'If you want me you'll find me here. You muthn't mind
your thon having a comic livery on.'
They all three went in; and Mr. Gradgrind sat down forlorn, on the
Clown's performing chair in the middle of the ring. On one of the
back benches, remote in the subdued light and the strangeness of
the place, sat the villainous whelp, sulky to the last, whom he had
the misery to call his son.
In a preposterous coat, like a beadle's, with cuffs and flaps
exaggerated to an unspeakable extent; in an immense waistcoat,
knee-breeches, buckled shoes, and a mad cocked hat; with nothing
fitting him, and everything of coarse material, moth-eaten and full
of holes; with seams in his black face, where fear and heat had
started through the greasy composition daubed all over it; anything
so grimly, detestably, ridiculously shameful as the whelp in his
comic livery, Mr. Gradgrind never could by any other means have
believed in, weighable and measurable fact though it was. And one
of his model children had come to this!
At first the whelp would not draw any nearer, but persisted in
remaining up there by himself.
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