CHARLES DICKENS DOMBEY AND SON CHAPTER I Dombey and ...

wonder.
For Florence lived alone in the deserted house, and day succeeded day, and
still she lived alone, and the cold walls looked down upon her with a vacant
stare, as if they had a Gorgon-like mind to stare her youth and beauty into
stone.
The grass began to grow upon the roof, and in the crevices of the basement
paving. A scaly crumbling vegetation sprouted round the window-sills.
Fragments of mortar lost their hold upon the insides of the unused chimneys,
and came dropping down. The two trees with the smoky trunks were blighted
high up, and the withered branches domineered above the leaves. Through the
whole building white had turned yellow, yellow nearly black; and since the
time when the poor lady died, it had slowly become a dark gap in the long
monotonous street.
But Florence bloomed there, like the king's fair daughter in the story. Her
books, her music, and her daily teachers, were her only real companions,
Susan Nipper and Diogenes excepted: of whom the former, in her attendance on
the studies of her young mistress, began to grow quite learned herself,
while the latter, softened possibly by the same influences, would lay his
head upon the window-ledge, and placidly open and shut his eyes upon the
street, all through a summer morning; sometimes pricking up his head to look
with great significance after some noisy dog in a cart, who was barking his
way along, and sometimes, with an exasperated and unaccountable recollection
of his supposed enemy in the neighbourhood, rushing to the door, whence,
after a deafening disturbance, he would come jogging back with a ridiculous
complacency that belonged to him, and lay his jaw upon the window-ledge
again, with the air of a dog who had done a public service.
So Florence lived in her wilderness of a home, within the circle of her
innocent pursuits and thoughts, and nothing harmed her. She could go down to
her father's rooms now, and think of him, and suffer her loving heart humbly
to approach him, without fear of repulse. She could look upon the objects
that had surrounded him in his sorrow, and could nestle near his chair, and
not dread the glance that she so well remembered. She could render him such