The Steamingine was a'most as good as a godfather to him, and so we called him Biler, don't you see!' As the last straw breaks the laden camel's back, this piece of information crushed the sinking spirits of Mr Dombey.

He motioned his child's foster-father to the door, who departed by no means unwillingly: and then turning the key, paced up and down the room in solitary wretchedness.
It would be harsh, and perhaps not altogether true, to say of him that he felt these rubs and gratings against his pride more keenly than he had felt his wife's death: but certainly they impressed that event upon him with new force, and communicated to it added weight and bitterness.
It was a rude shock to his sense of property in his child, that these people--the mere dust of the earth, as he thought them--should be necessary to him; and it was natural that in proportion as he felt disturbed by it, he should deplore the occurrence which had made them so.

For all his starched, impenetrable dignity and composure, he wiped blinding tears from his eyes as he paced up and down his room; and often said, with an emotion of which he would not, for the world, have had a witness, 'Poor little fellow!' It may have been characteristic of Mr Dombey's pride, that he pitied himself through the child.

Not poor me.

Not poor widower, confiding by constraint in the wife of an ignorant Hind who has been working 'mostly underground' all his life, and yet at whose door Death had never knocked, and at whose poor table four sons daily sit--but poor little fellow! Those words being on his lips, it occurred to him--and it is an instance of the strong attraction with which his hopes and fears and all his thoughts were tending to one centre--that a great temptation was being placed in this woman's way.