Thus James Harthouse learnt how Mr. Bounderby dealt with hands.

Mr. Harthouse, however, only felt bored, and took the earliest opportunity to explain to Mrs. Bounderby that he really had no opinions, and that he was going in for her father’s opinions, because he might as well back them as anything else.

“The side that can prove anything in a line of units, tens, hundreds, and thousands, Mrs. Bounderby, seems to me to afford the most fun and to give a man the best chance.  I am quite ready to go in for it to the same extent as if I believed it.  And what more could I possibly do if I did believe it?”.

“You are a singular politician,” said Louisa.

“Pardon me; I have not even that merit.  We are the largest party in the state, I assure you, if we all fell out of our adopted ranks and were reviewed together.”

The more Mr. Harthouse’s interest waned in politics the greater became his interest in Mrs. Bounderby.  And he cultivated the whelp, cultivated him earnestly, and by so doing learnt from the graceless youth that “Loo never cared anything for old Bounderby,” and had married him to please her brother.

Gradually, bit by bit, James Harthouse established a confidence with the whelp’s sister from which her husband was excluded.  He established a confidence with her that absolutely turned upon her indifference towards her husband, and the absence at all times of any congeniality between them.  He had artfully, but plainly, assured her that he knew her heart in its last most delicate recesses, and the barrier behind which she lived had melted away.

And yet he had not, even now, any earnest wickedness of purpose in him.  So drifting icebergs, setting with a current, wreck the ships.

IV.—­Mr. Gradgrind and His Daughter

Mrs. Gradgrind died while her husband was up in London, and Louisa was with her mother when death came.

“You learnt a great deal, Louisa, and so did your brother,” said Mrs. Gradgrind, when she was dying.  “Ologies of all kinds from morning to night.  But there is something—­not an ology at all—­that your father has missed, or forgotten.  I don’t know what it is; I shall never get its name now.  But your father may.  It makes me restless.  I want to write to him to find out, for God’s sake, what it is.”

It was shortly after Mrs. Gradgrind’s death that Mr. Bounderby was called away from home on business for a few days; and Mr. James Harthouse, still not sure at times of his purpose, found himself alone with Mrs. Bounderby.

They were in the garden, and Harthouse implored her to accept him as her lover.  She urged him to go away, she commanded him to go away; but she neither turned her face to him nor raised it, but sat as still as though she were a statue.

Harthouse declared that she was the stake for which he ardently desired to play away all that he had in life; that the objects he had lately pursued turned worthless beside her; the success that was almost within his grasp he flung away from him, like the dirt it was, compared with her.