‘I cannot disguise from you, Jupe,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, knitting his brow, ‘that the result of your probation there has disappointed me; has greatly disappointed me. You have not acquired, under Mr. and Mrs. M’Choakumchild, anything like that amount of exact knowledge which I looked for. You are extremely deficient in your facts. Your acquaintance with figures is very limited. You are altogether backward, and below the mark.’ ‘I am sorry, sir,’ she returned; ‘but I know it is quite true. Yet I have tried hard, sir.’ ‘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.’ ‘Thank you, sir, very much,’ said Sissy, with a grateful curtsey. ‘You are useful to Mrs. Gradgrind, and (in a generally pervading way) you are serviceable in the family also; so I understand from Miss Louisa, and, indeed, so I have observed myself. I therefore hope,’ said Mr. Gradgrind, ‘that you can make yourself happy in those relations.’ ‘I should have nothing to wish, sir, if—’ ‘I understand you,’ said Mr. Gradgrind; ‘you still refer to your father. I have heard from Miss Louisa that you still preserve that bottle. Well! If your training in the science of arriving at exact results had been more successful, you would have been wiser on these points. I will say no more.’ He really liked Sissy too well to have a contempt for her; otherwise he held her calculating powers in such very slight estimation that he must have fallen upon that conclusion. Somehow or other, he had become possessed by an idea that there was something in this girl which could hardly be set forth in a tabular form. Her capacity of definition might be easily stated at a very low figure, her mathematical knowledge at nothing; yet he was not sure that if he had been required, for example, to tick her off into columns in a parliamentary return, he would have quite known how to divide her.