around is blackened. There are
dark pools of water, muddy lanes, and miserable habitations far below.
There are jagged walls and falling houses close at hand, and through the
battered roofs and broken windows, wretched rooms are seen, where 'want
and fever hide themselves in many wretched shapes, while smoke and
crowded gables, and distorted chimneys, and deformity of brick and
mortar penning up deformity of mind and body, choke the murky distance.
As Mr Dombey looks out of his carriage window, it is never in his
thoughts that the monster who has brought him there has let the light
of day in on these things: not made or caused them. It was the journey's
fitting end, and might have been the end of everything; it was so
ruinous and dreary.'

So, pursuing the one course of thought, he had the one relentless
monster still before him. All things looked black, and cold, and
deadly upon him, and he on them. He found a likeness to his misfortune
everywhere. There was a remorseless triumph going on about him, and it
galled and stung him in his pride and jealousy, whatever form it took:
though most of all when it divided with him the love and memory of his
lost boy.

There was a face--he had looked upon it, on the previous night, and it
on him with eyes that read his soul, though they were dim with tears,
and hidden soon behind two quivering hands--that often had attended
him in fancy, on this ride. He had seen it, with the expression of last
night, timidly pleading to him. It was not reproachful, but there was
something of doubt, almost of hopeful incredulity in it, which, as he
once more saw that fade away into a desolate certainty of his dislike,
was like reproach. It was a trouble to him to think of this face of
Florence.

Because he felt any new compunction towards it? No. Because the feeling
it awakened in him--of which he had had some old foreshadowing in older
times--was full-formed now, and spoke out plainly, moving him too much,
and threatening to grow too strong for his composure. Because the face
was abroad, in the expression of defeat and persecution that seemed to
encircle him like the air. Because it barbed the arrow of that cruel and
remorseless enemy on which his thoughts so ran, and put into its grasp a
double-handed sword. Because he knew full well, in his own breast, as he
stood there, tinging the scene of transition before him with the morbid
colours of his own mind, and making it a ruin and a picture of