‘If you are this boy’s father,’ said Nicholas, ‘look at the wreck he is, and tell me that you purpose to send him back to that loathsome den from which I brought him.’

Nicholas bit his lip, and coloured, but affected not to hear the remark.

‘I thought they might be,’ said Squeers, coolly. ‘We have a good many of them; that boy’s one.’

"Sonya?" she thought, glancing at that curled-up, sleeping little kitten with her enormous plait of hair. "No, how could she? She`s virtuous. She fell in love with Nicholas and does not wish to know anything more. Even Mamma does not understand. It is wonderful how clever I am and how... charming she is," she went on, speaking of herself in the third person, and imagining it was some very wise manthe wisest and best of menwho was saying it of her. "There is everything, everything in her," continued this man. "She is unusually intelligent, charming... and then she is pretty, uncommonly pretty, and agileshe swims and rides splendidly... and her voice! One can really say it`s a wonderful voice!"