Dombey and Son quotes

Dombey, exulting in the long-looked-for event, jingled and jingled the heavy gold watch-chain that depended from below his trim blue coat, whereof the buttons sparkled phosphorescently in the feeble rays of the distant fire.

Son, with his little fists curled up and clenched, seemed, in his feeble way, to be squaring at existence for having come upon him so unexpectedly.

“The House will once again, Mrs. Dombey,” said Mr. Dombey, “be not only in name but in fact Dombey and Son: Dom-bey and Son!”

Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr. Dombey’s life.

The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made to give them light.

Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre.

Such idle talk was little likely to reach the ears of Mr. Dombey, whom it nearly concerned; and probably no one in the world would have received it with such utter incredulity as he, if it had reached him.

Dombey and Son had often dealt in hides, but never in hearts.

They left that fancy ware to boys and girls, and boarding-schools and books. Mr. Dombey would have reasoned: That a matrimonial alliance with himself must, in the nature of things, be gratifying and honourable to any woman of common sense.

The Doctor gently brushed the scattered ringlets of the child, aside from the face and mouth of the mother. Alas how calm they lay there; how little breath there was to stir them!

Thus, clinging fast to that slight spar within her arms, the mother drifted out upon the dark and unknown sea that rolls round all the world.

“Why, it’s as much as you can afford to keep them!” said Mr. Dombey.

“I couldn’t hardly afford but one thing in the world less, Sir.”

“Can you read?” asked Mr. Dombey.

“My darling,” said Richards, “you wear that pretty black frock in remembrance of your Mama.”

“I can remember my Mama,” returned the child, with tears springing to her eyes, “in any frock.”

“But people put on black, to remember people when they’re gone.”

“Oh! but begging your pardon, Mrs. Richards, that don’t matter, you know,” returned the black-eyed girl, who was so desperately sharp and biting that she seemed to make one’s eyes water.

“I may be very fond of pennywinkles, Mrs. Richards, but it don’t follow that I’m to have ’em for tea.”

“Well, it don’t matter,” said Polly.

Still, Polly persevered with all the better heart for seeing this; and, judging of Mr. Dombey by herself, had great confidence in the mute appeal of poor little Florence’s mourning dress.

“It’s hard indeed,” thought Polly, “if he takes only to one little motherless child, when he has another, and that a girl, before his eyes.”

So, Polly kept her before his eyes, as long as she could, and managed so well with little Paul, as to make it very plain that he was all the livelier for his sister’s company.

Dombey’s eyes, as in some others that occasionally see the light, they only achieved that mighty piece of knowledge, the understanding of their own position, who showed a fitting reverence for his.

It was not so much their merit that they knew themselves, as that they knew him, and bowed low before him.

“My dear Paul,” returned his sister, “you do Miss Tox but justice, as a man of your penetration was sure, I knew, to do.

He gave Mr. Dombey his hand, as if he feared it might electrify him.

Mr. Dombey took it as if it were a fish, or seaweed, or some such clammy substance, and immediately returned it to him with exalted politeness.

“Perhaps, Louisa,” said Mr. Dombey, slightly turning his head in his cravat, as if it were a socket, “you would have preferred a fire?”

“This,” returned Mr. Dombey, “is some cold preparation of calf’s head, I think. I see cold fowls—ham—patties—salad—lobster. Miss Tox will do me the honour of taking some wine? Champagne to Miss Tox.”

There was a toothache in everything.

The wine was so bitter cold that it forced a little scream from Miss Tox, which she had great difficulty in turning into a “Hem!”

The veal had come from such an airy pantry, that the first taste of it had struck a sensation as of cold lead to Mr. Chick’s extremities. Mr. Dombey alone remained unmoved.

He might have been hung up for sale at a Russian fair as a specimen of a frozen gentleman.

The prevailing influence was too much even for his sister. She made no effort at flattery or small talk, and directed all her efforts to looking as warm as she could.

Polly moved towards the door, with Florence holding to her dress, and crying to her in the most pathetic manner not to go away.

It was a dagger in the haughty father’s heart, an arrow in his brain, to see how the flesh and blood he could not disown clung to this obscure stranger, and he sitting by.

Not that he cared to whom his daughter turned, or from whom turned away. The swift sharp agony struck through him, as he thought of what his son might do.

“Yes. Anything—almost,” said Mr. Dombey.

“Anything means everything, don’t it, Papa?”

asked his son: not observing, or possibly not understanding, the qualification.

“Cruel!” said Mr. Dombey, settling his neckcloth, and seeming to resent the idea. “No. A good thing can’t be cruel.”

“If it’s a good thing, and can do anything,” said the little fellow, thoughtfully, as he looked back at the fire, “I wonder why it didn’t save me my Mama.”

He didn’t ask the question of his father this time. Perhaps he had seen, with a child’s quickness, that it had already made his father uncomfortable.

“Oh, it’s not at night, Papa,” returned the child, “it’s in the day; and I lie down in Florence’s lap, and she sings to me. At night I dream about such cu‑ri‑ous things!”

And he went on, warming his hands again, and thinking about them, like an old man or a young goblin.

Mr.

She was generally spoken of as “a great manager” of children; and the secret of her management was, to give them everything that they didn’t like, and nothing that they did—which was found to sweeten their dispositions very much.

She was such a bitter old lady, that one was tempted to believe there had been some mistake in the application of the Peruvian machinery, and that all her waters of gladness and milk of human kindness, had been pumped out dry, instead of the mines.

The Castle of this ogress and child-queller was in a steep by-street at Brighton; where the soil was more than usually chalky, flinty, and sterile, and the houses were more than usually brittle and thin;

where the small front-gardens had the unaccountable property of producing nothing but marigolds, whatever was sown in them; and where snails were constantly discovered holding on to the street doors, and other public places they were not expected to ornament, with the tenacity of cupping-glasses.

In the winter time the air couldn’t be got out of the Castle, and in the summer time it couldn’t be got in.

There was such a continual reverberation of wind in it, that it sounded like a great shell, which the inhabitants were obliged to hold to their ears night and day, whether they liked it or no. It was not, naturally, a fresh-smelling house;

“No. It’s mine,” retorted Mrs. Pipchin.

“It’s a very nasty one,” said Paul.

“There’s a worse place in it than this though,” said Mrs. Pipchin, “where we shut up our bad boys.”

Florence asked him what he thought he heard.

“I want to know what it says,” he answered, looking steadily in her face. “The sea, Floy, what is it that it keeps on saying?”

She told him that it was only the noise of the rolling waves.

Houses and shops were different from what they used to be, and bore Mr. Brogley’s warrant on their fronts in large characters. The broker seemed to have got hold of the very churches; for their spires rose into the sky with an unwonted air.

Even the sky itself was changed, and had an execution in it plainly.

Captain Cuttle lived on the brink of a little canal near the India Docks, where there was a swivel bridge which opened now and then to let some wandering monster of a ship come roaming up the street like a stranded leviathan.

“Gills!” said the Captain, hurrying into the back parlour, and taking him by the hand quite tenderly. “

Lay your head well to the wind, and we’ll fight through it.

All you’ve got to do,” said the Captain, with the solemnity of a man who was delivering himself of one of the most precious practical tenets ever discovered by human wisdom, “is to lay your head well to the wind, and we’ll fight through it!”

The Doctor only undertook the charge of ten young gentlemen, but he had, always ready, a supply of learning for a hundred, on the lowest estimate; and it was at once the business and delight of his life to gorge the unhappy ten with it.

In fact, Doctor Blimber’s establishment was a great hothouse, in which there was a forcing apparatus incessantly at work.

All the boys blew before their time. Mental green-peas were produced at Christmas, and intellectual asparagus all the year round. Mathematical gooseberries (very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere sprouts of bushes, under Doctor Blimber’s cultivation.

Mathematical gooseberries (very sour ones too) were common at untimely seasons, and from mere sprouts of bushes, under Doctor Blimber’s cultivation. Every description of Greek and Latin vegetable was got off the driest twigs of boys, under the frostiest circumstances.

Nature was of no consequence at all.

No matter what a young gentleman was intended to bear, Doctor Blimber made him bear to pattern, somehow or other.

The Doctor’s was a mighty fine house, fronting the sea. Not a joyful style of house within, but quite the contrary. Sad-coloured curtains, whose proportions were spare and lean, hid themselves despondently behind the windows.

The tables and chairs were put away in rows, like figures in a sum; fires were so rarely lighted in the rooms of ceremony, that they felt like wells, and a visitor represented the bucket;

the dining-room seemed the last place in the world where any eating or drinking was likely to occur; there was no sound through all the house but the ticking of a great clock in the hall, which made itself audible in the very garrets;

Miss Blimber, too, although a slim and graceful maid, did no soft violence to the gravity of the house. There was no light nonsense about Miss Blimber. She kept her hair short and crisp, and wore spectacles.

She was dry and sandy with working in the graves of deceased languages.

None of your live languages for Miss Blimber. They must be dead—stone dead—and then Miss Blimber dug them up like a Ghoul.

Mrs. Pipchin, in her deference, merely muttered at the young man as she passed on, and said, “Oh! he was a precious fellow”—leaving the young man, who was all meekness and incapacity, affected even to tears by the incident. But

Mrs. Pipchin had a way of falling foul of all meek people; and her friends said who could wonder at it, after the Peruvian mines!

The Doctor was sitting in his portentous study, with a globe at each knee, books all round him, Homer over the door, and Minerva on the mantelshelf. “And how do you do, Sir?” he said to Mr. Dombey, “and how is my little friend?”

“Shall we make a man of him?” repeated the Doctor.

“I had rather be a child,” replied Paul.

“Indeed!” said the Doctor. “Why?”

He sat, with folded hands, upon his pedestal, silently listening. But he might have answered “weary, weary! very lonely, very sad!” And there, with an aching void in his young heart, and all outside so cold, and bare, and strange,

Paul sat as if he had taken life unfurnished, and the upholsterer were never coming.

It was a wonder that the great clock in the hall, instead of being constant to its first inquiry, never said, “Gentlemen, we will now resume our studies,” for that phrase was often enough repeated in its neighbourhood.

The studies went round like a mighty wheel, and the young gentlemen were always stretched upon it.

After tea there were exercises again, and preparations for next day by candlelight. And in due course there was bed; where, but for that resumption of the studies which took place in dreams, were rest and sweet forgetfulness.

gravely attired, as to his upper man, in black; and as to his legs, in pepper-and-salt colour. His dark hair was just touched here and there with specks of gray, as though the tread of Time had splashed it; and his whiskers were already white.

He had a mighty respect for Mr. Dombey, and rendered him due homage;

but as he was of a genial temper himself, and never wholly at his ease in that stately presence, he was disquieted by no jealousy of the many conferences enjoyed by Mr.

Here the Captain stretched out his hand to Walter, with an air of downright good faith that spoke volumes; at the same time repeating (for he felt proud of the accuracy and pointed application of his quotation),

“When found, make a note of.”

“Captain Cuttle,” said Walter, taking the immense fist extended to him by the Captain in both his hands, which it completely filled, “next to my Uncle Sol, I love you.

and informed Walter that on such a serious matter, he must be allowed to “bite his nails a bit.”

“It’s an old habit of mine, Wal’r,” said the Captain, “any time these fifty year. When you see Ned Cuttle bite his nails, Wal’r, then you may know that Ned Cuttle’s aground.”

Thereupon the Captain put his iron hook between his teeth, as if it were a hand;

There were railway hotels, office-houses, lodging-houses, boardinghouses; railway plans, maps, views, wrappers, bottles, sandwich-boxes, and timetables; railway hackney-coach and cabstands; railway omnibuses, railway streets and buildings, railway hangers-on and parasites, and flatterers out of all calculation.

There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in.

Among the vanquished was the master chimney-sweeper, whilom incredulous at Staggs’s Gardens, who now lived in a stuccoed house three stories high, and gave himself out, with golden flourishes upon a varnished board, as contractor for the cleansing of railway chimneys by machinery.

nothing but the bitterness and cruelty of grief. This commonly ensued upon the recognition of some spot or object very tenderly associated with him; and it made the miserable house, at first, a place of agony.

But it is not in the nature of pure love to burn so fiercely and unkindly long.

The flame that in its grosser composition has the taint of earth may prey upon the breast that gives it shelter;

After stating this curious and unexpected fact,

Mr. Toots fell into a deep well of silence.

“You have left Dr. Blimber’s, I think?” said Florence, trying to help him out.

“I should hope so,” returned Mr. Toots. And tumbled in again.

He remained at the bottom, apparently drowned, for at least ten minutes. At the expiration of that period, he suddenly floated, and said,

“Well! Good morning, Miss Dombey.”

“Talk of him being a change, indeed!” observed Miss Nipper to herself with boundless contempt.

“If he’s a change, give me a constancy.”

“Good night, Susan,” said Florence.

But her innocent imagination was too full of one theme to admit them. Nothing wandered in her thoughts but love—a wandering love, indeed, and castaway—but turning always to her father.

There was nothing in the dropping of the rain, the moaning of the wind, the shuddering of the trees, the striking of the solemn clocks, that shook this one thought, or diminished its interest.

Her recollections of the dear dead boy—and they were never absent—were itself, the same thing. And oh, to be shut out: to be so lost: never to have looked into her father’s face or touched him, since that hour!

but infinitely lighter than now, when it might have fallen on her (whom he could have lost, or he believed it, without a pang), and had not. Her loving and innocent face rising before him, had no softening or winning influence.

He rejected the angel, and took up with the tormenting spirit crouching in his bosom.

Her patience, goodness, youth, devotion, love, were as so many atoms in the ashes upon which he set his heel. He saw her image in the blight and blackness all around him, not irradiating but deepening the gloom.

This curious association of objects, suggesting a remembrance of the celebrated bull who got by mistake into a crockery shop, was received with perfect gravity by Mr. Dombey, who intimated his opinion that Nature was, no doubt, a very respectable institution.

“What I want,” drawled Mrs. Skewton, pinching her shrivelled throat, “is heart.” It was frightfully true in one sense, if not in that in which she used the phrase.

“What I want, is frankness, confidence, less conventionality, and freer play of soul. We are so dreadfully artificial.”

“Do you mean the daughter?” inquired Mr. Dombey.

“Is Joey B. a turnip, Dombey,” said the Major, “that he should mean the mother?”

“You were complimentary to the mother,” returned Mr. Dombey.

very airily dressed; and certainly not resembling Shakespeare’s Cleopatra, whom age could not wither. On their way upstairs they had heard the sound of a harp, but it had ceased on their being announced, and Edith now stood beside it handsomer and haughtier than ever.

It was a remarkable characteristic of this lady’s beauty that it appeared to vaunt and assert itself without her aid, and against her will.

She knew that she was beautiful: it was impossible that it could be otherwise: but she seemed with her own pride to defy her very self.

with long nails, nicely pared and sharpened; with a natural antipathy to any speck of dirt, which made him pause sometimes and watch the falling motes of dust, and rub them off his smooth white hand or glossy linen:

Mr. Carker the Manager, sly of manner, sharp of tooth, soft of foot, watchful of eye, oily of tongue, cruel of heart, nice of habit, sat with a dainty steadfastness and patience at his work, as if he were waiting at a mouse’s hole.

At length the letters were disposed of, excepting one which he reserved for a particular audience. Having locked the more confidential correspondence in a drawer, Mr. Carker the Manager rang his bell.

“There is offence in everything you do,” replied his brother, glancing at him with a sudden scowl, which in a moment gave place to a wider smile than the last. “Carry those papers away, if you please. I am busy.”

His politeness was so much more cutting than his wrath, that the Junior went to the door.

But stopping at it, and looking round, he said:

… was at that time nursing as thriving a little girl, Sir, as we’ve ever took the liberty of adding to our family, I wouldn’t have made so free as drop a hint of her being capable of imparting nourishment, not if it was never so!”

Mr. Carker grinned at him like a shark, but in an absent, thoughtful manner.

“Whether,” submitted Mr. Perch, after a short silence, and another cough, “it mightn’t be best for me to tell him, that if he was seen here any more he would be given into custody; and to keep to it!

Complacent and affable as man could be, Mr. Carker picked his way along the streets and hummed a soft tune as he went.

He seemed to purr, he was so glad.

And in some sort, Mr. Carker, in his fancy, basked upon a hearth too.

Florence lived alone in the great dreary house, and day succeeded day, and still she lived alone; and the blank walls looked down upon her with a vacant stare, as if they had a Gorgon-like mind to stare her youth and beauty into stone.

No magic dwelling-place in magic story, shut up in the heart of a thick wood, was ever more solitary and deserted to the fancy, than was her father’s mansion in its grim reality, as it stood lowering on the street:

But

Florence bloomed there, like the king’s fair daughter in the story.

Her books, her music, and her daily teachers, were her only real companions, Susan Nipper and Diogenes excepted:

Always: at her books, her music, and her work: in her morning walks, and in her nightly prayers: she had her engrossing aim in view.

Strange study for a child, to learn the road to a hard parent’s heart!

There were many careless loungers through the street, as the summer evening deepened into night, who glanced across the road at the sombre house, and saw the youthful figure at the window, such a contrast to it, looking upward at the stars as they began …

After sundry failures in this wise, the Commander, addressing himself to nobody, thus spake; or rather the voice within him said of its own accord, and quite independent of himself, as if he were possessed by a gruff spirit:

“My name’s Jack Bunsby!”

“He was christened John,” cried the delighted Captain Cuttle. “Hear him!”

“He was christened John,” cried the delighted Captain Cuttle. “Hear him!”

“And what I says,” pursued the voice, after some deliberation, “I stands to.”

The Captain, with Florence on his arm, nodded at the auditory, and seemed to say, “Now he’s coming out. This is what I meant when I brought him.”

The girl made an impatient gesture with her cowering shoulders, and turned her head another way.

Ugly, misshapen, peevish, ill-conditioned, ragged, dirty⁠—but beloved!

Oh yes! Florence had seen her father’s look towards her, and she knew whose look it had no likeness to.

“Only for that, Miss,” said the neighbour, with a smile, in which there was more of secret sympathy than he expressed; “only to get that, he never lets her out of his sight!”

“Because the day’ll come, and has been coming a long while,” observed the other, bending low over his work, “when to get half as much from that unfort’nate child of mine⁠—to get the trembling of a finger, or the waving of a hair⁠—would be to raise the dead.”

Florence softly put some money near his hand on the old boat, and left him.

“We have been making every effort to endeavour to secure to you a good establishment,” rejoined her mother. “That has been your life. And now you have got it.”

“There is no slave in a market: there is no horse in a fair: so shown and offered and examined and paraded, Mother, as I have been, for ten shameful years,”

cried Edith, with a burning brow, and the same bitter emphasis on the one word. “Is it not so? Have I been made the byword of all kinds of men?

Thus, with no one to advise her—for she could advise with no one without seeming to complain against him—gentle Florence tossed on an uneasy sea of doubt and hope; and

Mr. Carker, like a scaly monster of the deep, swam down below, and kept his shining eye upon her.

Florence had a new reason in all this for wishing to be at home again. Her lonely life was better suited to her course of timid hope and doubt;

notwithstanding Mrs. Skewton’s being extremely hard to kiss, and squeaking shrilly in the sacred edifice. The example is followed by Cousin Feenix and even by Mr. Dombey.

Lastly, Mr. Carker, with his white teeth glistening, approaches Edith, more as if he meant to bite her, than to taste the sweets that linger on her lips.

There is a glow upon her proud cheek, and a flashing in her eyes, that may be meant to stay him; but it does not, for he salutes her as the rest have done, and wishes her all happiness.

that she broke up in the last hurricane; and that every soul on board perished.’ ”

Captain Cuttle, like all mankind, little knew how much hope had survived within him under discouragement, until he felt its death-shock.

During the reading of the paragraph, and for a minute or two afterwards, he sat with his gaze fixed on the modest Mr. Toots, like a man entranced;

Passion seemed not only to do wrong and violence to the memory of the dead, but to be infected by death, and to droop and decline beside it.

All the living knaves and liars in the world, were nothing to the honesty and truth of one dead friend.

The only thing the honest Captain made out clearly, in this state of mind, besides the loss of Walter, was, that with him almost the whole world of Captain Cuttle had been drowned.

One don’t see anything, one don’t hear anything, one don’t know anything; that’s the fact. We go on taking everything for granted, and so we go on, until whatever we do, good, bad, or indifferent, we do from habit.

Habit is all I shall have to report, when I am called upon to plead to my conscience, on my deathbed.

‘Habit,’ says I; ‘I was deaf, dumb, blind, and paralytic, to a million things, from habit.’ ‘Very businesslike indeed, Mr. What’s-your-name,’ says Conscience, ‘but it won’t do here!’ ”

“Why do you rest in the rain?” said Harriet, gently.

“Because I have no other resting-place,” was the reply.

“But there are many places of shelter near here. This,” referring to the little porch, “is better than where you were. You are very welcome to rest here.”

Harriet uttering an expression of pity, the traveller looked up with a contemptuous and incredulous smile.

“Why, what’s a torn foot to such as me?” she said. “And what’s a torn foot in such as me, to such as you?”

“Come in and wash it,” answered Harriet, mildly, “and let me give you something to bind it up.”

“

I don’t know who began to harden me, if my own dear mother didn’t,

” she returned, sitting with her folded arms, and knitted brows, and compressed lips as if she were bent on excluding, by force, every softer feeling from her breast. “Listen, mother, to a word or two.

“but I have thought of it sometimes, in the course of my lone years, till I have got used to it. I have heard some talk about duty first and last; but it has always been of my duty to other people.

I have wondered now and then⁠—to pass away the time⁠—whether no one ever owed any duty to me.

”

She was handsome. She was taught too late, and taught all wrong. She was too well cared for, too well trained, too well helped on, too much looked after. You were very fond of her—you were better off then.

What came to that girl comes to thousands every year. It was only ruin, and she was born to it.

”

We used to call him in my parliamentary time W. P. Adams, in consequence of his being Warming Pan for a young fellow who was in his minority. Perhaps my friend Dombey may have known the man?”

Mr. Dombey, who was as likely to have known Guy Fawkes, replied in the negative.

But one of the seven mild men unexpectedly leaped into distinction, by saying he had known him, and adding—“always wore Hessian boots!”

Mrs. Chick rose erect with these words, and took the arm of Mr. Chick, who escorted her from the room, after half an hour’s shady sojourn there.

And it is due to her penetration to observe that she certainly was not missed at all.

But she was not the only indignant guest; for Mr. Dombey’s list (still constantly in difficulties) were, as a body, indignant with Mrs. Dombey’s list, for looking at them through eyeglasses, and audibly wondering who all those people were; while Mrs.

If, at the sacrifice of all my property, I could get transmigrated into Miss Dombey’s dog—I—I really think I should never leave off wagging my tail. I should be so perfectly happy, Captain Gills!”

Mr. Toots said it with watery eyes, and pressed his hat against his bosom with deep emotion.

“My lad,” returned the Captain, moved to compassion, “if you’re in arnest—”

All this he could know, and did: but he could not know that one word was whispering in the deep recesses of her heart, to keep her quiet; and that the word was Florence.

Blind idiot, rushing to a precipice! He thought she stood in awe of him!

“You are too expensive, Madam,” said Mr. Dombey. “You are extravagant.

“What is it that you have to sell?” said Edith.

“Only this,” returned the woman, holding out her wares, without looking at them. “I sold myself long ago.”

“My Lady, don’t believe her,” croaked the old woman to Mrs. Skewton; “don’t believe what she says. She loves to talk like that. She’s my handsome and undutiful daughter. She gives me nothing but reproaches, my Lady, for all I have done for her.

“Unmoved?” looking wildly at her—“it’s gone now—and why are you so unmoved? That is not my fancy, Edith. It turns me cold to see you sitting at my side.”

“Sorry! You seem always sorry. But it is not for me!”

With that, she cries;

As she looked upon it now, she saw it, for the first time, free from the cloud that had darkened her childhood. Calm, tranquil night was reigning in its stead. He might have gone to sleep, for anything she saw there, blessing her.

Awake, unkind father! Awake, now, sullen man! The time is flitting by; the hour is coming with an angry tread. Awake!

There was no change upon his face; and as she watched it, awfully, its motionless response recalled the faces that were gone. So they looked, so would he; so she, his weeping child, who should say when!

And doing so, and looking back at him with blinded eyes, and stealing timidly away, passed out of his room, and crossed the other, and was gone.

He may sleep on now. He may sleep on while he may. But let him look for that slight figure when he wakes, and find it near him when the hour is come!

Sad and grieving was the heart of Florence, as she crept upstairs. The quiet house had grown more dismal since she came down.

“Counsellor—yes,” said Carker. “Flatterer—no. A little reservation I fear I must confess to. But our interest and convenience commonly oblige many of us to make professions that we cannot feel.

We have partnerships of interest and convenience, friendships of interest and convenience, dealings of interest and convenience, marriages of interest and convenience, every day.

”

“No, there’s no harm in it, I know,” returned Rob, with the same distrustful glance at the packer’s and the bottle-maker’s, and the church; “but blabbing, if it’s only about the number of buttons on my master’s coat, won’t do.

I tell you it won’t do with him. A cove had better drown himself.

He says so. I shouldn’t have so much as told you what his name was, if you hadn’t known it. Talk about somebody else.”

who does not hate him, secretly: who does not wish him evil rather than good: and who would not turn upon him, if he had the power and boldness.

The nearer to his favour, the nearer to his insolence; the closer to him, the farther from him.

That’s the creed here!”

Was Mr. Dombey’s master-vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an unnatural characteristic?

It might be worthwhile, sometimes, to inquire what Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether, in the enforced distortions so produced, it is not natural to be unnatural.

Coop any son or daughter of our mighty mother within narrow range, and bind the prisoner to one idea, and foster it by servile worship of it on the part of the few timid or designing people standing round, and what is Nature to the …

when fields of grain shall spring up from the offal in the byways of our wicked cities, and roses bloom in the fat churchyards that they cherish; then we may look for natural humanity, and find it growing from such seed.

Oh for a good spirit who would take the housetops off, with a more potent and benignant hand than the lame demon in the tale, and show a Christian people what dark shapes issue from amidst their homes, to swell the retinue of the Destroying Angel as he moves forth among them!

For only one night’s view of the pale phantoms rising from the scenes of our too-long neglect; and from the thick and sullen air where Vice and Fever propagate together, raining the tremendous social retributions which are ever pouring down, and ever coming thicker!

But not as she did.

She had better have been dead than laugh as she did, in reply, with her intent look fixed upon him.

He had better have been dead, than sitting there, in his magnificence, to hear her.

For as she looked, she saw him murdering that fond idea to which she had held in spite of him. She saw his cruelty, neglect, and hatred dominant above it, and stamping it down.

She saw she had no father upon earth, and ran out, orphaned, from his house.

Ran out of his house. A moment, and her hand was on the lock, the cry was on her lips, his face was there, made paler by the yellow candles hastily put down and guttering away, and by the daylight coming in above the door.

“Here, pretty?” returned the Captain. “He ain’t been here this many a long day. He ain’t been heerd on, since he sheered off arter poor Wal’r. But,” said the Captain, as a quotation, “

Though lost to sight, to memory dear, and England, Home, and Beauty!

”

“But I was going to say, Captain Gills,” said Mr. Toots. “Happening to be this way early this morning—to tell you the truth, I was coming to breakfast with you.

As to sleep, you know, I never sleep now. I might be a Watchman, except that I don’t get any pay, and he’s got nothing on his mind.

”

“Not to me, Captain Gills,” replied Mr. Toots gravely. “Not to me, I assure you.

The state of my feelings towards Miss Dombey is of that unspeakable description, that my heart is a desert island, and she lives in it alone.

I’m getting more used up every day, and I’m proud to be so. If you could see my legs when I take my boots off, you’d form some idea of what unrequited affection is.

All this, with a touch and tread as light as Florence’s own.

Long may it remain in this mixed world a point not easy of decision, which is the more beautiful evidence of the Almighty’s goodness⁠—the delicate fingers that are formed for sensitiveness and sympathy of touch, and made to minister to pain and grief, or the rough hard Captain Cuttle hand, that the heart teaches, guides, and softens in a moment!

Florence slept upon her couch, forgetful of her homelessness and orphanage, and Captain Cuttle watched upon the stairs. A louder sob or moan than usual, brought him sometimes to her door; but by degrees she slept more peacefully, and the Captain’s watch was undisturbed.

“Hope, you see, Wal’r,” said the Captain, sagely, “Hope. It’s that as animates you.

Hope is a buoy, for which you overhaul your Little Warbler, sentimental diwision, but Lord, my lad, like any other buoy, it only floats; it can’t be steered nowhere.

Along with the figurehead of Hope,” said the Captain, “there’s a anchor; but what’s the good of my having a anchor, if I can’t find no bottom to let it go in?”

“I have not a brother’s right,” said Walter. “I have not a brother’s claim.

I left a child. I find a woman.

”

Shaken as he is by his disgrace, he is not yet humbled to the level earth. The root is broad and deep, and in the course of years its fibres have spread out and gathered nourishment from everything around it.

The tree is struck, but not down.

Though he hide the world within him from the world without—which he believes has but one purpose for the time, and that, to watch him eagerly wherever he goes—he cannot hide those rebel traces of it, which escape in hollow eyes and cheeks, a haggard …

restless and busy everywhere, with nothing else but him.

It is not a phantom of his imagination. It is as active in other people’s minds as in his.

Witness Cousin Feenix, who comes from Baden-Baden, purposely to talk to him. Witness Major Bagstock, who accompanies Cousin Feenix on that friendly mission.

Everything that is said and done about it, except by Mr. Dombey, is done in chorus.

Mr. Dombey and the world are alone together.

He was coming gaily towards her, when, in an instant, she caught the knife up from the table, and started one pace back.

“Stand still!” she said, “or I shall murder you!”

The sudden change in her, the towering fury and intense abhorrence sparkling in her eyes and lighting up her brow, made him stop as if a fire had stopped him.

But she forgot it. In the beating of that heart for her, and in the beating of her own for him, all harsher music was unheard, all stern unloving hearts forgotten.

Fragile and delicate she was, but with a might of love within her that could, and did, create a world to fly to, and to rest in, out of his one image.

How often did the great house, and the old days, come before her in the twilight time, when she was sheltered by the arm, so proud, so fond, and, creeping closer to him, shrunk within it at the recollection!

“No, nothing, Walter. Nothing but your wife.” The light hand stole about his neck, and the voice came nearer—nearer.

“I am nothing any more, that is not you. I have no earthly hope any more, that is not you. I have nothing dear to me any more, that is not you.”

Oh! well might Mr.

Say, if you please, that I am sure her husband deserves her—even her!—and that I am glad of her choice.”

Mr. Toots got more distinct as he came to these last words, and raising his eyes from the doorpost, said them stoutly.

He then shook Walter’s hand again with a fervour that Walter was not slow to return and started homeward.

There is nothing personal in Mrs. Miff’s remark. She merely speaks of stock-in-trade. She is hardly more curious in couples than in coffins.

She is such a spare, straight, dry old lady⁠—such a pew of a woman⁠—that you should find as many individual sympathies in a chip.

Mr. Sownds, now, who is fleshy, and has scarlet in his coat, is of a different temperament.

… most of all, against the infatuation of its head, who would not contract its enterprises by a hair’s breadth, and would not listen to a word of warning that the ship he strained so hard against the storm, was weak, and could not bear it.

The year was out, and the great House was down.

One summer afternoon; a year, wanting some odd days, after the marriage in the City church; there was a buzz and whisper upon ’Change of a great failure. A certain cold proud man, well known there, was not there, nor was he represented there.

For six entire weeks after the bankruptcy, this miserable foreigner lived in a rainy season of bootjacks and brushes.

Mrs. Chick had three ideas upon the subject of the terrible reverse. The first was that she could not understand it. The second, that her brother had not made an effort.

The third, that if she had been invited to dinner on the day of that first party, it never would have happened; and that she had said so, at the time.

But he is resolved on payment to the last farthing of his means. His own words are, that they will clear, or nearly clear, the House, and that no one can lose much.

Ah, Miss Harriet, it would do us no harm to remember oftener than we do, that vices are sometimes only virtues carried to excess!

His pride shows well in this.”

hardly to be recognised now, but by the long black hair that showed so very black against the colourless face, and all the white things about it.

Oh, the strong eyes, and the weak frame!

The eyes that turned so eagerly and brightly to the door when Harriet came in; the feeble head that could not raise itself, and moved so slowly round upon its pillow!

“We are all brethren,” says Mrs. Perch, in a pause of her drink. “Except the sisters,” says Mr. Perch. “How are the mighty fallen!” remarks Cook. “Pride shall have a fall, and it always was and will be so!” observes the housemaid.

It is wonderful how good they feel, in making these reflections; and what a Christian unanimity they are sensible of, in bearing the common shock with resignation.

There is only one interruption to this excellent state of mind, which is occasioned by a young kitchen-maid of inferior rank—in black stockings—who, having sat with her mouth open for a long time, unexpectedly discharges from it words to this effect, “Suppose the wages shouldn’t …

Perch improves it with several pious axioms, original and selected. It becomes a clear case that they must all go. Boxes are packed, cabs fetched, and at dusk that evening there is not one member of the party left.

The house stands, large and weatherproof, in the long dull street; but it is a ruin, and the rats fly from it.

The men in the carpet caps go on tumbling the furniture about;

“I tell you what, Polly, me dear,” says Mr. Toodle, “being now an ingine-driver, and well to do in the world, I shouldn’t allow of your coming here, to be made dull-like, if it warn’t for favours past.

But favours past, Polly, is never to be forgot. To them which is in adversity, besides, your face is a cord’l.

So let’s have another kiss on it, my dear. You wish no better than to do a right act, I know; and my views is, that it’s right and dutiful to do this. Good night, Polly!”