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PinkMonkey.com-Nicholas Nickelby by Charles Dickens




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


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