t altogether true, to say of him that
he felt these rubs and gratings against his pride more keenly than he
had felt his wife's death: but certainly they impressed that event upon
him with new force, and communicated to it added weight and bitterness.
It was a rude shock to his sense of property in his child, that these
people--the mere dust of the earth, as he thought them--should be
necessary to him; and it was natural that in proportion as he felt
disturbed by it, he should deplore the occurrence which had made them
so. For all his starched, impenetrable dignity and composure, he wiped
blinding tears from his eyes as he paced up and down his room; and often
said, with an emotion of which he would not, for the world, have had a
witness, 'Poor little fellow!'

It may have been characteristic of Mr Dombey's pride, that he pitied
himself through the child. Not poor me. Not poor widower, confiding by
constraint in the wife of an ignorant Hind who has been working 'mostly
underground' all his life, and yet at whose door Death had never
knocked, and at whose poor table four sons daily sit--but poor little
fellow!

Those words being on his lips, it occurred to him--and it is an instance
of the strong attraction with which his hopes and fears and all his
thoughts were tending to one centre--that a great temptation was being
placed in this woman's way. Her infant was a boy too. Now, would it be
possible for her to change them?

Though he was soon satisfied that he had dismissed the idea as romantic
and unlikely--though possible, there was no denying--he could not help
pursuing it so far as to entertain within himself a picture of what his
condition would be, if he should discover such an imposture when he was
grown old. Whether a man so situated would be able to pluck away the
result of so many years of usage, confidence, and belief, from the
impostor, and endow a stranger with it?

But it was idle speculating thus. It couldn't happen. In a moment
afterwards he determined that it could, but that such women were
constantly observed, and had no opportunity given them for the
accomplishment of such a design, even when they were so wicked as to
entertain it. In another moment, he was remembering how few such cases
seemed to have ever happened. In another moment he was wondering whether
they ever happened and were not found out.

As his unusual emotion subsided, these misgivings gradually melted away,
though so much of their