Thus Paul grew to be nearly five years old. He was a pretty little fellow, though there was something wan and wistful in his small face, that gave occasion to many significant shakes of his nurse's head. His temper gave abundant promise of being imperious, like his father's, in after life. He was childish and sportive enough at times; but he had a strange, old-fashioned, thoughtful way at other times of sitting brooding in his miniature arm-chair, when he looked and talked like one of those terrible little beings in the fairy tales, who, at a hundred and fifty or two hundred years of age, fantastically represent the children for whom they have been substituted. He would frequently be stricken with this mood upstairs in the nursery, and would sometimes lapse into it suddenly, exclaiming that he was tired, even while playing with Florence, or driving his nurse in single harness. But at no one time did he fall into it so surely, as when, his little chair being carried down into his father's room, he sat there with him after dinner by the fire. They were the strangest pair at such a time that ever firelight shone upon. Mr. Dombey, so erect and solemn, gazing at the blaze; his little image, with an old, old face, peering into the red perspective with the fixed and rapt attention of a sage; the two so very much alike, and yet so monstrously contrasted.
On one of these occasions, when they had both been perfectly quiet for a long time, little Paul broke the silence thus:—
"Papa! what's money?"
The abrupt question had such immediate reference to the subject of Mr. Dombey's thoughts, that Mr. Dombey was quite disconcerted.
"What is money, Paul?" he answered. "Money?"
"Yes," said the child, laying his hands upon the elbows of his little chair, and turning the old face up towards Mr. Dombey's, "what is money?"
Mr. Dombey was in a difficulty. He would have liked to give him some grown-up explanation; but looking down at the little chair, and seeing what a long way down it was, he answered: "Gold, and silver, and copper. Guineas, shillings, halfpence. You know what they are?"
"Oh, yes, I know what they are," said Paul. "I don't mean that, papa. I mean what's money, after all."
"What is money, after all?" said Mr. Dombey, backing his chair a little, that he might the better gaze at the atom that made such an inquiry.
"I mean, papa, what can it do?" returned Paul.