little pair of shoes by any chance, she would take 'em off and sell
'em for drink. Why, I have known that grandmother of mine lie in
her bed and drink her four-teen glasses of liquor before
breakfast!'

Mrs. Gradgrind, weakly smiling, and giving no other sign of
vitality, looked (as she always did) like an indifferently executed
transparency of a small female figure, without enough light behind
it.

'She kept a chandler's shop,' pursued Bounderby, 'and kept me in an
egg-box. That was the cot of my infancy; an old egg-box. As soon
as I was big enough to run away, of course I ran away. Then I
became a young vagabond; and instead of one old woman knocking me
about and starving me, everybody of all ages knocked me about and
starved me. They were right; they had no business to do anything
else. I was a nuisance, an incumbrance, and a pest. I know that
very well.'

His pride in having at any time of his life achieved such a great
social distinction as to be a nuisance, an incumbrance, and a pest,
was only to be satisfied by three sonorous repetitions of the
boast.

'I was to pull through it, I suppose, Mrs. Gradgrind. Whether I
was to do it or not, ma'am, I did it. I pulled through it, though
nobody threw me out a rope. Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond,
labourer, porter, clerk, chief manager, small partner, Josiah
Bounderby of Coketown. Those are the antecedents, and the
culmination. Josiah Bounderby of Coketown learnt his letters from