) might be put to the edge of the sword, consumed by fire, smitten by plagues and leprosy, that their bones might be ground to dust, and that they might be utterly exterminated. As she read on, years seemed to fall away from her son like the imaginings of a dream, and all the old dark horrors of his usual preparation for the sleep of an innocent child to overshadow him. She shut the book and remained for a little time with her face shaded by her hand. So did the old man, otherwise still unchanged in attitude; so, probably, did the old woman in her dimmer part of the room. Then the sick woman was ready for bed. ‘Good night, Arthur. Affery will see to your accommodation. Only touch me, for my hand is tender.’ He touched the worsted muffling of her hand—that was nothing; if his mother had been sheathed in brass there would have been no new barrier between them—and followed the old man and woman down-stairs. The latter asked him, when they were alone together among the heavy shadows of the dining-room, would he have some supper? ‘No, Affery, no supper.’ ‘You shall if you like,’ said Affery. ‘There’s her tomorrow’s partridge in the larder—her first this year; say the word and I’ll cook it.’ No, he had not long dined, and could eat nothing. ‘Have something to drink, then,’ said Affery; ‘you shall have some of her bottle of port, if you like. I’ll tell Jeremiah that you ordered me to bring it you.’ No; nor would he have that, either. ‘It’s no reason, Arthur,’ said the old woman, bending over him to whisper, ‘that because I am afeared of my life of ‘em, you should be. You’ve got half the property, haven’t you?’ ‘Yes, yes.’ ‘Well then, don’t you be cowed. You’re clever, Arthur, an’t you?’ He nodded, as she seemed to expect an answer in the affirmative. ‘Then stand up against them! She’s awful clever, and none but a clever one durst say a word to her. He’s a clever one—oh, he’s a clever one!—and he gives it her when he has a mind to’t, he does!’ ‘Your husband does?’ ‘Does? It makes me shake from head to foot, to hear him give it her. My husband, Jeremiah Flintwinch, can conquer even your mother. What can he be but a clever one to do that!’ His shuffling footstep coming towards them caused her to retreat to the other end of the room. Though a tall, hard-favoured, sinewy old woman, who in her youth might have enlisted in the Foot Guards without much fear of discovery, she collapsed before the little keen-eyed crab-like old man. ‘Now, Affery,’ said he, ‘now, woman, what are you doing? Can’t you find Master Arthur something or another to pick at?’ Master Arthur repeated his recent refusal to pick at anything. ‘Very well, then,’ said the old man; ‘make his bed. Stir yourself.’ His neck was so twisted that the knotted ends of his white cravat usually dangled under one ear; his natural acerbity and energy, always contending with a second nature of habitual repression, gave his features a swollen and suffused look; and altogether, he had a weird appearance of having hanged himself at one time or other, and of having gone about ever since, halter and all, exactly as some timely hand had cut him down. ‘You’ll have bitter words together to-morrow, Arthur; you and your mother,’ said Jeremiah. ‘Your having given up the business on your father’s death—which she suspects, though we have left it to you to tell her—won’t go off smoothly.’ ‘I have given up everything in life for the business, and the time came for me to give up that.’ ‘Good!’ cried Jeremiah, evidently meaning Bad. ‘Very good! only don’t expect me to stand between your mother and you, Arthur. I stood between your mother and your father, fending off this, and fending off that, and getting crushed and pounded betwixt em; and I’ve done with such work.’ ‘You will never be asked to begin it again for me, Jeremiah.’ ‘Good. I’m glad to hear it; because I should have had to decline it, if I had been. That’s enough—as your mother says—and more than enough of such matters on a Sabbath night. Affery, woman, have you found what you want yet?’ She had been collecting sheets and blankets from a press, and hastened to gather them up, and to reply, ‘Yes, Jeremiah.’ Arthur Clennam helped her by carrying the load himself, wished the old man good night, and went up-stairs with her to the top of the house. They mounted up and up, through the musty smell of an old close house, little used, to a large garret bed-room. Meagre and spare, like all the other rooms, it was even uglier and grimmer than the rest, by being the place of banishment for the worn-out furniture. Its movables were ugly old chairs with worn-out seats, and ugly old chairs without any seats; a threadbare patternless carpet, a maimed table, a crippled wardrobe, a lean set of fire-irons like the skeleton of a set deceased, a washing-stand that looked as if it had stood for ages in a hail of dirty soapsuds, and a bedstead with four bare atomies of posts, each terminating in a spike, as if for the dismal accommodation of lodgers who might prefer to impale themselves. Arthur opened the long low window, and looked out upon the old blasted and blackened forest of chimneys, and the old red glare in the sky, which had seemed to him once upon a time but a nightly reflection of the fiery environment that was presented to his childish fancy in all directions, let it look where it would. He drew in his head again, sat down at the bedside, and looked on at Affery Flintwinch making the bed. ‘Affery, you were not married when I went away.’ She screwed her mouth into the form of saying ‘No,’ shook her head, and proceeded to get a pillow into its case. ‘How did it happen?’ ‘Why, Jeremiah, o’ course,’ said Affery, with an end of the pillow-case between her teeth. ‘Of course he proposed it, but how did it all come about? I should have thought that neither of you would have married; least of all should I have thought of your marrying each other.’ ‘No more should I,’ said Mrs Flintwinch, tying the pillow tightly in its case. ‘That’s what I mean. When did you begin to think otherwise?’ ‘Never begun to think otherwise at all,’ said Mrs Flintwinch. Seeing, as she patted the pillow into its place on the bolster, that he was still looking at her as if waiting for the rest of her reply, she gave it a great poke in the middle, and asked, ‘How could I help myself?’ ‘How could you help yourself from being married!’ ‘O’ course,’ said Mrs Flintwinch. ‘It was no doing o’ mine. I’d never thought of it. I’d got something to do, without thinking, indeed! She kept me to it (as well as he) when she could go about, and she could go about then.’ ‘Well?’ ‘Well?’ echoed Mrs Flintwinch. ‘That’s what I said myself. Well! What’s the use of considering? If them two clever ones have made up their minds to it, what’s left for me to do? Nothing.’ ‘Was it my mother’s project, then?’ ‘The Lord bless you, Arthur, and forgive me the wish!’ cried Affery, speaking always in a low tone. ‘If they hadn’t been both of a mind in it, how could it ever have been? Jeremiah never courted me; t’ant likely that he would, after living in the house with me and ordering me about for as many years as he’d done. He said to me one day, he said, “Affery,” he said, “now I am going to tell you something. What do you think of the name of Flintwinch?” “What do I think of it?” I says. “Yes,” he said, “because you’re going to take it,” he said. “Take it?” I says. “Jere-mi-ah?” Oh! he’s a clever one!’ Mrs Flintwinch went on to spread the upper sheet over the bed, and the blanket over that, and the counterpane over that, as if she had quite concluded her story. ‘Well?’ said Arthur again. ‘Well?’ echoed Mrs Flintwinch again. ‘How could I help myself? He said to me, “Affery, you and me must be married, and I’ll tell you why. She’s failing in health, and she’ll want pretty constant attendance up in her room, and we shall have to be much with her, and there’ll be nobody about now but ourselves when we’re away from her, and altogether it will be more convenient. She’s of my opinion,” he said, “so if you’ll put your bonnet on next Monday morning at eight, we’ll get it over.”’ Mrs Flintwinch tucked up the bed. ‘Well?’ ‘Well?’ repeated Mrs Flintwinch, ‘I think so! I sits me down and says it. Well!—Jeremiah then says to me, “As to banns, next Sunday being the third time of asking (for I’ve put ‘em up a fortnight), is my reason for naming Monday. She’ll speak to you about it herself, and now she’ll find you prepared, Affery.” That same day she spoke to me, and she said, “So, Affery, I understand that you and Jeremiah are going to be married. I am glad of it, and so are you, with reason. It is a very good thing for you, and very welcome under the circumstances to me. He is a sensible man, and a trustworthy man, and a persevering man, and a pious man.” What could I say when it had come to that? Why, if it had been—a smothering instead of a wedding,’ Mrs Flintwinch cast about in her mind with great pains for this form of expression, ‘I couldn’t have said a word upon it, against them two clever ones.’ ‘In good faith, I believe so.’ ‘And so you may, Arthur.’ ‘Affery, what girl was that in my mother’s room just now?’ ‘Girl?’ said Mrs Flintwinch in a rather sharp key. ‘It was a girl, surely, whom I saw near you—almost hidden in the dark corner?’ ‘Oh! She? Little Dorrit? She’s nothing; she’s a whim of—hers.’ It was a peculiarity of Affery Flintwinch that she never spoke of Mrs Clennam by name. ‘But there’s another sort of girls than that about. Have you forgot your old sweetheart? Long and long ago, I’ll be bound.’ ‘I suffered enough from my mother’s separating us, to remember her. I recollect her very well.’ ‘Have you got another?’ ‘No.’ ‘Here’s news for you, then. She’s well to do now, and a widow. And if you like to have her, why you can.’ ‘And how do you know that, Affery?’ ‘Them two clever ones have been speaking about it.—There’s Jeremiah on the stairs!’ She was gone in a moment. Mrs Flintwinch had introduced into the web that his mind was busily weaving, in that old workshop where the loom of his youth had stood, the last thread wanting to the pattern. The airy folly of a boy’s love had found its way even into that house, and he had been as wretched under its hopelessness as if the house had been a castle of romance. Little more than a week ago at Marseilles, the face of the pretty girl from whom he had parted with regret, had had an unusual interest for him, and a tender hold upon him, because of some resemblance, real or imagined, to this first face that had soared out of his gloomy life into the bright glories of fancy. He leaned upon the sill of the long low window, and looking out upon the blackened forest of chimneys again, began to dream; for it had been the uniform tendency of this man’s life—so much was wanting in it to think about, so much that might have been better directed and happier to speculate upon—to make him a dreamer, after all.意劫取。