Mr. Bounderby. “Turn this girl to the right about, and there’s an end of it.”

“I am much of your opinion.”

“Do it at once,” said Bounderby, “has always been my motto from a child. When I thought I would run away from my egg-box and my grandmother, I did it at once. Do you the same. Do this at once!”

“Are you walking?” asked his friend. “I have the father’s address. Perhaps you would not mind walking to town with me?”

“Not the least in the world,” said Mr. Bounderby, “as long as you do it at once!”

So Mr. Bounderby threw on his hat—he always threw it on, as expressing a man who had been far too busily employed in making himself to acquire any fashion of wearing his hat—and, with his hands in his pockets, sauntered out into the hall. “I never wear gloves,” it was his custom to say. “I didn’t climb up the ladder in them. Shouldn’t be so high up if I had.”

Being left to saunter in the hall a minute or two while Mr. Gradgrind went upstairs for the address, he opened the door of the children’s study and looked into that serene floor-clothed apartment, which, notwithstanding its bookcases and its cabinets and its variety of learned and philosophical appliances, had much of the genial aspect of a room devoted to hair-cutting. Louisa languidly leaned upon the window looking out, without looking at anything, while young Thomas stood sniffing revengefully at the fire. Adam Smith and Malthus, two younger Gradgrinds, were out at lecture in custody; and little Jane, after manufacturing a good deal of moist pipe-clay on her face with slatepencil and tears, had fallen asleep over vulgar fractions.

“It’s all right now, Louisa: it’s all right, young Thomas,” said Mr. Bounderby; “you won’t do so any more. I’ll answer for its being all over with Father. Well, Louisa, that’s worth a kiss, isn’t it?”

“You can take one, Mr. Bounderby,” returned Louisa, when she had coldly paused, and slowly walked across the room, and ungraciously raised her cheek towards him, with her face turned away.

“Always my pet; ain’t you, Louisa?” said Mr. Bounderby. “Good-bye, Louisa!”

He went his way, but she stood on the same spot, rubbing the cheek he had kissed with her handkerchief until it was burning red. She was still doing this five minutes afterwards.

“What are you about, Loo?” her brother sulkily remonstrated. “You’ll rub a hole in your face.”

“You may cut the piece out with your pen-knife if you like, Tom. I wouldn’t cry!”

CHAPTER V

The Keynote

COKETOWN, to which Messrs. Bounderby and Gradgrind now walked, was a triumph of fact; it had no greater taint of fancy in it than Mrs. Gradgrind herself. Let us strike the keynote, Coketown, before pursuing our tune.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves forever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next.

These attributes of Coketown were in the main inseparable from the work by which it was sustained; against them were to be set off comforts of life which found their way all over the world, and elegancies of life which made, we will not ask how much of the fine lady, who could scarcely bear to hear the place mentioned. The rest of its features were voluntary, and they were these.

You saw nothing in Coketown but what was severely workful. If the members of a religious persuasion built a chapel there—as the members of eighteen religious