Page 624 - bleak-house

man Street two or three times, where preparations were in
progress too—a good many, I observed, for enhancing the
comforts of old Mr. Turveydrop, and a few for putting the
newly married couple away cheaply at the top of the house—
but our great point was to make the furnished lodging
decent for the wedding-breakfast and to imbue Mrs. Jellyby
beforehand with some faint sense of the occasion.
The latter was the more difficult thing of the two because
Mrs. Jellyby and an unwholesome boy occupied the front
sitting-room (the back one was a mere closet), and it was
littered down with wastepaper and Borrioboolan docu-
ments, as an untidy stable might be littered with straw. Mrs.
Jellyby sat there all day drinking strong coffee, dictating,
and holding Borrioboolan interviews by appointment. The
unwholesome boy, who seemed to me to be going into a de-
cline, took his meals out of the house. When Mr. Jellyby
came home, he usually groaned and went down into the
kitchen. There he got something to eat if the servant would
give him anything, and then, feeling that he was in the way,
went out and walked about Hatton Garden in the wet. The
poor children scrambled up and tumbled down the house
as they had always been accustomed to do.
The production of these devoted little sacrifices in any
presentable condition being quite out of the question at a
week’s notice, I proposed to Caddy that we should make
them as happy as we could on her marriage morning in
the attic where they all slept, and should confine our great-
est efforts to her mama and her mama’s room, and a clean
breakfast. In truth Mrs. Jellyby required a good deal of

624 Bleak House