income. He was officially accessible to every blundering old woman who
had incoherence to bestow upon him, and readily received the Boffins.
He was quite a young man, expensively educated and wretchedly paid, with
quite a young wife and half a dozen quite young children. He was under
the necessity of teaching and translating from the classics, to eke out
his scanty means, yet was generally expected to have more time to spare
than the idlest person in the parish, and more money than the richest.
He accepted the needless inequalities and inconsistencies of his life,
with a kind of conventional submission that was almost slavish; and any
daring layman who would have adjusted such burdens as his, more decently
and graciously, would have had small help from him.

With a ready patient face and manner, and yet with a latent smile that
showed a quick enough observation of Mrs Boffin's dress, Mr Milvey, in
his little book-room--charged with sounds and cries as though the six
children above were coming down through the ceiling, and the roasting
leg of mutton below were coming up through the floor--listened to Mrs
Boffin's statement of her want of an orphan.

'I think,' said Mr Milvey, 'that you have never had a child of your own,
Mr and Mrs Boffin?'

Never.

'But, like the Kings and Queens in the Fairy Tales, I suppose you have
wished for one?'

In a general way, yes.

Mr Milvey smiled again, as he remarked to himself 'Those kings and