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837 when I want to. Won’t you come home, won’t you?’ ‘No, no, no,’ cried Smike, shrinking back. ‘He never loved nobody,’ bawled Squeers, through the keyhole. ‘He never loved me; he never loved Wackford, who is next door but one to a cherubim. How can you expect that he’ll love his father? He’ll never love his father, he won’t. He don’t know what it is to have a father. He don’t understand it. It an’t in him.’ Mr Snawley looked steadfastly at his son for a full minute, and then covering his eyes with his hand, and once more raising his hat in the air, appeared deeply occupied in deploring his black ingratitude. Then drawing his arm across his eyes, he picked up Mr Squeers’s hat, and taking it under one arm, and his own under the other, walked slowly and sadly out. ‘Your romance, sir,’ said Ralph, lingering for a moment, ‘is destroyed, I take it. No unknown; no persecuted descendant of a man of high degree; but the weak, imbecile son of a poor, petty tradesman. We shall see how your sympathy melts before plain matter of fact.’ ‘You shall,’ said Nicholas, motioning towards the door. ‘And trust me, sir,’ added Ralph, ‘that I never supposed you would give him up tonight. Pride, obstinacy, reputation for fine feeling, were all against it. These must be brought down, sir, lowered, crushed, as they shall be soon. The protracted and wearing anxiety and expense of the law in its most oppressive form, its torture from hour to hour, its weary days and sleepless nights, with these I’ll prove you, and break your haughty spirit, strong as you deem it now. And when you make this house a hell, and visit these trials upon yonder wretched object (as you will; I know you), and those who think you now a young-fledged hero, |