'Ha!' said Dr Blimber. 'Shall we make a man of him?'

'Do you hear, Paul?' added Mr Dombey; Paul being silent.

'Shall we make a man of him?' repeated the Doctor.

'I had rather be a child,' replied Paul.

'Money, Paul, can do anything.' He [i.e. Mr Dombey] took hold of the little hand, and beat it softly against one of his own as he said so.

[...]

'Anything, Papa?'

'Yes. Anything - almost,' said Mr Dombey.

'Anything means everything, don't it, Papa?' asked his son: not observing, or possibly not understanding, the qualification.

'It includes it: yes,' said Mr Dombey.

'Why didn't money save my mama?' returned the child. 'It isn't cruel, is it?'

'Cruel!' said Mr Dombey, settling his neckcloth, and seeming to resent the idea. 'No. A good thing can't be cruel.'

'If it's a good thing, and can do anything,' said the little fellow, thoughtfully, as he looked back at the fire, 'I wonder why it didn't save my mama.'

Not that she had anything particular to forgive in her sister-in-law, nor indeed anything at all, except her having married her brother - in itself a species of audacity - and her having, in the course of events, given birth to a girl instead of a boy: which as Mrs Chick had frequently observed, was not quite what she had expected of her, and was not a pleasant return for all the attention and distinction she had met with.

It was much more satisfactory, he observed, rubbing his hands, to begin at the foundation. And again he leered at Paul, as if he would have liked to tackle him with the Greek alphabet, on the spot.

The young gentlemen were prematurely full of carking anxieties. They knew no rest from the pursuit of stoney-hearted verbs, savage noun-substantives, inflexible syntactic passages, and ghosts of exercises that appeared to them in their dreams