“Bounderby,” urged Mr. Gradgrind, “we are all liable to mistakes—”
“I thought you couldn't make “em,” interrupted Bounderby.
“Perhaps I thought so. But, I say we are all liable to mistakes and I should feel sensible of your delicacy, and grateful for it, if you would spare me these references to Harthouse. I shall not associate him in our conversation with your intimacy and encouragement; pray do not persist in connecting him with mine.”
“I never mentioned his name!” said Bounderby.
“Well, well!” returned Mr. Gradgrind, with a patient, even a submissive, air. And he sat for a little while pondering. “Bounderby, I see reason to doubt whether we have ever quite understood Louisa.”
“Who do you mean by We?”
“Let me say I, then,” he returned, in answer to the coarsely blurted question; “I doubt whether I have understood Louisa. I doubt whether I have been quite right in the manner of her education.”
“There you hit it,” returned Bounderby. “There I agree with you. You have found it out at last, have you? Education! I'll tell you what education is—To be tumbled out of doors, neck and crop, and put upon the shortest allowance of everything except blows. That's what I call education.”
“I think your good sense will perceive,” Mr. Gradgrind remonstrated in all humility, “that whatever the merits of such a system may be, it would be difficult of general application to girls.”
“I don't see it at all, sir,” returned the obstinate Bounderby.
“Well,” sighed Mr. Gradgrind, “we will not enter into the question. I assure you I have no desire to be controversial. I seek to repair what is amiss, if I possibly can; and I hope you will assist me in a good spirit, Bounderby, for I have been very much distressed.”
“I don't understand you, yet,” said Bounderby, with determined obstinacy, “and therefore I won't make any promises.”
“In the course of a few hours, my dear Bounderby,” Mr. Gradgrind proceeded, in the same depressed and propitiatory manner, “I appear to myself to have become better informed as to Louisa's character, than in previous years. The enlightenment has been painfully forced upon me, and the discovery is not mine. I think there are—Bounderby, you will be surprised to hear me say this—I think there are qualities in Louisa, which—which have been harshly neglected, and—and a little perverted. And—and I would suggest to you, that—that if you would kindly meet me in a timely endeavour to leave her to her better nature for a while—and to encourage it to develop itself by tenderness and consideration—it—it would be the better for the happiness of all of us. Louisa,” said Mr. Gradgrind, shading his face with his hand, “has always been my favourite child.”
The blustrous Bounderby crimsoned and swelled to such an extent on hearing these words, that he seemed to be, and probably was, on the brink of a fit. With his very ears a bright purple shot with crimson, he pent up his indignation, however, and said:
“You'd like to keep her here for a time?”
“I—I had intended to recommend, my dear Bounderby, that you should allow Louisa to remain here on a visit, and be attended by Sissy (I mean of course Cecilia Jupe), who understands her, and in whom she trusts.”
“I gather from all this, Tom Gradgrind,” said Bounderby, standing up with his hands in his pockets, “that you are of opinion that there's what people call some incompatibility between Loo Bounderby and myself.”
“I fear there is at present a general incompatibility between Louisa, and—and—and almost all the relations in which I have placed her,” was her father's sorrowful reply.
“Now, look you here, Tom Gradgrind,” said Bounderby the flushed, confronting him with his legs wide apart, his hands deeper in his pockets, and his hair like a hayfield wherein his windy anger was boisterous. “You have said your say; I am going to say mine. I am a Coketown man. I am Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. I know the bricks of this town, and I know the works of this town, and I know the chimneys of this town, and I know the smoke of this town, and I know the Hands of this town. I know “em all pretty well. They're real. When a man tells me anything about imaginative qualities, I always tell that man, whoever he is, that I know what he means. He means turtle soup and venison, with a gold spoon, and that he wants to be set up with a coach and six. That's what your daughter wants. Since you are of opinion that she ought to have what she wants, I recommend you to provide it for her. Because, Tom Gradgrind, she will never have it from me.”
“Bounderby,” said Mr. Gradgrind, “I hoped, after my entreaty, you would have taken a different tone.”
“Just wait a bit,” retorted Bounderby; “you have said your say, I believe. I heard you out; hear me out, if you please. Don't make yourself a spectacle of unfairness as well as inconsistency, because, although I am sorry to see Tom Gradgrind reduced to his present position, I should be doubly sorry to see him brought so low as that. Now, there's an incompatibility of some sort or another, I am given to understand by you, between your daughter and me. I'll give you to understand, in reply to that, that there unquestionably is an incompatibility of the first magnitude—to be summed up in this—that your daughter don't properly know her husband's merits, and is not impressed with such a sense as would become her, by George! of the honour of his alliance. That's plain speaking, I hope.”
“Bounderby,” urged Mr. Gradgrind, “this is unreasonable.”
“Is it?” said Bounderby. “I am glad to hear you say so. Because when Tom Gradgrind, with his new lights, tells me that what I say is unreasonable, I am convinced at once it must be devilish sensible. With your permission I am going on. You know my origin; and you know that for a good many years of my life I didn't want a shoeing-horn, in consequence of not having a shoe. Yet you may believe or not, as you think proper, that there are ladies—born ladies—belonging to families—Families!—who next to worship the ground I walk on.”
He discharged this like a Rocket, at his father-in-law's head.
“Whereas your daughter,” proceeded Bounderby, “is far from being a born lady. That you know, yourself. Not that I care a pinch of candle-snuff about such things, for you are very well aware I don't; but that such is the fact, and you, Tom Gradgrind, can't change it. Why do I say this?”
“Not, I fear,” observed Mr. Gradgrind, in a low voice, “to spare me.”
“Hear me out,” said Bounderby, “and refrain from cutting in till your turn comes round. I say this, because highly connected females have been astonished to see the way in which your daughter has conducted herself, and to witness her insensibility. They have wondered how I have suffered it. And I wonder myself now, and I won't suffer it.”
“Bounderby,” returned Mr. Gradgrind, rising, “the less we say tonight the better, I think.”
“On the contrary, Tom Gradgrind, the more we say to-night, the better, I think. That is,” the consideration checked him, “till I have said all I mean to say, and then I don't care how soon we stop. I come to a question that may shorten the business. What do you mean by the proposal you made just now?”
“What do I mean, Bounderby?”
“By your visiting proposition,” said Bounderby, with an inflexible jerk of the hayfield.
“I mean that I hope you may be induced to arrange in a friendly manner, for allowing Louisa a period of repose and reflection here, which may tend to a gradual alteration for the better in many respects.”
“To a softening down of your ideas of the incompatibility?” said Bounderby.
“If you put it in those terms.”
“What made you think of this?” said Bounderby.
“I have already said, I fear Louisa has not been understood. Is it asking too much, Bounderby, that you, so far her elder, should aid in trying to set her right? You have accepted a great charge of her; for better for worse, for—”
Mr. Bounderby may have been annoyed by the repetition of his own words to Stephen Blackpool, but he cut the quotation short with an angry start.