Gradgrind's study is a blue chamber of books and a deadly statistical clock. Louisa sits by the window looking at Coketown smoke while her father announces Bounderby's proposal of marriage. She hears him in silence, then asks in the same steady voice whether she loves Bounderby, whether he asks her to love him, and whether Bounderby asks love of her.
Flustered, Gradgrind falls back on Fact: she is twenty, Bounderby fifty; marriage statistics from England, Wales, India, China, and the Calmucks of Tartary show age gaps are common, so the disparity virtually disappears. The question reduces to: Shall I marry him? Louisa looks at the smoke and says when night comes, fire bursts out. Her father does not see the application.
For one wavering moment she nearly throws herself on his breast, but the barriers he built are too high. She accepts: since Bounderby likes to take her thus, she will marry him, and asks him to repeat her answer word for word. She tells him she never had a child's heart, dream, belief, or fear.
Gradgrind, moved by his success, presents Mrs. Bounderby downstairs. Mrs. Gradgrind worries what to call Josiah. Sissy looks at Louisa in wonder, pity, sorrow, and doubt. Louisa knows without looking and from that moment holds Sissy coldly at a distance.
Coming Up in Chapter 16
The marriage is settled on paper. In Husband and Wife Louisa and Bounderby begin the life that facts alone could arrange, and the gap between them shows at once Bounderby's first worry about his engagement is telling Mrs. Sparsit..
