Hard Times | Page 8

her bringing-up.
'Thomas, though I have the fact before me, I find it difficult to believe that you, with your
education and resources, should have brought your sister to a scene like this.'
'I brought him, father,' said Louisa, quickly. 'I asked him to come.'
'I am sorry to hear it. I am very sorry indeed to hear it. It makes Thomas no better, and it
makes you worse, Louisa.'
She looked at her father again, but no tear fell down her cheek.
'You! Thomas and you, to whom the circle of the sciences is open; Thomas and you, who
may be said to be replete with facts; Thomas and you, who have been trained to
mathematical exactness; Thomas and you, here!' cried Mr. Gradgrind. 'In this degraded
position! I am amazed.'
'I was tired, father. I have been tired a long time,' said Louisa.
'Tired? Of what?' asked the astonished father.
'I don't know of what - of everything, I think.'
'Say not another word,' returned Mr. Gradgrind. 'You are childish. I will hear no more.'
He did not speak again until they had walked some half-a-mile in silence, when he
gravely broke out with: 'What would your best friends say, Louisa? Do you attach no
value to their good opinion? What would Mr. Bounderby say?' At the mention of this
name, his daughter stole a look at him, remarkable for its intense and searching character.
He saw nothing of it, for before he looked at her, she had again cast down her eyes!
'What,' he repeated presently, 'would Mr. Bounderby say?' All the way to Stone Lodge, as
with grave indignation he led the two delinquents home, he repeated at intervals 'What
would Mr. Bounderby say?' - as if Mr. Bounderby had been Mrs. Grundy.


CHAPTER IV
- MR. BOUNDERBY

NOT being Mrs. Grundy, who was Mr. Bounderby?
Why, Mr. Bounderby was as near being Mr. Gradgrind's bosom friend, as a man perfectly
devoid of sentiment can approach that spiritual relationship towards another man

perfectly devoid of sentiment. So near was Mr. Bounderby - or, if the reader should
prefer it, so far off.
He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with
a stare, and a metallic laugh. A man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have
been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great puffed head and forehead,
swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his
eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being
inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt
himself a self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy
speaking-trumpet of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was
the Bully of humility.
A year or two younger than his eminently practical friend, Mr. Bounderby looked older;
his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or eight added to it again, without
surprising anybody. He had not much hair. One might have fancied he had talked it off;
and that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being
constantly blown about by his windy boastfulness.
In the formal drawing-room of Stone Lodge, standing on the hearthrug, warming himself
before the fire, Mr. Bounderby delivered some observations to Mrs. Gradgrind on the
circumstance of its being his birthday. He stood before the fire, partly because it was a
cool spring afternoon, though the sun shone; partly because the shade of Stone Lodge
was always haunted by the ghost of damp mortar; partly because he thus took up a
commanding position, from which to subdue Mrs. Gradgrind.
'I hadn't a shoe to my foot. As to a stocking, I didn't know such a thing by name. I passed
the day in a ditch, and the night in a pigsty. That's the way I spent my tenth birthday. Not
that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch.'
Mrs. Gradgrind, a little, thin, white, pink-eyed bundle of shawls, of surpassing feebleness,
mental and bodily; who was always taking physic without any effect, and who, whenever
she showed a symptom of coming to life, was invariably stunned by some weighty piece
of fact tumbling on her; Mrs. Gradgrind hoped it was a dry ditch?
'No! As wet as a sop. A foot of water in it,' said Mr. Bounderby.
'Enough to give a baby cold,' Mrs. Gradgrind considered.
'Cold? I was born with inflammation of the lungs, and of everything else, I believe, that
was capable of inflammation,' returned