decay,
instead of hopeful change, and promise of better things, that life had
quite as much to do with his complainings as death. One child was gone,
and one child left. Why was the object of his hope removed instead of
her?

The sweet, calm, gentle presence in his fancy, moved him to no
reflection but that. She had been unwelcome to him from the first; she
was an aggravation of his bitterness now. If his son had been his only
child, and the same blow had fallen on him, it would have been heavy to
bear; but infinitely lighter than now, when it might have fallen on her
(whom he could have lost, or he believed it, without a pang), and had
not. Her loving and innocent face rising before him, had no softening
or winning influence. He rejected the angel, and took up with the
tormenting spirit crouching in his bosom. Her patience, goodness, youth,
devotion, love, were as so many atoms in the ashes upon which he set his
heel. He saw her image in the blight and blackness all around him, not
irradiating but deepening the gloom. More than once upon this journey,
and now again as he stood pondering at this journey's end, tracing
figures in the dust with his stick, the thought came into his mind, what
was there he could interpose between himself and it?

The Major, who had been blowing and panting all the way down, like
another engine, and whose eye had often wandered from his newspaper to
leer at the prospect, as if there were a procession of discomfited Miss
Toxes pouring out in the smoke of the train, and flying away over the
fields to hide themselves in any place of refuge, aroused his friends
by informing him that the post-horses were harnessed and the carriage
ready.

'Dombey,' said the Major, rapping him on the arm with his cane, 'don't
be thoughtful. It's a bad habit, Old Joe, Sir, wouldn't be as tough
as you see him, if he had ever encouraged it. You are too great a man,
Dombey, to be thoughtful. In your position, Sir, you're far above that
kind of thing.'

The Major even in his friendly remonstrances, thus consulting the
dignity and honour of Mr Dombey, and showing a lively sense of their
importance, Mr Dombey felt more than ever disposed to defer to a
gentleman possessing so much good sense and such a well-regulated mind;
accordingly he made an effort to listen to the Major's stories, as they
trotted along the turnpike road; and the Major, finding both the pace
and the road a great deal better adapted to his convers