Mr. Gradgrind laid his hand upon the shoulder of each erring child, and said, “Louisa!  Thomas!”

“I wanted to see what it was like,” said Louisa shortly.  “I brought him, I was tired, father.  I have been tired a long time.”

“Tired?  Of what?” asked the astonished father.

“I don’t know of what—­of everything, I think.”

They walked on in silence for some half a mile before Mr. Gradgrind gravely broke out with, “What would your best friends say, Louisa?  What would Mr. Bounderby say?”

All the way to Stone Lodge he repeated at intervals, “What would Mr.
Bounderby say?”

At the first mention of the name his daughter, a child of fifteen or sixteen now, but at no distant day to become a woman, all at once, 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.

Mr. Bounderby was at Stone Lodge when they arrived.  He stood before the fire on the hearth rug, delivering some observations to Mrs. Gradgrind on the circumstance of its being his birthday.  It was a commanding position from which to subdue Mrs. Gradgrind.

He stopped in his harangue, which was entirely concerned with the story of his early disadvantages, at the entrance of his eminently practical friend and the two young culprits.

“Well!” blustered Mr. Bounderby, “what’s the matter?  What is young Thomas in the dumps about?”

He spoke of young Thomas, but he looked at Louisa.

“We were peeping at the circus,” muttered Louisa haughtily; “and father caught us.”

“And, Mrs. Gradgrind,” said her husband, in a lofty manner, “I should as soon have expected to find my children reading poetry.”

“Dear me!” whimpered Mrs. Gradgrind.  “How can you, Louisa and Thomas?  I wonder at you.  I declare you’re enough to make one regret ever having had a family at all.  I have a great mind to say I wish I hadn’t. Then what would you have done, I should like to know?  As if, with my head in its present throbbing state, you couldn’t go and look at the shells and minerals and things provided for you, instead of circuses.  I’m sure you have enough to do if that’s what you want.  With my head in its present state I couldn’t remember the mere names of half the facts you have got to attend to.”

“That’s the reason,” pouted Louisa.

“Don’t tell me that’s the reason, because it can be nothing of the sort,” said Mrs. Gradgrind.  “Go and be something logical directly.”

Mrs. Gradgrind, not being a scientific character, usually dismissed her children to their studies with the general injunction that they were to choose their own pursuit.

II.—­Mr. Bounderby of Coketown

Mr. Josiah Bounderby was as near being Mr. Gradgrind’s bosom friend as a man perfectly devoid of sentiment can be to another man perfectly devoid of sentiment.