“Yes,” said Mr. Gradgrind, “yes, I believe you have tried hard; I have observed you, and I can find no fault in that respect.”
“Thank you, sir. I have thought sometimes”—Sissy very timid here—“that perhaps I tried to learn too much, and that if I had asked to be allowed to try a little less, I might have——”
“No, Jupe, no,” said Mr. Gradgrind, shaking his head in his profoundest and most eminently practical way. “No. The course you pursued, you pursued according to the system—the system—and there is no more to be said about it. I can only suppose that the circumstances of your early life were too unfavourable to the development of your reasoning powers, and that we began too late. Still, as I have said already, I am disappointed.”
“I wish I could have made a better acknowledgment, sir, of your kindness to a poor forlorn girl who had no claim upon you, and of your protection of her.”
“Don’t shed tears,” said Mr. Gradgrind. “Don’t shed tears. I don’t complain of you. You are an affectionate, earnest, good young woman, and—and we must make that do.”
How blind a man must become when his faith in a system or a philosophy can make him estimate fact storing so much and character forming so little! Sissy could not learn facts, therefore Mr. Gradgrind mourned. The fact that she was “affectionate, earnest, good,” was only a trifling matter—a very poor substitute for brilliant acquirements in dates and facts and mental arithmetic.
Sissy became, however, the good angel of the Gradgrind household. She helped Louisa back to a partial hope and sweetness; she gave the younger children, with Mr. Gradgrind’s permission, the real childhood of freedom and imagination, which the older children had lost forever; she brightened the lives even of Mrs. and Mr. Gradgrind, and she helped to save Tom from the disgrace of his crime.
The closing picture of the book, one of the most beautiful Dickens ever painted, tells the story of Sissy’s future:
But happy Sissy’s happy children loving her; all children loving her; she, grown learned in childish lore; thinking no innocent and pretty fancy ever to be despised; trying hard to know her humbler fellow-creatures, and to beautify their lives of machinery and reality with those imaginative graces and delights, without which the heart of infancy will wither up, the sturdiest physical manhood will be morally stark death, and the plainest national prosperity figures can show will be the Writing on the Wall—she holding this course as part of no fantastic vow, or bond, or brotherhood, or sisterhood, or pledge, or covenant, or fancy dress, or fancy fair; but simply as a duty to be done. Did Louisa see these things of herself? These things were to be!
Dear reader! It rests with you and me whether, in our two fields of action, similar things shall be or not. Let them be! We shall sit with lighter bosoms on the hearth, to see the ashes of our fires turn gray and cold.