luptuous glitter, strange and constrained
towards its haughty mistress, whose repellent beauty it repeated, and
presented all around him, as in so many fragments of a mirror, he was
conscious of embarrassment and awkwardness. Nothing that ministered
to her disdainful self-possession could fail to gall him. Galled and
irritated with himself, he sat down, and went on, in no improved humour:

'Mrs Dombey, it is very necessary that there should be some
understanding arrived at between us. Your conduct does not please me,
Madam.'

She merely glanced at him again, and again averted her eyes; but she
might have spoken for an hour, and expressed less.

'I repeat, Mrs Dombey, does not please me. I have already taken occasion
to request that it may be corrected. I now insist upon it.'

'You chose a fitting occasion for your first remonstrance, Sir, and you
adopt a fitting manner, and a fitting word for your second. You insist!
To me!'

'Madam,' said Mr Dombey, with his most offensive air of state, 'I have
made you my wife. You bear my name. You are associated with my position
and my reputation. I will not say that the world in general may be
disposed to think you honoured by that association; but I will say that
I am accustomed to "insist," to my connexions and dependents.'

'Which may you be pleased to consider me? she asked.

'Possibly I may think that my wife should partake--or does partake, and
cannot help herself--of both characters, Mrs Dombey.'

She bent her eyes upon him steadily, and set her trembling lips. He
saw her bosom throb, and saw her face flush and turn white. All this he
could know, and did: but he could not know that one word was whispering
in the deep recesses of her heart, to keep her quiet; and that the word
was Florence.

Blind idiot, rushing to a precipice! He thought she stood in awe of him.

'You are too expensive, Madam,' said Mr Dombey. 'You are extravagant.
You waste a great deal of money--or what would be a great deal in the
pockets of most gentlemen--in cultivating a kind of society that is
useless to me, and, indeed, that upon the whole is disagreeable to me. I
have to insist upon a total change in all these respects. I know that in
the novelty of possessing a tithe of such means as Fortune has placed
at your disposal, ladies are apt to run into a sudden extreme. There
has been more than enough of that extreme. I beg that Mrs Granger's very
different experiences may now come to the inst