“I got here, Flopson?” asked Mrs. Pocket.

“Why, if it ain’t your footstool!” cried Flopson.  “And if you keep it under your skirts like that, who’s to help tumbling?  Here!  Take the baby, Mum, and give me your book.”

Mrs. Pocket acted on the advice, and inexpertly danced the infant a little in her lap, while the other children played about it.  This had lasted but a very short time, when Mrs. Pocket issued summary orders that they were all to be taken into the house for a nap.  Thus I made the second discovery on that first occasion, that the nurture of the little Pockets consisted of alternately tumbling up and lying down.

Under these circumstances, when Flopson and Millers had got the children into the house, like a little flock of sheep, and Mr. Pocket came out of it to make my acquaintance, I was not much surprised to find that Mr. Pocket was a gentleman with a rather perplexed expression of face, and with his very grey hair disordered on his head, as if he didn’t quite see his way to putting anything straight.

Chapter 23

Mr. Pocket said he was glad to see me, and he hoped I was not sorry to see him.  “For, I really am not,” he added, with his son’s smile, “an alarming personage.”  He was a young-looking man, in spite of his perplexities and his very grey hair, and his manner seemed quite natural.  I use the word natural, in the sense of its being unaffected; there was something comic in his distraught way, as though it would have been downright ludicrous but for his own perception that it was very near being so.  When he had talked with me a little, he said to Mrs. Pocket, with a rather anxious contraction of his eyebrows, which were black and handsome, “Belinda, I hope you have welcomed Mr. Pip?” And she looked up from her book, and said, “Yes.”  She then smiled upon me in an absent state of mind, and asked me if I liked the taste of orange-flower water?  As the question had no bearing, near or remote, on any foregone or subsequent transaction, I consider it to have been thrown out, like her previous approaches, in general conversational condescension.

I found out within a few hours, and may mention at once, that Mrs. Pocket was the only daughter of a certain quite accidental deceased Knight, who had invented for himself a conviction that his deceased father would have been made a Baronet but for somebody’s determined opposition arising out of entirely personal motives — I forget whose, if I ever knew — the Sovereign’s, the Prime Minister’s, the Lord Chancellor’s, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s, anybody’s — and had tacked himself on to the nobles of the earth in right of this quite supposititious fact.  I believe he had been knighted himself for storming the English grammar at the point of the pen, in a desperate address engrossed on vellum, on the occasion of the laying of the first stone of some building or other, and for handing some Royal Personage either the trowel or the mortar.  Be that as it may, he had directed Mrs. Pocket to be brought up from her cradle as one who in the nature of things must marry a title, and who was to be guarded from the acquisition of plebeian domestic knowledge.