Sissy's Progress — Hard Times

Sissy Jupe would have run away from Stone Lodge except for one unarithmetical faith: her father did not desert her, and she must stay where he can find her. M'Choakumchild reports disaster after disaster. She cries over muslin-cap sums, ranks lowest in class, and once answered that the first principle of Political Economy is the Golden Rule. A three-foot scholar corrected her. Gradgrind orders infinite grinding at the mill of knowledge.

One night Louisa tries to help with Sissy's lessons and hears how badly the system fits. Sissy cannot call a nation prosperous without knowing who has the money. She thinks one starved person is as hard hit whether the population is a million or a million million. When asked for the percentage of drowned sailors, she sobs that it is nothing to the families who lost them. Louisa, with a wild wandering interest like a banished creature, asks forbidden questions about Sissy's mother the dancer, her father the clown, and the night Jupe sent her for nine oils and vanished.

Sissy tells how her father beat Merrylegs in despair, then lay on the floor with the bloody dog in his arms. Louisa kisses her and asks for the end. Tom interrupts twice, wanting Louisa in the drawing room so Bounderby may invite him to dinner. Afterward Sissy curtseys to Gradgrind again and again: any letter yet about her father? Louisa waits for the answer as anxiously as Sissy does. When Gradgrind says no, Louisa's face repeats Sissy's trembling. Gradgrind calls the hope baseless. Dickens adds that fantastic hope can grip as hard as fact, though only Louisa seems to know it. Tom calculates for himself. Mrs. Gradgrind complains and goes torpid again.