Little Dorrit: The rivals [updated]

In chapter 26, Henry Gowan, Minnie Meagles’s suitor, brings Arthur Clennam to his family for a meal. This is a good scene, and we get wonderful passages like this: 

“Mrs Gowan, however, received him with condescension. He found her a courtly old lady, formerly a Beauty, and still sufficiently well-favoured to have dispensed with the powder on her nose and a certain impossible bloom under each eye. She was a little lofty with him; so was another old lady, dark-browed and high-nosed, and who must have had something real about her or she could not have existed, but it was certainly not her hair or her teeth or her figure or her complexion…”  

Or this: 

“Mr Henry Gowan seemed to have a malicious pleasure in playing off the three talkers against each other, and in seeing Clennam startled by what they said. Having as supreme a contempt for the class that had thrown him off as for the class that had not taken him on, he had no personal disquiet in anything that passed. His healthy state of mind appeared even to derive a gratification from Clennam’s position of embarrassment and isolation among the good company; and if Clennam had been in that condition with which Nobody was incessantly contending, he would have suspected it, and would have struggled with the suspicion as a meanness, even while he sat at the table.” 

And this: 

“In the course of a couple of hours the noble Refrigerator, at no time less than a hundred years behind the period, got about five centuries in arrears, and delivered solemn political oracles appropriate to that epoch. He finished by freezing a cup of tea for his own drinking, and retiring at his lowest temperature.” 

Delicious. Dickens is such a delight. 
But to go back to my point, Henry Gowan brings Arthur to see Mrs Gowan, who then asks Arthur about Minnie Meagles. 
Afterwards: 

“In that state of mind which rendered nobody uneasy, his thoughtfulness would have turned principally on the man at his side. He would have thought of the morning when he first saw him rooting out the stones with his heel, and would have asked himself, ‘Does he jerk me out of the path in the same careless, cruel way?’ He would have thought, had this introduction to his mother been brought about by him because he knew what she would say, and that he could thus place his position before a rival and loftily warn him off, without himself reposing a word of confidence in him? He would have thought, even if there were no such design as that, had he brought him there to play with his repressed emotions, and torment him? The current of these meditations would have been stayed sometimes by a rush of shame, bearing a remonstrance to himself from his own open nature, representing that to shelter such suspicions, even for the passing moment, was not to hold the high, unenvious course he had resolved to keep. At those times, the striving within him would have been hardest; and looking up and catching Gowan’s eyes, he would have started as if he had done him an injury.” 

Reading this passage, I can’t help thinking about chapter 24, when Amy Dorrit comes to work for Flora and Flora tells her she was once engaged to Arthur. Why does she do so? Does she take Amy on as a seamstress only to do something good for her former lover’s friend, or does she mean something else? What does she think? How does Amy feel? It’s not quite clear. 
The blurb on my copy says Amy cherishes an unrequited love for Arthur, so far in the book I don’t see much of that—it is clear that Arthur has an interest in Amy, and cares about her, and there’s lots of gratitude on her side, but love? It isn’t obvious*. I’m going to bet though, that Andrew Davies’s adaptation of Little Dorrit will make it very obvious from the start that there’s some romantic feeling—Andrew Davies sexes up everything. 
I’m digressing. Little Dorrit has a few pairs of love rivals, which is interesting. John Chivery’s mother reveals to Arthur that he loves and has been rejected by Amy. Amy comes to work for Flora and is told that Flora and Arthur were once engaged. Now Arthur considers marrying Minnie Meagles and his rival Henry Gowan brings him to see his mother, who asks about Minnie. 
As I read on, Little Dorrit becomes harder to analyse in terms of strands of story, because they intersect and there are so many characters. The strand I called the Bureaucrats leads to the love subplot of Arthur- Minnie- Henry Gowan, and also leads to Arthur becoming a business partner for Daniel Doyce, whom he meets through Mr Meagles. 
The strand of the Marshalsea prison becomes more complicated as we get the story of Fanny and the idiot Merdle, son of a merchant. 
I haven’t mentioned the story of Arthur’s past—Flora Finching, née Casby. 
Cavalletto of the Marseilles prisoners strand now lives in Bleeding Heart Yard, in the same house as the Plornish family, Amy’s friends. 
And then we have the strand of Mr Pancks, accountant/ grubber for Mr Casby (father of Flora and landlord of Bleeding Heart Yard), who follows and tries to find out something about Amy, and I don’t know for what or for whom. 
I’m about to start chapter 27. I predict that soon we have to come back to Mrs Clennam and the Flintwinches, Miss Wade from the beginning of the book will return and have a significant role which involves Tattycoram (Harriet Beadle), and Rigaud (alias Lagnier) will also be seen again. And of course we will find out why Mr Pancks wants to investigate Amy.


* Update on 23/7: the narrator finally tells us in chapter 32.