Hard Times

Gradgrind's study: a stern room with a deadly statistical clock that measures every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin-lid. Louisa sits near the window looking out at Coketown's chimneys and smoke. Gradgrind tells her she is the subject of a proposal of marriage. He waits. She says not a word. He repeats it. She says only: 'I hear you, father.' Then she begins her questions, one at a time, in exactly the same voice: 'Do you think I love Mr. Bounderby?' 'Do you ask me to love him?' 'Does Mr. Bounderby ask me to love him?' Gradgrind is more flustered than she is. He falls back on Fact: she is twenty, Bounderby is fifty — here are the statistics on age-disparate marriages across England, Wales, India, China, and among the Calmucks of Tartary, and the disparity virtually disappears. The question is simply: Shall I marry him? Louisa looks out at the smoke: 'There seems to be nothing there but languid and monotonous smoke. Yet when the night comes, Fire bursts out, father.' He does not see the application. There is a moment — one wavering moment — when she is impelled to throw herself on his breast and give him the pent-up confidences of her heart. But the barriers between them are too many and too high. The moment passes into the plumbless depths of the past. 'Let it be so. Since Mr. Bounderby likes to take me thus, I am satisfied to accept his proposal.' She asks him to repeat it word for word. Gradgrind is moved by his success. He takes her downstairs and presents her to her mother as 'Mrs. Bounderby.' Sissy looks at Louisa in wonder, in pity, in sorrow, in doubt. Louisa knows it without looking at her. From that moment she is impassive and cold, and holds Sissy at a distance.