‘You have a suspicious appearance of inscribing some fair creature’s on the bark, Tom.’

[Picture: Mr. Harthouse and Tom Gradgrind in the garden]

‘Not much of that, Mr. Harthouse, unless some fair creature with a slashing fortune at her own disposal would take a fancy to me. Or she might be as ugly as she was rich, without any fear of losing me. I’d carve her name as often as she liked.’

‘I am afraid you are mercenary, Tom.’

‘Mercenary,’ repeated Tom. ‘Who is not mercenary? Ask my sister.’

‘Have you so proved it to be a failing of mine, Tom?’ said Louisa, showing no other sense of his discontent and ill-nature.

‘You know whether the cap fits you, Loo,’ returned her brother sulkily. ‘If it does, you can wear it.’

‘Tom is misanthropical to-day, as all bored people are now and then,’ said Mr. Harthouse. ‘Don’t believe him, Mrs. Bounderby. He knows much better. I shall disclose some of his opinions of you, privately expressed to me, unless he relents a little.’

‘At all events, Mr. Harthouse,’ said Tom, softening in his admiration of his patron, but shaking his head sullenly too, ‘you can’t tell her that I ever praised her for being mercenary. I may have praised her for being the contrary, and I should do it again, if I had as good reason. However, never mind this now; it’s not very interesting to you, and I am sick of the subject.’

They walked on to the house, where Louisa quitted her visitor’s arm and went in. He stood looking after her, as she ascended the steps, and passed into the shadow of the door; then put his hand upon her brother’s shoulder again, and invited him with a confidential nod to a walk in the garden.

‘Tom, my fine fellow, I want to have a word with you.’

They had stopped among a disorder of roses—it was part of Mr. Bounderby’s humility to keep Nickits’s roses on a reduced scale—and Tom sat down on a terrace-parapet, plucking buds and picking them to pieces; while his powerful Familiar stood over him, with a foot upon the parapet, and his figure easily resting on the arm supported by that knee. They were just visible from her window. Perhaps she saw them.

‘Tom, what’s the matter?’

‘Oh! Mr. Harthouse,’ said Tom with a groan, ‘I am hard up, and bothered out of my life.’

‘My good fellow, so am I.’

‘You!’ returned Tom. ‘You are the picture of independence. Mr. Harthouse, I am in a horrible mess. You have no idea what a state I have got myself into—what a state my sister might have got me out of, if she would only have done it.’