The angels are, we know very well, up-stairs.' Miss Twinkleton looked round with a kind of stiff stare.
'I refer, my dear,' said Mr.Grewgious, laying his hand on Rosa's, as the possibility thrilled through his frame of his otherwise seeming to take the awful liberty of calling Miss Twinkleton my dear; 'I refer to the other young ladies.' Miss Twinkleton resumed her writing.
Mr.Grewgious, with a sense of not having managed his opening point quite as neatly as he might have desired, smoothed his head from back to front as if he had just dived, and were pressing the water out--this smoothing action, however superfluous, was habitual with him--and took a pocket-book from his coat-pocket, and a stump of black-lead pencil from his waistcoat-pocket.
'I made,' he said, turning the leaves: 'I made a guiding memorandum or so--as I usually do, for I have no conversational powers whatever--to which I will, with your permission, my dear, refer.

"Well and happy." Truly.

You are well and happy, my dear?
You look so.' 'Yes, indeed, sir,' answered Rosa.
'For which,' said Mr.Grewgious, with a bend of his head towards the corner window, 'our warmest acknowledgments are due, and I am sure are rendered, to the maternal kindness and the constant care and consideration of the lady whom I have now the honour to see before me.' This point, again, made but a lame departure from Mr.Grewgious, and never got to its destination; for, Miss Twinkleton, feeling that the courtesies required her to be by this time quite outside the conversation, was biting the end of her pen, and looking upward, as waiting for the descent of an idea from any member of the Celestial Nine who might have one to spare.
Mr.Grewgious smoothed his smooth head again, and then made another reference to his pocket-book; lining out 'well and happy,' as disposed of.
'"Pounds, shillings, and pence," is my next note.

A dry subject for a young lady, but an important subject too.

Life is pounds, shillings, and pence.