'"Pounds, shillings, and pence." You find your allowance always
sufficient for your wants, my dear?'

Rosa wanted for nothing, and therefore it was ample.

'And you are not in debt?'

Rosa laughed at the idea of being in debt. It seemed, to her
inexperience, a comical vagary of the imagination. Mr. Grewgious
stretched his near sight to be sure that this was her view of the
case. 'Ah!' he said, as comment, with a furtive glance towards
Miss Twinkleton, and lining out pounds, shillings, and pence: 'I
spoke of having got among the angels! So I did!'

Rosa felt what his next memorandum would prove to be, and was
blushing and folding a crease in her dress with one embarrassed
hand, long before he found it.

'"Marriage." Hem!' Mr. Grewgious carried his smoothing hand down
over his eyes and nose, and even chin, before drawing his chair a
little nearer, and speaking a little more confidentially: 'I now
touch, my dear, upon the point that is the direct cause of my
troubling you with the present visit. Othenwise, being a
particularly Angular man, I should not have intruded here. I am
the last man to intrude into a sphere for which I am so entirely
unfitted. I feel, on these premises, as if I was a bear--with the
cramp--in a youthful Cotillon.'

His ungainliness gave him enough of the air of his simile to set