“And what, my old lady,” inquired Mr. Boffin, when he also had sympathetically laughed: “what’s your views on the subject of the Bower?”
“Shut it up. Don’t part with it, but put somebody in it, to keep it.”
“Any other views?”
“Noddy,” said Mrs. Boffin, coming from her fashionable sofa to his side on the plain settle, and hooking her comfortable arm through his, “Next I think—and I really have been thinking early and late—of the disappointed girl; her that was so cruelly disappointed, you know, both of her husband and his riches. Don’t you think we might do something for her? Have her to live with us? Or something of that sort?”
“Ne‑ver once thought of the way of doing it!” cried Mr. Boffin, smiting the table in his admiration. “What a thinking steam-ingein this old lady is. And she don’t know how she does it. Neither does the ingein!”
Mrs. Boffin pulled his nearest ear, in acknowledgment of this piece of philosophy, and then said, gradually toning down to a motherly strain: “Last, and not least, I have taken a fancy. You remember dear little John Harmon, before he went to school? Over yonder across the yard, at our fire? Now that he is past all benefit of the money, and it’s come to us, I should like to find some orphan child, and take the boy and adopt him and give him John’s name, and provide for him. Somehow, it would make me easier, I fancy. Say it’s only a whim—”
“But I don’t say so,” interposed her husband.
“No, but deary, if you did—”
“I should be a beast if I did,” her husband interposed again.