Gradgrind and Bounderby follow Sissy up the steep stairs of the Pegasus's Arms into the circus lodgings. Signor Jupe's peacock-feathered nightcap hangs on a nail, but the man, the dog, and the trunk are gone. Sissy runs to the booth and returns with bad news gathering behind her: Mr. Childers, the Wild Huntsman, explains that Jupe has been "goosed" once too often, his joints stiffening and his clowning failing, and has slipped away with a bundle under his arm rather than face his daughter knowing he broke down.
Bounderby treats desertion as simple moral fact and launches into his own story of a mother who ran away from him. Kidderminster, the young Cupid of the troupe, tells the manufacturer to lower himself. The circus people do not admire plain Fact the way Bounderby expects. Gradgrind admits he came to expel Sissy from school because of her connections, but Jupe's flight changes the arithmetic. In a private word with Bounderby, he adds a colder motive: keep her as an object lesson to Louisa of where vulgar curiosity leads.
Sleary's troupe gathers, and Dickens pauses to honor them: untidy, unlettered, and useless at sharp practice, yet gentle, pitying, and quick to help one another. When Sissy returns and sees no father, she breaks on Emma Gordon's bosom. Bounderby tells her bluntly that Jupe has absconded. Gradgrind then offers a deal worked out like a sum: come to Stone Lodge, be educated, cut off all contact with the circus, decide now. Sissy chooses to go, clinging to the hope that father can find her through Sleary.
The women pack her basket. The men kiss her goodbye. Sleary hands her to Gradgrind like a rider mounting a horse, lets her keep the nine oils for the father who promised to return, and leaves him with the chapter's philosophy: people must be amused somehow; they cannot always be working or learning. Make the best of us, not the worst. The fixed eye and the rolling eye lose her in the street, and Coketown's harsh, facts-only world gains a child who will prove its measurements wrong.
Coming Up in Chapter 7
At Bounderby's red brick house a faded aristocrat named Mrs Sparsit keeps tea, tends the banker's pride, and watches the self-made man perform humility for a salary while privately calculating every slight. Her respectability will soon become surveillance dressed as concern..
