Great Expectations: Charles Dickens: 4
I fully expected to find a constable in the kitchen, waiting to take me up. But there was no constable, and my robbery was never discovered. Mrs Joe was prodigiously busy in getting the house ready for the festivities of the day, and Joe had been put upon the kitchen door-step to keep him out of the dustpan - an article into which his destiny always led him, sooner or later, when my sister was vigorously reaping the floors of her establishment. "And where the deuce have you been," was Mrs Joe's Christmas salution, when I and my conscience showed ourselves. I said I had been down to hear the carols. "Ah! well!" observed Mrs Joe. "You might have done worse." Not a doubt of that, I thought. "Perhaps I weren't a blacksmith's wife, and a slave with her apron never off, I should have been to hear the Carols, myself that's the best reason for my never hearing any." Joe who had ventured into the kitchen after me as the dustpan had...