Bokelskere.no

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

.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?'

But the Major, with his complexion like a Stilton cheese, and his eyes like a prawn's, went roving about, [...].

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.

'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.'

'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.'

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

[...], who had been appointed schoolmaster because he didn't know anything, and wasn't fit for anything and for whose cruel cane all chubby little boys had a perfect fascination.

His social existance had been more like that of an early Christian, than an innocent child of the nineteenth century. He had been stoned in the streets. He had been overthrown into gutters; bespattered with mud; violently flattened against posts.

'I am far from being friendly,' pursued Mr Dombey, 'to what is called by persons of levelling sentiments, general education. But it is necessary that the inferior classes should continue to be taught to know their position, and to conduct themselves properly. So far I approve of schools.