When, in a moment's irresolution, he looked
at Charity, he could not but observe a struggle in her face between
a sense of triumph and a sense of shame; nor could he but remark how,
meeting even his eyes, which she cared so little for, she turned away
her own, for all the splenetic defiance in her manner.
An uneasy thought entered Tom's head; a shadowy misgiving that the
altered relations between himself and Pecksniff were somehow to involve
an altered knowledge on his part of other people, and were to give him
an insight into much of which he had had no previous suspicion. And yet
he put no definite construction upon Charity's proceedings. He certainly
had no idea that as he had been the audience and spectator of her
mortification, she grasped with eager delight at any opportunity of
reproaching her sister with his presence in HER far deeper misery; for
he knew nothing of it, and only pictured that sister as the same giddy,
careless, trivial creature she always had been, with the same slight
estimation of himself which she had never been at the least pains
to conceal. In short, he had merely a confused impression that Miss
Pecksniff was not quite sisterly or kind; and being curious to set it
right, accompanied her as she desired.
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