Mr. Gradgrind tried to make him understand that the best thing to do was to leave things as they were for a time, and that Louisa, who had been so tried, should stay on a visit to her father, and be treated with tenderness and consideration.  It was all wasted on Blunderby.

“Now, I don’t want to quarrel with you, Tom Gradgrind!” he retorted.  “If your daughter, whom I made Loo Bounderby, and might have done better by leaving Loo Gradgrind, don’t come home at noon to-morrow, I shall understand that she prefers to stay away, and you’ll take charge of her in future.  What I shall say to people in general of the incompatibility that led to my so laying down the law will be this:  I am Josiah Bounderby, she’s the daughter of Tom Gradgrind; and the two horses wouldn’t pull together.  I am pretty well known to be rather an uncommon man, and most people will understand that it must be a woman rather out of the common who would come up to my mark.  I have got no more to say.  Good-night!”

At five minutes past twelve next day, Mr. Bounderby directed his wife’s property to be carefully packed up and sent to Tom Gradgrind’s, and then resumed a bachelor’s life.

Mr. James Harthouse, learning from Louisa’s maid—­a young woman greatly attached to her mistress—­that his attentions were altogether undesirable, and that he would never see Mrs. Bounderby again, decided to throw up politics and leave Coketown at once.  Which he did.

Into how much of futurity did Mr. Bounderby see as he sat alone?  Had he any prescience of the day, five years to come, when Josiah Bounderby, of Coketown, was to die in a fit in the Coketown street?  Could he foresee Mr. Gradgrind, a white-haired man, making his facts and figures subservient to Faith, Hope, and Charity, and no longer trying to grind that Heavenly trio in his dusty little mills?  These things were to be.

Could Louisa, sitting alone in her father’s house and gazing into the fire, foresee the childless years before her?  Could she picture a lonely brother, flying from England after robbery, and dying in a strange land, conscious of his want of love and penitent?  These things were to be.  Herself again a wife—­a mother—­lovingly watchful of her children, ever careful that they should have a childhood of the mind no less than a childhood of the body, as knowing it to be an even more beautiful thing, and a possession any hoarded scrap of which is a blessing and happiness to the wisest?  Such a thing was never to be.

* * * * *

Little Dorrit

      “Little Dorrit” was written at a time when the author was
     busying himself not only with other literary work, but also
     with semi-private theatricals.  John Forster, Charles Dickens’s
     biographer and friend, even had some sort of fear at that time
     that Dickens was in danger of adopting the stage as a