‘What is your great mode of smoothing and managing, Tom? Is it a secret?’

‘Oh!’ said Tom, ‘if it is a secret, it’s not far off. It’s you. You are his little pet, you are his favourite; he’ll do anything for you. When he says to me what I don’t like, I shall say to him, ‘‘My sister Loo will be hurt and disappointed, Mr Bounderby. She always used to tell me she was sure you would be easier with me than this.’’ That’ll bring him about, or nothing will.’

After waiting for some answering remark, and getting none, Tom wearily relapsed into the present time, and twined himself yawning round and about the rails of his chair, and rumpled his head more and more, until he suddenly looked up, and asked:

‘Have you gone to sleep, Loo?’

‘No, Tom. I am looking at the fire.’

‘You seem to find more to look at in it than ever I could find,’ said Tom. ‘Another of the advantages, I suppose, of being a girl.’

‘Tom,’ inquired his sister, slowly, and in a curious tone, as if she were reading what she asked in the fire, and it were not quite plainly written there, ‘do you look forward with any satisfaction to this change to Mr Bounderby’s?’

‘Why, there’s one thing to be said of it,’ returned Tom, pushing his chair from him, and standing up; ‘it will be getting away from home.’

‘There is one thing to be said of it,’ Louisa repeated in her former curious tone; ‘it will be getting away from home. Yes.’

‘Not but what I shall be very unwilling, both to leave you, Loo, and to leave you here. But I must go, you know, whether I like it or not; but I had better go where I can take with me some advantage of your influence, than where I should lose it altogether. Don’t you see?’

‘Yes, Tom.’

The answer was so long in coming, though there was no indecision in it, that Tom went and leaned on the back of her chair, to contemplate the fire which so engrossed her, from her point of view, and see what he could make of it.

‘Except that it is a fire,’ said Tom, ‘it looks to me as stupid and blank as everything else looks. What do you see in it? Not a circus?’

‘I don’t see anything in it, Tom, particularly. But since I have been looking at it, I have been wondering about you and me, grown up.’

‘Wondering again!’ said Tom.

‘I have such unmanageable thoughts,’ returned his sister, ‘that they will wonder.’

‘Then I beg of you, Louisa,’ said Mrs Gradgrind, who had opened the door without being heard, ‘to do nothing of that description, for goodness’ sake, you inconsiderate girl, or I shall never hear the last of it from your father. And, Thomas, it is really shameful, with my poor head continually wearing me out, that a boy brought up as you have been, and whose education has cost what yours has, should be found encouraging his sister to wonder, when he knows his father has expressly said that she is not to do it.’