'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.'

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.

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.

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

[...], and in the meanwhile the clocks appeared to have made up their minds never to strike three any more.

'Come, Miss Dombey,' said Walter, looking after him as they turned away also, 'we'll go to my uncle as quick as we can. Did you ever hear Mr Dombey speak of Mr Carter the junior, Miss Florence?'

'No,' returned the child, mildly, 'I don't often hear papa speak.'

.Dombey and Son,' repeated his father. 'Would you like to be Dombey and Son now, and lend this money to young Gay's uncle?'

'Oh! if you please, Papa!' said Paul: and so would Florence.'

'Girls,' said Mr Dombey, 'have nothing to do with Dombey and Son. Would you like it?'

'His father's name, Mrs Dombey, and his grandfather's! I wish his grandfather were alive this day!' And again she said 'Dom-bey and Son,' in exactly the same tone as before.

Those three words conveyed the one idea of Mr Dombey's life. The earth was made for Dombey and Son to trade in, and the sun and moon were made togive them light. Rivers and seas were formed to float their ships; rainbows gave them promise of fair weather; winds blew for or against their enterprises; stars and planets circled in their orbits, to preserve inviolate a system of which they were the centre. Common abbreviations took new meanings in his eyes, and had sole reference to them. A.D. had no concern with anno Domini, but stood for anno Dombei - and Son.

He had risen, as his father before him, in the course of life and death, from Son to Dombey, and for nearly twenty years had been the sole representative of the firm.

His rooms were were very small, and strongly impregnated with tobacco-smoke, but snug enough: everything being stowed away, as if there were an earthquake regularly every half hour.