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admitted, said Mrs Sparsit,  that it s very tasteful.  Yes, ma am,
returned Bitzer,  if that s worth the money.  Besides which,
ma am, resumed Bitzer, while he was polishing the table,  he looks
to me as if he gamed.  It s immoral to game, said Mrs Sparsit.  It s
ridiculous, ma am, said Bitzer,  because the chances are against the
players. Whether it was that the heat prevented Mrs Sparsit from
working, or whether it was that her hand was out, she did no work
that night. She sat at the window, when the sun began to sink
behind the smoke; she sat there, when the smoke was burning red,
when the colour faded from it, when darkness seemed to rise
slowly out of the ground, and creep upward, upward, up to the
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house-tops, up the church steeple, up to the summits of the factory
chimneys, up to the sky. Without a candle in the room, Mrs Sparsit
sat at the window, with her hands before her, not thinking much of
the sounds of evening: the whooping of boys, the barking of dogs,
the rumbling of wheels, the steps and voices of passengers, the
shrill street cries, the clogs upon the pavement when it was their
hour for going by, the shutting-up of shop-shutters. Not until the
light porter announced that her nocturnal sweetbread was ready,
did Mrs Sparsit arouse herself from her reverie, and con- vey her
dense black eyebrows- by that time creased with meditation, as if
they needed ironing out- up stairs.
 O, you Fool! said Mrs Sparsit, when she was alone at her supper.
Whom she meant, she did not say; but she could scarcely have
meant the sweetbread.
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CHAPTER 2
Mr James Harthouse
THE Gradgrind party wanted assistance in cutting the throats of
the Graces.
They went about recruiting; and where could they enlist recruits
more hopefully, than among the fine gentlemen who, having found
out everything to be worth nothing, were equally ready for
anything? Moreover, the healthy spirits who had mounted to this
sublime height were attractive to many of the Gradgrind school.
They liked fine gentlemen; they pretended that they did not, but
they did. They became exhausted in imitation of them; and they
yaw-yawed in their speech like them; and they served out, with an
enervated air, the little mouldy rations of political economy, on
which they regaled their disciples. There never before was seen on
earth such a wonderful hybrid race as was thus produced.
Among the fine gentlemen not regularly belonging to the
Gradgrind school, there was one of a good family and a better
appearance, with a happy turn of humour which had told
immensely with the House of Commons on the occasion of his
entertaining it with his (and the Board of Directors ) view of a
railway accident, in which the most careful officers ever known,
employed by the most liberal managers ever heard of, assisted by
the finest mechanical contrivances ever devised, the whole in
action on the best line ever constructed, had killed five peo- ple
and wounded thirty-two, by a casualty without which the
excellence of the whole system would have been positively
incomplete. Among the slain was a cow, and among the scattered
articles unowned, a widow s cap. And the honourable member had
so tickled the House (which has a delicate sense of humour) by
putting the cap on the cow, that it became impatient of any serious
reference to the Coroner s Inquest, and brought the railway off
with Cheers and Laughter.
Now, this gentleman had a younger brother of still better
appearance than himself, who had tried life as a Comet of
Dragoons, and found it a bore; and had afterwards tried it in the
train of an English minister abroad, and found it a bore; and had
then strolled to Jerusalem, and got bored there; and had then gone
yachting about the world, and got bored everywhere. To whom
this honourable and jocular member fraternally said one day,  Jem,
there s a good opening among the hard Fact fellows, and they want
men. I wonder you don t go in for statistics. Jem, rather taken by
the novelty of the idea, and very hard up for a change, was as
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