, made a great
fortune and made a great will. In the question how the trusts under that
will are to be administered, the fortune left by the will is squandered
away; the legatees under the will are reduced to such a miserable
condition that they would be sufficiently punished if they had committed
an enormous crime in having money left them, and the will itself is made
a dead letter. All through the deplorable cause everybody must have
copies, over and over again, of everything that has accumulated about it
in the way of cartloads of papers, and must go down the middle and up
again, through such an infernal country-dance of costs and fees and
nonsense and corruption as was never dreamed of in the wildest visions
of a witch's sabbath. And we can't get out of the suit on any terms, for
we are made parties to it, and _must be_ parties to it, whether we like
it or not. But it won't do to think of it! Thinking of it drove my
great-uncle, poor Tom Jarndyce, to blow his brains out."

"I hope sir--" said I.

"I think you had better call me Guardian, my dear."

"I hope, Guardian," said I, giving the housekeeping keys the least shake
in the world, "that you may not be trusting too much to my discretion. I
am not clever, and that's the truth."

"You are clever enough to be the good little woman of our lives here, my
dear," he returned playfully; "the little old woman of the rhyme, who
sweeps the cobwebs of the sky, and you will sweep them out of _our_ sky
in the course of your housekeeping, Esther."

This was the beginning of my being called Old Woman, and Mother Hubbard,
and Dame Durden, and so many names of that sort, that my own soon became
quite lost.

One of the things I noticed from the first about my guardian was that,
though he was always doing a thousand acts of kindness, he could not
bear any acknowledgments.

We had somehow got to see more of Miss Flite on our visits to London:
for the Lord Chancellor always had to be consulted before Richard could
settle in any profession, and as Richard first wanted to be a doctor and
then tired of that in favour of the army, there were several
consultations. I remember one visit because it was the first time we met
Mr. Woodcourt.

My guardian and Ada and I heard of Miss Flite having been ill, and when
we called we found a medical gentleman attending her in her garret in
Lincoln's Inn.

Miss Flite dropped a general curtsy.

"Honoured, indeed," she said, "by another visit