ch,
and made their marriage way a road of ashes.

Let us be just to him. In the monstrous delusion of his life, swelling
with every grain of sand that shifted in its glass, he urged her on, he
little thought to what, or considered how; but still his feeling towards
her, such as it was, remained as at first. She had the grand demerit of
unaccountably putting herself in opposition to the recognition of his
vast importance, and to the acknowledgment of her complete submission to
it, and so far it was necessary to correct and reduce her; but otherwise
he still considered her, in his cold way, a lady capable of doing
honour, if she would, to his choice and name, and of reflecting credit
on his proprietorship.

Now, she, with all her might of passionate and proud resentment, bent
her dark glance from day to day, and hour to hour--from that night in
her own chamber, when she had sat gazing at the shadows on the wall,
to the deeper night fast coming--upon one figure directing a crowd of
humiliations and exasperations against her; and that figure, still her
husband's.

Was Mr Dombey's master-vice, that ruled him so inexorably, an unnatural
characteristic? It might be worthwhile, sometimes, to inquire what
Nature is, and how men work to change her, and whether, in the enforced
distortions so produced, it is not natural to be unnatural. Coop any
son or daughter of our mighty mother within narrow range, and bind the
prisoner to one idea, and foster it by servile worship of it on the part
of the few timid or designing people standing round, and what is Nature
to the willing captive who has never risen up upon the wings of a free
mind--drooping and useless soon--to see her in her comprehensive truth!

Alas! are there so few things in the world, about us, most unnatural,
and yet most natural in being so? Hear the magistrate or judge admonish
the unnatural outcasts of society; unnatural in brutal habits, unnatural
in want of decency, unnatural in losing and confounding all distinctions
between good and evil; unnatural in ignorance, in vice, in recklessness,
in contumacy, in mind, in looks, in everything. But follow the good
clergyman or doctor, who, with his life imperilled at every breath
he draws, goes down into their dens, lying within the echoes of our
carriage wheels and daily tread upon the pavement stones. Look round
upon the world of odious sights--millions of immortal creatures have no
other world on earth--at the lightest