“Pooh, pooh! Don’t you talk nonsense, my good fellow,” said Mr. Bounderby, “about things you don’t understand; and don’t you call the institutions of your country a muddle, or you’ll get yourself into a real muddle one of these fine mornings. The institutions of your country are not your piecework, and the only thing you have got to do, is, to mind your piecework. You didn’t take your wife for fast and for loose; but for better for worse. If she has turned out worse⁠—why, all we have got to say is, she might have turned out better.”

“Now, I’ll tell you what!” Mr. Bounderby resumed, as a valedictory address. “With what I shall call your unhallowed opinions, you have been quite shocking this lady: who, as I have already told you, is a born lady, and who, as I have not already told you, has had her own marriage misfortunes to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds⁠—tens of thousands of pounds!” (he repeated it with great relish). “Now, you have always been a steady hand hitherto; but my opinion is, and so I tell you plainly, that you are turning into the wrong road. You have been listening to some mischievous stranger or other⁠—they’re always about⁠—and the best thing you can do is, to come out of that. Now you know;” here his countenance expressed marvellous acuteness; “I can see as far into a grindstone as another man; farther than a good many, perhaps, because I had my nose well kept to it when I was young. I see traces of the turtle soup, and venison, and gold spoon in this. Yes, I do!” cried Mr. Bounderby, shaking his head with obstinate cunning. “By the Lord Harry, I do!”

With a very different shake of the head and deep sigh, Stephen said, “Thank you, sir, I wish you good day.” So he left Mr. Bounderby swelling at his own portrait on the wall, as if he were going to explode himself into it; and Mrs. Sparsit still ambling on with her foot in her stirrup, looking quite cast down by the popular vices.

Old Stephen descended the two white steps, shutting the black door with the brazen doorplate, by the aid of the brazen full-stop, to which he gave a parting polish with the sleeve of his coat, observing that his hot hand clouded it. He crossed the street with his eyes bent upon the ground, and thus was walking sorrowfully away, when he felt a touch upon his arm.

It was not the touch he needed most at such a moment⁠—the touch that could calm the wild waters of his soul, as the uplifted hand of the sublimest love and patience could abate the raging of the sea⁠—yet it was a woman’s hand too. It was an old woman, tall and shapely still, though withered by time, on whom his eyes fell when he stopped and turned. She was very cleanly and plainly dressed, had country mud upon her shoes, and was newly come from a journey. The flutter of her manner, in the unwonted noise of the streets; the spare shawl, carried unfolded on her arm; the heavy umbrella, and little basket; the loose long-fingered gloves, to which her hands were unused; all bespoke an old woman from the country, in her plain holiday clothes, come into Coketown on an expedition of rare occurrence. Remarking this at a glance, with the quick observation of his class, Stephen Blackpool bent his attentive face⁠—his face, which, like the faces of many of his order, by dint of long working with eyes and hands in the midst of a prodigious noise, had acquired the concentrated look with which we are familiar in the countenances of the deaf⁠—the better to hear what she asked him.

“And healthy,” said the old woman, “as the fresh wind?”