Mr. James Harthouse — Hard Times

The Gradgrind party wants help cutting the throats of the Graces and recruits among fine gentlemen who have found everything worth nothing and are ready for anything. James Harthouse, bored with dragoon life, diplomacy, and travel, takes his brother's advice to go in for statistics. He coaches from blue books, makes speeches, and arrives in Coketown with a letter from Thomas Gradgrind introducing him to Josiah Bounderby of the Bank.

Bounderby meets Harthouse at the hotel and delivers his condensed epitome of Coketown: smoke is meat and drink, mill work is the pleasantest and best-paid labor on earth, and every Hand wants turtle soup and venison with a gold spoon. Harthouse agrees on conviction with everything, then walks with Bounderby to the red brick house. Louisa strikes him as constrained yet careless, reserved yet watchful, cold yet ashamed of her husband's braggart humility. The drawing-room is cheerless and boastfully rich, with no trace of a woman's occupation anywhere.

At dinner Harthouse tells Louisa he has no predilections left and will back her father's opinions because any set will do equal harm. She asks if he has none of his own; his vicious assumption of honesty in dishonesty seems to impress her. Tom appears and her impassive face breaks into a beaming smile. Harthouse stores the clue: the whelp is the only creature she cares for. Tom escorts him back to the hotel, and the visitor has found the angle he wanted before the evening ends.