Book The Second: Riches Chapter 33 Going!

The changes of a fevered room are slow and fluctuating; but the changes
of the fevered world are rapid and irrevocable.

It was Little Dorrit's lot to wait upon both kinds of change. The
Marshalsea walls, during a portion of every day, again embraced her in
their shadows as their child, while she thought for Clennam, worked for
him, watched him, and only left him, still to devote her utmost love and
care to him.

Her part in the life outside the gate urged its pressing
claims upon her too, and her patience untiringly responded to them.
Here was Fanny, proud, fitful, whimsical, further advanced in that
disqualified state for going into society which had so much fretted
her on the evening of the tortoise-shell knife, resolved always to want
comfort, resolved not to be comforted, resolved to be deeply wronged,
and resolved that nobody should have the audacity to think her so.

Here was her brother, a weak, proud, tipsy, young old man, shaking from
head to foot, talking as indistinctly as if some of the money he plumed
himself upon had got into his mouth and couldn't be got out, unable to
walk alone in any act of his life, and patronising the sister whom he
selfishly loved (he always had that negative merit, ill-starred and
ill-launched Tip!) because he suffered her to lead him. Here was Mrs
Merdle in gauzy mourning--the original cap whereof had possibly been
rent to pieces in a fit of grief, but had certainly yielded to a highly
becoming article from the Parisian market--warring with Fanny foot to
foot, and breasting her with her desolate bosom every hour in the day.