The Mill on the Floss quotes

Just by the red-roofed town the tributary Ripple flows with a lively current into the Floss. How lovely the little river is, with its dark changing wavelets!

It seems to me like a living companion while I wander along the bank, and listen to its low, placid voice, as to the voice of one who is deaf and loving.

I remember those large dipping willows. I remember the stone bridge.

As I look at the full stream, the vivid grass, the delicate bright-green powder softening the outline of the great trunks and branches that gleam from under the bare purple boughs,

I am in love with moistness, and envy the white ducks that are dipping their heads far into the water here among the withes, unmindful of the awkward appearance they make in the drier world above.

The rush of the water and the booming of the mill bring a dreamy deafness, which seems to heighten the peacefulness of the scene. They are like a great curtain of sound, shutting one out from the world beyond.

The rush of the water and the booming of the mill bring a dreamy deafness, which seems to heighten the peacefulness of the scene.

They are like a great curtain of sound, shutting one out from the world beyond.

And now there is the thunder of the huge covered wagon coming home with sacks of grain. That honest wagoner is thinking of his dinner, getting sadly dry in the oven at this late hour;

Tulliver was what is called a good-tempered person—never cried, when she was a baby, on any slighter ground than hunger and pins; and from the cradle upward had been healthy, fair, plump, and dull-witted; in short, the flower of her family for beauty and amiability.

But milk and mildness are not the best things for keeping, and when they turn only a little sour, they may disagree with young stomachs seriously.

I have often wondered whether those early Madonnas of Raphael, with the blond faces and somewhat stupid expression, kept their placidity undisturbed when their strong-limbed, strong-willed boys got a little too old to do without clothing.

but things have got so twisted round and wrapped up i’ unreasonable words, as aren’t a bit like ’em, as I’m clean at fault, often an’ often.

Everything winds about so⁠—the more straightforrad you are, the more you’re puzzled.

”

but things have got so twisted round and wrapped up i’ unreasonable words, as aren’t a bit like ’em, as I’m clean at fault, often an’ often. Everything winds about so—the more straightforrad you are, the more you’re puzzled.”

Mr. Tulliver took a draught, swallowed it slowly, and shook his head in a melancholy manner, conscious of exemplifying the truth that a perfectly sane intellect is hardly at home in this insane world.

“You’re quite in the right of it, Tulliver,” observed Mr. Riley. “Better spend an extra hundred or two on your son’s education, than leave it him in your will.

And he had really given himself the trouble of recommending Mr. Stelling to his friend Tulliver without any positive expectation of a solid, definite advantage resulting to himself, notwithstanding the subtle indications to the contrary which might have misled a too sagacious observer.

For there is nothing more widely misleading than sagacity if it happens to get on a wrong scent

; and sagacity, persuaded that men usually act and speak from distinct motives, with a consciously proposed end in view, is certain to waste its energies on imaginary game.

Plotting covetousness and deliberate contrivance, in order to compass a selfish end, are nowhere abundant but in the world of the dramatist: they demand too intense a mental action for many of our fellow-parishioners to be guilty of them.

It is easy enough to spoil the lives of our neighbours without taking so much trouble; we can do it by lazy acquiescence and lazy omission, by trivial falsities for which we hardly know a reason, by small frauds neutralised by small extravagances, by maladroit flatteries, and clumsily improvised insinuations.

We live from hand to mouth, most of us, with a small family of immediate desires; we do little else than snatch a morsel to satisfy the hungry brood, rarely thinking of seed-corn or the next year’s crop.

we can do it by lazy acquiescence and lazy omission, by trivial falsities for which we hardly know a reason, by small frauds neutralised by small extravagances, by maladroit flatteries, and clumsily improvised insinuations.

We live from hand to mouth, most of us, with a small family of immediate desires; we do little else than snatch a morsel to satisfy the hungry brood, rarely thinking of seed-corn or the next year’s crop.

Mr. Riley was a man of business, and not cold toward his own interest, yet even he was more under the influence of small promptings than of farsighted designs. He had no private understanding with the Rev. Walter Stelling;

Why should an auctioneer and appraiser thirty years ago, who had as good as forgotten his free-school Latin, be expected to manifest a delicate scrupulosity which is not always exhibited by gentlemen of the learned professions, even in our present advanced stage of morality?

Besides, a man with the milk of human kindness in him can scarcely abstain from doing a good-natured action, and one cannot be good-natured all round.

Nature herself occasionally quarters an inconvenient parasite on an animal toward whom she has otherwise no ill will. What then? We admire her care for the parasite. If Mr.

an’ that war as much as to say as a Dutchman war a fool, or next door. Nay, nay, I aren’t goin’ to bother mysen about Dutchmen.

There’s fools enoo, an’ rogues enoo, wi’out lookin’ i’ books for ’em.

”

“Nay, Miss, I’n got to keep count o’ the flour an’ corn; I can’t do wi’ knowin’ so many things besides my work.

That’s what brings folks to the gallows⁠—knowin’ everything but what they’n got to get their bread by.

An’ they’re mostly lies, I think, what’s printed i’ the books: them printed sheets are, anyhow, as the men cry i’ the streets.”

“Don’t you fret, Miss,” said Luke, soothingly; “they’re nash things, them lop-eared rabbits; they’d happen ha’ died, if they’d been fed.

Things out o’ natur niver thrive: God A’mighty doesn’t like ’em.

He made the rabbits’ ears to lie back, an’ it’s nothin’ but contrairiness to make ’em hing down like a mastiff dog’s. Master Tom ’ull know better nor buy such things another time. Don’t you fret, Miss.

“Oh, he is cruel!” Maggie sobbed aloud, finding a wretched pleasure in the hollow resonance that came through the long empty space of the attic. She never thought of beating or grinding her fetish; she was too miserable to be angry.

These bitter sorrows of childhood! when sorrow is all new and strange, when hope has not yet got wings to fly beyond the days and weeks, and the space from summer to summer seems measureless.

Maggie soon thought she had been hours in the attic, and it must be teatime, and they were all having their tea, and not thinking of her.

Tulliver was a peremptory man, and, as he said, would never let anybody get hold of his whip-hand; but he went out rather sullenly, carrying his piece of plumcake, and not intending to reprieve Maggie’s punishment, which was no more than she deserved.

Tom was only thirteen, and had no decided views in grammar and arithmetic, regarding them for the most part as open questions, but he was particularly clear and positive on one point⁠—namely, that he would punish everybody who deserved it.

Why, he wouldn’t have minded being punished himself if he deserved it; but, then, he never did deserve it.

Tom was only thirteen, and had no decided views in grammar and arithmetic, regarding them for the most part as open questions, but he was particularly clear and positive on one point—namely, that he would punish everybody who deserved it.

Why, he wouldn’t have minded being punished himself if he deserved it; but, then, he never did deserve it.

It was Tom’s step, then, that Maggie heard on the stairs, when her need of love had triumphed over her pride, and she was going down with her swollen eyes and dishevelled hair to beg for pity.

At least her father would stroke her head and say, “Never mind, my wench.”

It is a wonderful subduer, this need of love⁠—this hunger of the heart⁠—as peremptory as that other hunger by which Nature forces us to submit to the yoke, and change the face of the world.

But she knew Tom’s step, and her heart began to beat violently with the sudden shock of hope. He only stood still at the top of the stairs and said, “Maggie, you’re to come down.”

But she rushed to him and clung round his neck, sobbing, “Oh, Tom, please forgive me—I can’t bear it—I will always be good—always remember things—do love me—please, dear Tom!”

We learn to restrain ourselves as we get older. We keep apart when we have quarrelled, express ourselves in well-bred phrases, and in this way preserve a dignified alienation, showing much firmness on one side, and swallowing much grief on the other.

We no longer approximate in our behaviour to the mere impulsiveness of the lower animals, but conduct ourselves in every respect like members of a highly civilised society.

There was nothing to mar her delight in the whispers and the dreamy silences, when she listened to the light dripping sounds of the rising fish, and the gentle rustling, as if the willows and the reeds and the water had their happy whisperings also.

Maggie thought it would make a very nice heaven to sit by the pool in that way, and never be scolded.

She never knew she had a bite till Tom told her; but she liked fishing very much.

Life did change for Tom and Maggie; and yet they were not wrong in believing that the thoughts and loves of these first years would always make part of their lives.

We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it

—if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass; the same hips and haws on the autumn’s hedgerows;

the same hips and haws on the autumn’s hedgerows; the same redbreasts that we used to call “God’s birds,” because they did no harm to the precious crops.

What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known, and loved because it is known?

The wood I walk in on this mild May day, with the young yellow-brown foliage of the oaks between me and the blue sky, the white starflowers and the blue-eyed speedwell and the ground ivy at my feet, what grove of tropic palms, what strange …

… and grassy fields, each with a sort of personality given to it by the capricious hedgerows—such things as these are the mother-tongue of our imagination, the language that is laden with all the subtle, inextricable associations the fleeting hours of our childhood left behind them.

Our delight in the sunshine on the deep-bladed grass today might be no more than the faint perception of wearied souls, if it were not for the sunshine and the grass in the far-off years which still live in us, and transform our perception into love.

And there’s sister Glegg, and sister Pullet too, saving money unknown, for they put by all their own interest and butter-money too; their husbands buy ’em everything.”

Mrs. Tulliver was a mild woman, but even a sheep will face about a little when she has lambs.

“Tchuh!” said Mr. Tulliver. “It takes a big loaf when there’s many to breakfast. What signifies your sisters’ bits o’ money when they’ve got half-a-dozen nevvies and nieces to divide it among?

There were some Dodsons less like the family than others, that was admitted; but in so far as they were “kin,” they were of necessity better than those who were “no kin.”

And it is remarkable that while no individual Dodson was satisfied with any other individual Dodson, each was satisfied, not only with him or herself, but with the Dodsons collectively.

The feeblest member of a family—the one who has the least character—is often the merest epitome of the family habits and traditions; and Mrs.

You may have it if it comes to you fair, but I shan’t give it you without. Right or left—you choose, now. Ha-a-a!” said Tom, in a tone of exasperation, as Maggie peeped. “You keep your eyes shut, now, else you shan’t have any.”

Maggie’s power of sacrifice did not extend so far; indeed, I fear she cared less that Tom should enjoy the utmost possible amount of puff, than that he should be pleased with her for giving him the best bit.

So she shut her eyes quite close, till Tom told her to “say which,” and then she said, “Left hand.”

Yet the excellent dog accepted Tom’s attention with as much alacrity as if he had been treated quite generously.

But Maggie, gifted with that superior power of misery which distinguishes the human being, and places him at a proud distance from the most melancholy chimpanzee, sat still on her bough

, and gave herself up to the keen sense of unmerited reproach. She would have given the world not to have eaten all her puff, and to have saved some of it for Tom.

he was gone now, and Maggie could think of no comfort but to sit down by the hollow, or wander by the hedgerow, and fancy it was all different, refashioning her little world into just what she should like it to be.

Maggie’s was a troublous life, and this was the form in which she took her opium.

Meanwhile Tom, forgetting all about Maggie and the sting of reproach which he had left in her heart, was hurrying along with Bob, whom he had met accidentally, to the scene of a great rat-catching in a neighbouring barn.

yet, for all that, he was not utterly a sneak and a thief as our friend Tom had hastily decided.

But Tom, you perceive, was rather a Rhadamanthine personage, having more than the usual share of boy’s justice in him⁠—the justice that desires to hurt culprits as much as they deserve to be hurt, and is troubled with no doubts concerning the exact amount of their deserts.

Maggie saw a cloud on his brow when he came home, which checked her joy at his coming so much sooner than she had expected, and she dared hardly speak to him as he stood silently throwing the small gravel-stones into the milldam.

It is not pleasant to give up a rat-catching when you have set your mind on it. But if Tom had told his strongest feeling at that moment, he would have said, “I’d do just the same again.”

That was his usual mode of viewing his past actions; whereas Maggie was always wishing she had done something different.

With sister Glegg in this humour, there was a cheerful prospect for the day.

Mrs. Tulliver never went the length of quarrelling with her, any more than a waterfowl that puts out its leg in a deprecating manner can be said to quarrel with a boy who throws stones.

But this point of the dinner was a tender one, and not at all new, so that Mrs. Tulliver could make the same answer she had often made before.

He bore about the same relation to his tall, good-looking wife, with her balloon sleeves, abundant mantle, and a large befeathered and beribboned bonnet, as a small fishing-smack bears to a brig with all its sails spread.

It is a pathetic sight and a striking example of the complexity introduced into the emotions by a high state of civilisation, the sight of a fashionably dressed female in grief.

From the sorrow of a Hottentot to that of a woman in large buckram sleeves, with several bracelets on each arm, an architectural bonnet, and delicate ribbon strings, what a long series of gradations!

Certainly the contrast between the cousins was conspicuous, and to superficial eyes was very much to the disadvantage of Maggie though a connoisseur might have seen “points” in her which had a higher promise for maturity than Lucy’s natty completeness.

It was like the contrast between a rough, dark, overgrown puppy and a white kitten.

Lucy put up the neatest little rosebud mouth to be kissed; everything about her was neat—her little round neck, with the row of coral beads; her little straight nose, not at all snubby;

Tom, too, had come up to Lucy, but he was not going to kiss her—no; he came up to her with Maggie, because it seemed easier, on the whole, than saying, “How do you do?” to all those aunts and uncles.

He stood looking at nothing in particular, with the blushing, awkward air and semi-smile which are common to shy boys when in company⁠—very much as if they had come into the world by mistake, and found it in a degree of undress that was quite embarrassing.

“Heyday!” said aunt Glegg, with loud emphasis. “Do little boys and gells come into a room without taking notice of their uncles and aunts? That wasn’t the way when I was a little gell.”

for if Tom had laughed at her, of course everyone else would; and if she had only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and Lucy, and had the apricot pudding and the custard! What could she do but sob?

She sat as helpless and despairing among her black locks as Ajax among the slaughtered sheep.

Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weatherworn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken friendships;

She could see clearly enough, now the thing was done, that it was very foolish, and that she should have to hear and think more about her hair than ever; for

Maggie rushed to her deeds with passionate impulse, and then saw not only their consequences, but what would have happened if they had not been done, with all the detail and exaggerated circumstance of an active imagination.

Tom never did the same sort of foolish things as Maggie, having a wonderful instinctive discernment of what would turn to his advantage or disadvantage;

or when his mother absolutely refused to let him have a tailed coat that “half,” although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already?

Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life, that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.

“Miss Maggie, you’re to come down this minute,” said Kezia, entering the room hurriedly. “Lawks! what have you been a-doing? I never see such a fright!”

Pullet’s experience to be readily conceivable. I know it is difficult for people in these instructed times to believe in uncle Pullet’s ignorance; but let them reflect on the remarkable results of a great natural faculty under favouring circumstances.

And uncle Pullet had a great natural faculty for ignorance.

He was the first to give utterance to his astonishment.

Mrs. Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her husband, yet she retained in all the freshness of her early married life a facility of saying things which drove him in the opposite direction to the one she desired.

Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way, as a patriarchal goldfish apparently retains to the last its youthful illusion that it can swim in a straight line beyond the encircling glass.

Mrs. Tulliver was an amiable fish of this kind, and after running her head against the same resisting medium for thirteen years would go at it again today with undulled alacrity.

Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way, as a patriarchal goldfish apparently retains to the last its youthful illusion that it can swim in a straight line beyond the encircling glass.

Mrs. Tulliver was an amiable fish of this kind, and after running her head against the same resisting medium for thirteen years would go at it again today with undulled alacrity.

This observation of hers tended directly to convince Mr. Tulliver that it would not be at all awkward for him to raise five hundred pounds; and when Mrs.

but it is really not improbable that there was a direct relation between these apparently contradictory phenomena, since

I have observed that for getting a strong impression that a skein is tangled there is nothing like snatching hastily at a single thread.

It was owing to this promptitude that Mr. Tulliver was on horseback soon after dinner the next day (he was not dyspeptic) on his way to Basset to see his sister Moss and her husband.

but the timely appearance of a cow-boy saved him that frustration of a plan he had determined on—namely, not to get down from his horse during this visit.

If a man means to be hard, let him keep in his saddle and speak from that height, above the level of pleading eyes, and with the command of a distant horizon.

Mrs. Moss heard the sound of the horse’s feet, and, when her brother rode up, was already outside the kitchen door, with a half-weary smile on her face, and a black-eyed baby in her arms. Mrs. Moss’s face bore a faded resemblance to her brother’s;

he never called her Mrs. Moss except when he was angry, and when they were in company. But she thought it was in the order of nature that people who were poorly off should be snubbed.

Mrs. Moss did not take her stand on the equality of the human race; she was a patient, prolific, loving-hearted woman.

“Your husband isn’t in the house, I suppose?” added Mr. Tulliver after a grave pause, during which four children had run out, like chickens whose mother has been suddenly in eclipse behind the hen-coop.

“Well, if that’s what you mean,” said Mr. Moss, looking blankly before him, “we’d better be sold up, and ha’ done with it; I must part wi’ every head o’ stock I’ve got, to pay you and the landlord too.”

Poor relations are undeniably irritating⁠—their existence is so entirely uncalled for on our part, and they are almost always very faulty people.

Mr. Tulliver had succeeded in getting quite as much irritated with Mr. Moss as he had desired, and he was able to say angrily, rising from his seat—

While the possible troubles of Maggie’s future were occupying her father’s mind, she herself was tasting only the bitterness of the present.

Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no memories of outlived sorrow.

The fact was, the day had begun ill with Maggie.

and Tom thought that the unusual size of the toads there was simply due to the general unusualness which characterised uncle Pullet’s possessions as a gentleman farmer.

Toads who paid rent were naturally leaner.

As for the house, it was not less remarkable; it had a receding centre, and two wings with battlemented turrets, and was covered with glittering white stucco.

A boy’s sheepishness is by no means a sign of overmastering reverence; and while you are making encouraging advances to him under the idea that he is overwhelmed by a sense of your age and wisdom, ten to one he is thinking you extremely queer.

The only consolation I can suggest to you is, that the Greek boys probably thought the same of Aristotle.

It is only when you have mastered a restive horse, or thrashed a drayman, or have got a gun in your hand, that these shy juniors feel you to be a truly admirable and enviable character.

But uncle Pullet, when entreated to exhibit his accomplishment, never depreciated it by a too ready consent. “We’ll see about it,” was the answer he always gave, carefully abstaining from any sign of compliance till a suitable number of minutes had passed.

Uncle Pullet had a programme for all great social occasions, and in this way fenced himself in from much painful confusion and perplexing freedom of will.

Perhaps the suspense did heighten Maggie’s enjoyment when the fairy tune began; for the first time she quite forgot that she had a load on her mind, that Tom was angry with her;

Maggie saw them leaving the garden, and could not resist the impulse to follow.

Anger and jealousy can no more bear to lose sight of their objects than love

, and that Tom and Lucy should do or see anything of which she was ignorant would have been an intolerable idea to Maggie.

“Then go and fetch her in this minute, you naughty boy. And how could you think o’ going to the pond, and taking your sister where there was dirt? You know she’ll do mischief if there’s mischief to be done.”

It was Mrs. Tulliver’s way, if she blamed Tom, to refer his misdemeanour, somehow or other, to Maggie.

The idea of Maggie sitting alone by the pond roused an habitual fear in Mrs. Tulliver’s mind, and she mounted the horse-block to satisfy herself by a sight of that fatal child, while Tom walked—not very quickly—on his way toward her.

She crept through the bars of the gate and walked on with new spirit, though not without haunting images of Apollyon, and a highwayman with a pistol, and a blinking dwarf in yellow with a mouth from ear to ear, and other miscellaneous dangers.

For poor little Maggie had at once the timidity of an active imagination and the daring that comes from overmastering impulse.

She had rushed into the adventure of seeking her unknown kindred, the gypsies;

“Columbus was a very wonderful man, who found out half the world, and they put chains on him and treated him very badly, you know; it’s in my Catechism of Geography, but perhaps it’s rather too long to tell before tea—I want my tea so.”

The last words burst from Maggie, in spite of herself, with a sudden drop from patronizing instruction to simple peevishness.

“Why, she’s hungry, poor little lady,” said the younger woman. “Give her some o’ the cold victual. You’ve been walking a good way, I’ll be bound, my dear. Where’s your home?”

… black cur ran barking up to Maggie, and threw her into a tremor that only found a new cause in the curses with which the younger man called the dog off, and gave him a rap with a great stick he held in his hand.

Maggie felt that it was impossible she should ever be queen of these people, or ever communicate to them amusing and useful knowledge.

Both the men now seemed to be inquiring about Maggie, for they looked at her, and the tone of the conversation became of that pacific kind which implies curiosity on one side and the power of satisfying it on the other.

“Oh yes, thank you,” said Maggie, “I’m very much obliged to you. But I wish you’d go with me too.”

She thought anything was better than going with one of the dreadful men alone; it would be more cheerful to be murdered by a larger party.

“Ah, you’re fondest o’ me, aren’t you?” said the woman. “But I can’t go; you’ll go too fast for me.”

Glegg, lest, to so delicate an article as a lady’s temper, the slightest touch should do mischief.

People who seem to enjoy their ill temper have a way of keeping it in fine condition by inflicting privations on themselves.

That was Mrs. Glegg’s way. She made her tea weaker than usual this morning, and declined butter. It was a hard case that a vigorous mood for quarrelling, so highly capable of using an opportunity, should not meet with a single remark from Mr.

If this is the way I’m to be treated, I’d better ha’ known it before my poor father died, and then, when I’d wanted a home, I should ha’ gone elsewhere, as the choice was offered me.”

Mr. Glegg paused from his porridge and looked up, not with any new amazement, but simply with that quiet, habitual wonder with which we regard constant mysteries.

“Why, Mrs. G., what have I done now?”

Morton, Mrs. Glegg answered magnanimously, quite as if she had been an uninjured woman: “Ah! then, there’ll be a good business for somebody to take to.”

Baxter had been open at least eight hours by this time, for it was nearly five o’clock; and if people are to quarrel often, it follows as a corollary that their quarrels cannot be protracted beyond certain limits.

Mr. and Mrs. Glegg talked quite amicably about the Tullivers that evening. Mr. Glegg went the length of admitting that Tulliver was a sad man for getting into hot water, and was like enough to run through his property; and Mrs.

and yet at the end of a fortnight it turned out to the contrary; not because Mr. Tulliver’s will was feeble, but because external fact was stronger. Wakem’s client was the only convenient person to be found.

Mr. Tulliver had a destiny as well as Oedipus, and in this case he might plead, like Oedipus, that his deed was inflicted on him rather than committed by him.

If he could have seen a fellow-pupil undergo these painful operations and survive them in good spirits, he might sooner have taken them as a matter of course.

But there are two expensive forms of education, either of which a parent may procure for his son by sending him as solitary pupil to a clergyman: one is the enjoyment of the reverend gentleman’s undivided neglect; the other is the endurance of the reverend gentleman’s undivided attention.

It was the latter privilege for which Mr. Tulliver paid a high price in Tom’s initiatory months at King’s Lorton.

Tulliver himself did not know, and so was necessarily thrown for self-direction on this wide kind of inference.

It is hardly fair to laugh at him, for I have known much more highly instructed persons than he make inferences quite as wide, and not at all wiser.

As for Mrs. Tulliver, finding that Mrs. Stelling’s views as to the airing of linen and the frequent recurrence of hunger in a growing boy entirely coincided with her own; moreover, that Mrs.

I only know it turned out as uncomfortably for Tom Tulliver as if he had been plied with cheese in order to remedy a gastric weakness which prevented him from digesting it.

It is astonishing what a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!

Once call the brain an intellectual stomach, and one’s ingenious conception of the classics and geometry as ploughs and harrows seems to settle nothing.

Tom, delighted with this verdict, telegraphed his triumph by wagging his head at Maggie, behind Mr. Stelling’s chair. As for Maggie, she had hardly ever been so mortified.

She had been so proud to be called “quick” all her little life, and now it appeared that this quickness was the brand of inferiority. It would have been better to be slow, like Tom.

“Ha, ha! Miss Maggie!” said Tom, when they were alone; “you see it’s not such a fine thing to be quick. You’ll never go far into anything, you know.”

… cold air to the warmth and the kisses and the smiles of that familiar hearth, where the pattern of the rug and the grate and the fire-irons were “first ideas” that it was no more possible to criticise than the solidity and extension of matter.

There is no sense of ease like the ease we felt in those scenes where we were born, where objects became dear to us before we had known the labour of choice, and where the outer world seemed only an extension of our own personality; we accepted and loved it as we accepted our own sense of existence and our own limbs.

Very commonplace, even ugly, that furniture of our early home might look if it were put up to auction; an improved taste in upholstery scorns it;

Mr. Tulliver was a strictly honest man, and proud of being honest, but he considered that in law the ends of justice could only be achieved by employing a stronger knave to frustrate a weaker.

Law was a sort of cockfight, in which it was the business of injured honesty to get a game bird with the best pluck and the strongest spurs.

“Gore’s no fool; you needn’t tell me that,” he observed presently, in a pugnacious tone, as if poor Gritty had been urging that lawyer’s capabilities; “but, you see, he isn’t up to the law as Wakem is. And water’s a very particular thing;

… to school again, there were scarcely any new items to be detected in his father’s statement of the case against Pivart, or any more specific indication of the measures he was bent on taking against that rash contravener of the principle that water was water.

Iteration, like friction, is likely to generate heat instead of progress, and Mr. Tulliver’s heat was certainly more and more palpable.

If there had been no new evidence on any other point, there had been new evidence that Pivart was as “thick as mud” with Wakem.

Philip was so advanced in his studies, and so apt, that Mr. Stelling could obtain credit by his facility, which required little help, much more easily than by the troublesome process of overcoming Tom’s dullness.

Gentlemen with broad chests and ambitious intentions do sometimes disappoint their friends by failing to carry the world before them.

Perhaps it is that high achievements demand some other unusual qualification besides an unusual desire for high prizes; perhaps it is that these stalwart gentlemen are rather indolent, their divinae particulum aurae being obstructed from soaring by a too hearty appetite.

Tulliver did, and she meant him to feel that she behaved exceedingly well to him. Philip, however, met her advances toward a good understanding very much as a caressed mollusk meets an invitation to show himself out of his shell.

Mrs. Stelling was not a loving, tenderhearted woman; she was a woman whose skirt sat well, who adjusted her waist and patted her curls with a preoccupied air when she inquired after your welfare.

These things, doubtless, represent a great social power, but it is not the power of love; and no other power could win Philip from his personal reserve.

… been so childish, you must be an exceptionally wise man, who, although you are devoted to a civil calling, requiring you to look bland rather than formidable, yet never, since you had a beard, threw yourself into a martial attitude, and frowned before the looking-glass.

It is doubtful whether our soldiers would be maintained if there were not pacific people at home who like to fancy themselves soldiers. War, like other dramatic spectacles, might possibly cease for want of a “public.”

and she was especially fond of petting objects that would think it very delightful to be petted by her.

She loved Tom very dearly, but she often wished that he cared more about her loving him.

“I think Philip Wakem seems a nice boy, Tom,” she said, when they went out of the study together into the garden, to pass the interval before dinner. “He couldn’t choose his father, you know;

He thought this sister of Tulliver’s seemed a nice little thing, quite unlike her brother; he wished he had a little sister. What was it, he wondered, that made Maggie’s dark eyes remind him of the stories about princesses being turned into animals?

I think it was that her eyes were full of unsatisfied intelligence, and unsatisfied beseeching affection.

“I say, Magsie,” said Tom at last, shutting his books and putting them away with the energy and decision of a perfect master in the art of leaving off, “I’ve done my lessons now. Come upstairs with me.”

Philip was often peevish and contemptuous; and Tom’s more specific and kindly impressions gradually melted into the old background of suspicion and dislike toward him as a queer fellow, a humpback, and the son of a rogue.

If boys and men are to be welded together in the glow of transient feeling, they must be made of metal that will mix, else they inevitably fall asunder when the heat dies out.

The two slight youthful figures soon grew indistinct on the distant road—were soon lost behind the projecting hedgerow.

They had gone forth together into their life of sorrow, and they would never more see the sunshine undimmed by remembered cares. They had entered the thorny wilderness, and the golden gates of their childhood had forever closed behind them.

Mr. Tulliver would never have asked for anything from so poor-spirited a fellow for himself, but Bessy might do so if she liked.

It is precisely the proudest and most obstinate men who are the most liable to shift their position and contradict themselves in this sudden manner; everything is easier to them than to face the simple fact that they have been thoroughly defeated, and must begin life anew.

And Mr.

Pullet, for he had kept her in ignorance of the nature of that transaction, and had explained the necessity for taking an inventory of the goods as a matter connected with his will.

The possession of a wife conspicuously one’s inferior in intellect is, like other high privileges, attended with a few inconveniences, and, among the rest, with the occasional necessity for using a little deception.

The next day Mr. Tulliver was again on horseback in the afternoon, on his way to Mr. Gore’s office at St. Ogg’s. Gore was to have seen Furley in the morning, and to have sounded him in relation to Mr. Tulliver’s affairs.

With a sudden flash and movement, he raised himself in the bed; she rushed toward him, and clasped him with agonised kisses.

Poor child! it was very early for her to know one of those supreme moments in life when all we have hoped or delighted in, all we can dread or endure, falls away from our regard as insignificant; is lost, like a trivial memory, in that simple, primitive love which knits us to the beings who have been nearest to us, in their times of helplessness or of anguish.

But that flash of recognition had been too great a strain on the father’s bruised, enfeebled powers.

Maggie, almost choked with mingled grief and anger, left the room, and took her old place on her father’s bed. Her heart went out to him with a stronger movement than ever, at the thought that people would blame him.

Maggie hated blame; she had been blamed all her life, and nothing had come of it but evil tempers.

Her father had always defended and excused her, and her loving remembrance of his tenderness was a force within her that would enable her to do or bear anything for his sake.

… felt that Susan was getting “like the rest,” and there would soon be little of the true Dodson spirit surviving except in herself, and, it might be hoped, in those nephews who supported the Dodson name on the family land, far away in the Wolds.

People who live at a distance are naturally less faulty than those immediately under our own eyes; and it seems superfluous, when we consider the remote geographical position of the Ethiopians, and how very little the Greeks had to do with them, to inquire further why Homer calls them “blameless.”

Mrs. Deane was the first to arrive; and when she had taken her seat in the large parlour, Mrs. Tulliver came down to her with her comely face a little distorted, nearly as it would have been if she had been crying.

Mrs. Deane was the first to arrive; and when she had taken her seat in the large parlour, Mrs. Tulliver came down to her with her comely face a little distorted, nearly as it would have been if she had been crying.

She was not a woman who could shed abundant tears, except in moments when the prospect of losing her furniture became unusually vivid, but she felt how unfitting it was to be quite calm under present circumstances.

“Oh, sister, what a world this is!” she exclaimed as she entered; “what trouble, oh dear!”

“Oh, sister, what a world this is!” she exclaimed as she entered; “what trouble, oh dear!”

Mrs. Deane was a thin-lipped woman, who made small well-considered speeches on peculiar occasions, repeating them afterward to her husband, and asking him if she had not spoken very properly.

“Yes, sister,” she said deliberately, “this is a changing world, and we don’t know today what may happen tomorrow. But it’s right to be prepared for all things, and if trouble’s sent, to remember as it isn’t sent without a cause.

Her voice was rather agitated as she uttered the last words, but the sound of wheels diverted her thoughts. Mr. and Mrs. Glegg were come, and were almost immediately followed by Mr. and Mrs. Pullet.

Mrs. Pullet entered crying, as a compendious mode, at all times, of expressing what were her views of life in general, and what, in brief, were the opinions she held concerning the particular case before her.

Mrs. Glegg had on her fuzziest front, and garments which appeared to have had a recent resurrection from rather a creasy form of burial; a costume selected with the high moral purpose of instilling perfect humility into Bessy and her children.

Mrs. Pullet entered crying, as a compendious mode, at all times, of expressing what were her views of life in general, and what, in brief, were the opinions she held concerning the particular case before her.

Mrs. Glegg had on her fuzziest front, and garments which appeared to have had a recent resurrection from rather a creasy form of burial; a costume selected with the high moral purpose of instilling perfect humility into Bessy and her children.

“Mrs. G., won’t you come nearer the fire?” said her husband, unwilling to take the more comfortable seat without offering it to her.

And it’s for your own good I say this, for it’s right you should feel what your state is, and what disgrace your husband’s brought on your own family, as you’ve got to look to for everything, and be humble in your mind.”

Mrs. Glegg paused, for speaking with much energy for the good of others is naturally exhausting.

Mrs. Tulliver, always borne down by the family predominance of sister Jane, who had made her wear the yoke of a younger sister in very tender years, said pleadingly:

We mustn’t be thinking o’ what’s unnecessary. A table, and a chair or two, and kitchen things, and a good bed, and suchlike. Why, I’ve seen the day when I shouldn’t ha’ known myself if I’d lain on sacking i’stead o’ the floor.

We get a deal o’ useless things about us, only because we’ve got the money to spend.

”

… only a recurrence of what had happened before, it struck all present as if it had been death, not only from its contrast with the completeness of the revival, but because his words had all had reference to the possibility that his death was near.

But with poor Tulliver death was not to be a leap; it was to be a long descent under thickening shadows.

Mr. Turnbull was sent for; but when he heard what had passed, he said this complete restoration, though only temporary, was a hopeful sign, proving that there was no permanent lesion to prevent ultimate recovery.

But Tom was clear upon two points—that his uncle Moss’s note must be destroyed; and that Luke’s money must be paid, if in no other way, out of his own and Maggie’s money now in the savings bank.

There were subjects, you perceive, on which Tom was much quicker than on the niceties of classical construction, or the relations of a mathematical demonstration.

There were no impulses in Tom that led him to expect what did not present itself to him as a right to be demanded. Why should people give away their money plentifully to those who had not taken care of their own money?

Tom saw some justice in severity; and all the more, because he had confidence in himself that he should never deserve that just severity.

It was very hard upon him that he should be put at this disadvantage in life by his father’s want of prudence; but he was not going to complain and to find fault with people because they did not make everything easy for him.

that was what Tom resolved he would do. It was intolerable to think of being poor and looked down upon all one’s life. He would provide for his mother and sister, and make everyone say that he was a man of high character.

He leaped over the years in this way, and, in the haste of strong purpose and strong desire, did not see how they would be made up of slow days, hours, and minutes.

By the time he had crossed the stone bridge over the Floss and was entering St. Ogg’s, he was thinking that he would buy his father’s mill and land again when he was rich enough, and improve the house and live there;

And there isn’t an article shipped or unshipped at our wharf but I know the quality of it. If I got places, sir, it was because I made myself fit for ’em.

If you want to slip into a round hole, you must make a ball of yourself; that’s where it is.

”

but now he suddenly felt at a disadvantage, because he knew less than someone else knew. There must be a world of things connected with that Swedish bark, which, if he only knew them, might have helped him to get on.

It would have been much easier to make a figure with a spirited horse and a new saddle.

Two hours ago, as Tom was walking to St. Ogg’s, he saw the distant future before him as he might have seen a tempting stretch of smooth sandy beach beyond a belt of flinty shingles;

And if life had no love in it, what else was there for Maggie? Nothing but poverty and the companionship of her mother’s narrow griefs, perhaps of her father’s heart-cutting childish dependence.

There is no hopelessness so sad as that of early youth, when the soul is made up of wants, and has no long memories, no superadded life in the life of others; though we who looked on think lightly of such premature despair, as if our vision of the future lightened the blind sufferer’s present.

Maggie, in her brown frock, with her eyes reddened and her heavy hair pushed back, looking from the bed where her father lay to the dull walls of this sad chamber which was the centre of her world, was a creature full of eager, passionate …

with an ear straining after dreamy music that died away and would not come near to her; with a blind, unconscious yearning for something that would link together the wonderful impressions of this mysterious life, and give her soul a sense of home in it.

No wonder, when there is this contrast between the outward and the inward, that painful collisions come of it.

“No, no; not me, Mr. Tom,” said Bob, with an air of cheerful confidence. “

There’s no law again’ flea-bites. If I wasn’t to take a fool in now and then, he’d niver get any wiser.

But, lors! hev a suvreign to buy you and Miss summat, on’y for a token—just to match my pocketknife.”

Allocaturs, filing of bills in Chancery, decrees of sale, are legal chain-shot or bombshells that can never hit a solitary mark, but must fall with widespread shattering.

So deeply inherent is it in this life of ours that men have to suffer for each other’s sins, so inevitably diffusive is human suffering, that even justice makes its victims, and we can conceive no retribution that does not spread beyond its mark in pulsations of unmerited pain.

By the beginning of the second week in January, the bills were out advertising the sale, under a decree of Chancery, of Mr.

But all this while Mrs. Tulliver was brooding over a scheme by which she, and no one else, would avert the result most to be dreaded, and prevent Wakem from entertaining the purpose of bidding for the mill.

Imagine a truly respectable and amiable hen, by some portentous anomaly, taking to reflection and inventing combinations by which she might prevail on Hodge not to wring her neck, or send her and her chicks to market; the result could hardly be other than much cackling and fluttering.

Mrs. Tulliver, seeing that everything had gone wrong, had begun to think she had been too passive in life;

Mrs. Tulliver had suggested to him several determining motives, and his mental glance was very rapid; he was one of those men who can be prompt without being rash, because their motives run in fixed tracks, and they have no need to reconcile conflicting aims.

To suppose that Wakem had the same sort of inveterate hatred toward Tulliver that Tulliver had toward him would be like supposing that a pike and a roach can look at each other from a similar point of view.

The roach necessarily abhors the mode in which the pike gets his living, and the pike is likely to think nothing further even of the most indignant roach than that he is excellent good eating;

a hot-tempered fellow, who would always give you a handle against him. Wakem’s conscience was not uneasy because he had used a few tricks against the miller; why should he hate that unsuccessful plaintiff, that pitiable, furious bull entangled in the meshes of a net?

Still, among the various excesses to which human nature is subject, moralists have never numbered that of being too fond of the people who openly revile us.

The successful Yellow candidate for the borough of Old Topping, perhaps, feels no pursuant meditative hatred toward the Blue editor who consoles his subscribers with vituperative rhetoric against Yellow men who sell their country, and are the demons of private life;

Still more, to see people who have been only insignificantly offensive to us reduced in life and humiliated, without any special effort of ours, is apt to have a soothing, flattering influence.

Providence or some other prince of this world, it appears, has undertaken the task of retribution for us; and really, by an agreeable constitution of things, our enemies somehow don’t prosper.

Wakem was not without this parenthetic vindictiveness toward the uncomplimentary miller; and now Mrs. Tulliver had put the notion into his head, it presented itself to him as a pleasure to do the very thing that would cause Mr.

… talking, it had occurred to the rapid-minded lawyer, among all the other circumstances of the case, that this purchase would, in a few years to come, furnish a highly suitable position for a certain favourite lad whom he meant to bring on in the world.

These were the mental conditions on which Mrs. Tulliver had undertaken to act persuasively, and had failed; a fact which may receive some illustration from the remark of a great philosopher, that fly-fishers fail in preparing their bait so as to make it alluring in the right quarter, for want of a due acquaintance with the subjectivity of fishes.

Of those two young hearts Tom’s suffered the most unmixed pain, for Maggie, with all her keen susceptibility, yet felt as if the sorrow made larger room for her love to flow in, and gave breathing-space to her passionate nature.

No true boy feels that; he would rather go and slay the Nemean lion, or perform any round of heroic labours, than endure perpetual appeals to his pity, for evils over which he can make no conquest.

Mr. Tulliver paused just inside the door, resting on Luke, and looking round him at all the bare places, which for him were filled with the shadows of departed objects—the daily companions of his life.

That first moment of renunciation and submission was followed by days of violent struggle in the miller’s mind, as the gradual access of bodily strength brought with it increasing ability to embrace in one view all the conflicting conditions under which he found himself.

Feeble limbs easily resign themselves to be tethered, and when we are subdued by sickness it seems possible to us to fulfil pledges which the old vigor comes back and breaks.

There were times when poor Tulliver thought the fulfilment of his promise to Bessy was something quite too hard for human nature;

“Ay, sir,” said Luke, “you’d be a deal better here nor in some new place. I can’t abide new places mysen: things is allays awk’ard—narrow-wheeled waggins, belike, and the stiles all another sort, an’ oatcake i’ some places, tow’rt th’ head o’ the Floss, there.

It’s poor work, changing your countryside.

”

“Ne’er mind, sir,” said Luke, “I shan’t plague mysen.

I’n been wi’ you twenty year, an’ you can’t get twenty year wi’ whistlin’ for ’em, no more nor you can make the trees grow: you mun wait till God A’mighty sends ’em.

I can’t abide new victual nor new faces, I can’t—you niver know but what they’ll gripe you.”

Their religion was of a simple, semi-pagan kind, but there was no heresy in it—if heresy properly means choice—for they didn’t know there was any other religion, except that of chapel-goers, which appeared to run in families, like asthma. How should they know?

The vicar of their pleasant rural parish was not a controversialist, but a good hand at whist, and one who had a joke always ready for a blooming female parishioner.

The religion of the Dodsons consisted in revering whatever was customary and respectable; it was necessary to be baptised, else one could not be buried in the churchyard, and to take the sacrament before death, as a security against more dimly understood perils;

Certain seeds which are required to find a nidus for themselves under unfavourable circumstances have been supplied by nature with an apparatus of hooks, so that they will get a hold on very unreceptive surfaces.

The spiritual seed which had been scattered over Mr. Tulliver had apparently been destitute of any corresponding provision, and had slipped off to the winds again, from a total absence of hooks.

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength.

It is in the slow, changed life that follows; in the time when sorrow has become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts its pain;

Maggie, thus exalted into Bob’s exalting Madonna, laughed in spite of herself; at which her worshipper’s blue eyes twinkled too, and under these favouring auspices he touched his cap and walked away.

The days of chivalry are not gone, notwithstanding Burke’s grand dirge over them; they live still in that far-off worship paid by many a youth and man to the woman of whom he never dreams that he shall touch so much as her little finger or the hem of her robe.

Bob, with the pack on his back, had as respectful an adoration for this dark-eyed maiden as if he had been a knight in armor calling aloud on her name as he pricked on to the fight.

All the favourite outdoor nooks about home, which seemed to have done their part with her parents in nurturing and cherishing her, were now mixed up with the home-sadness, and gathered no smile from the sunshine.

Every affection, every delight the poor child had had, was like an aching nerve to her.

There was no music for her any more—no piano, no harmonised voices, no delicious stringed instruments, with their passionate cries of imprisoned spirits sending a strange vibration through her frame.

She had not perceived—how could she until she had lived longer?—the inmost truth of the old monk’s outpourings, that renunciation remains sorrow, though a sorrow borne willingly.

Maggie was still panting for happiness, and was in ecstasy because she had found the key to it.

She knew nothing of doctrines and systems, of mysticism or quietism; but this voice out of the far-off middle ages was the direct communication of a human soul’s belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an unquestioned message.

She knew nothing of doctrines and systems, of mysticism or quietism; but this voice out of the far-off middle ages was the direct communication of a human soul’s belief and experience, and came to Maggie as an unquestioned message.

I suppose that is the reason why the small old-fashioned book, for which you need only pay sixpence at a bookstall, works miracles to this day, turning bitter waters into sweetness; while expensive sermons and treatises, newly issued, leave all things as they were before.

It was written down by a hand that waited for the heart’s prompting; it is the chronicle of a solitary, hidden anguish, struggle, trust, and triumph, not written on velvet cushions to teach endurance to those who are treading with bleeding feet on the stones.

“

You are very much more beautiful than I thought you would be.

”

The greatest of painters only once painted a mysteriously divine child; he couldn’t have told how he did it, and we can’t tell why we feel it to be divine.

I think there are stores laid up in our human nature that our understandings can make no complete inventory of.

Certain strains of music affect me so strangely; I can never hear them without their changing my whole attitude of mind for a time, and if the effect would last, I might be capable of heroisms.”

Maggie had an awe of him, against which she struggled as something unfair to her consciousness of wider thoughts and deeper motives; but it was of no use to struggle.

A character at unity with itself⁠—that performs what it intends, subdues every counteracting impulse, and has no visions beyond the distinctly possible⁠—is strong by its very negations.

You may imagine that Tom’s more and more obvious unlikeness to his father was well fitted to conciliate the maternal aunts and uncles; and Mr. Deane’s favourable reports and predictions to Mr.

that those who said least were most likely to find their words made good; and that when the right moment came, it would be seen who could do something better than talk.

Uncle Pullet, after silent meditation for a period of several lozenges, came distinctly to the conclusion, that when a young man was likely to do well, it was better not to meddle with him.

Tom, meanwhile, had shown no disposition to rely on anyone but himself, though, with a natural sensitiveness toward all indications of favourable opinion, he was glad to see his uncle Glegg look in on him sometimes in a friendly way during business hours, and glad …

“Ay, sir, you say true,” returned Bob, nodding his head aside; “

I think my head’s all alive inside like an old cheese, for I’m so full o’ plans, one knocks another over.

If I hadn’t Mumps to talk to, I should get top-heavy an’ tumble in a fit. I suppose it’s because I niver went to school much. That’s what I jaw my old mother for.

“Well, but it’s nothing but right you should have a small percentage,” said Mr. Glegg. “

I’ve no opinion o’ transactions where folks do things for nothing. It allays looks bad.

”

“here’s a thing to make a lass’s mouth water, an’ on’y two shillin’—an’ why? Why, ’cause there’s a bit of a moth-hole ’i this plain end.

Lors, I think the moths an’ the mildew was sent by Providence o’ purpose to cheapen the goods a bit for the good-lookin’ women as han’t got much money.

If it hadn’t been for the moths, now, every hankicher on ’em ’ud ha’ gone to the rich, handsome ladies, like you, mum, at five shillin’ apiece—not a farthin’ less; but what does the moth do?

It is the moment when our resolution seems about to become irrevocable—when the fatal iron gates are about to close upon us—that tests our strength.

Then, after hours of clear reasoning and firm conviction, we snatch at any sophistry that will nullify our long struggles, and bring us the defeat that we love better than victory.

Maggie felt her heart leap at this subterfuge of Philip’s, and there passed over her face that almost imperceptible shock which accompanies any relief. He saw it, and they parted in silence.

Perhaps there is inevitably something morbid in a human being who is in any way unfavourably excepted from ordinary conditions, until the good force has had time to triumph; and it has rarely had time for that at two-and-twenty.

That force was present in Philip in much strength, but the sun himself looks feeble through the morning mists.

“As soon as I came to the blond-haired young lady reading in the park, I shut it up, and determined to read no further. I foresaw that that light-complexioned girl would win away all the love from Corinne and make her miserable.

I’m determined to read no more books where the blond-haired women carry away all the happiness. I should begin to have a prejudice against them.

If you could give me some story, now, where the dark woman triumphs, it would restore the balance. I want to avenge Rebecca and Flora MacIvor and Minna, and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones.

“He might be very disagreeable. He might look at me through an eyeglass stuck in his eye, making a hideous face, as young Torry does. I should think other women are not fond of that; but I never felt any pity for young Torry.

I’ve never any pity for conceited people, because I think they carry their comfort about with them.

”

Maggie, indeed, was hurrying along, for she felt it time to be gone. But the sense that their parting was near made her more anxious lest she should have unintentionally left some painful impression on Philip’s mind.

It was one of those dangerous moments when speech is at once sincere and deceptive; when feeling, rising high above its average depth, leaves floodmarks which are never reached again.

They stopped to part among the Scotch firs.

Secrets are rarely betrayed or discovered according to any programme our fear has sketched out.

Fear is almost always haunted by terrible dramatic scenes, which recur in spite of the best-argued probabilities against them;

still Tom, retaining all his old repulsion for Philip’s deformity, shrank from attributing to his sister the probability of feeling more than a friendly interest in such an unfortunate exception to the common run of men.

Tom’s was a nature which had a sort of superstitious repugnance to everything exceptional.

A love for a deformed man would be odious in any woman, in a sister intolerable. But if she had been carrying on any kind of intercourse whatever with Philip, a stop must be put to it at once;

He did not know how much of an old boyish repulsion and of mere personal pride and animosity was concerned in the bitter severity of the words by which he meant to do the duty of a son and a brother.

Tom was not given to inquire subtly into his own motives any more than into other matters of an intangible kind; he was quite sure that his own motives as well as actions were good, else he would have had nothing to do with them.

Maggie’s only hope was that something might, for the first time, have prevented Philip from coming. Then there would be delay—then she might get Tom’s permission to write to him. Her heart beat with double violence when they got under the Scotch firs.

You have no pity; you have no sense of your own imperfection and your own sins. It is a sin to be hard; it is not fitting for a mortal, for a Christian. You are nothing but a Pharisee.

You thank God for nothing but your own virtues; you think they are great enough to win you everything else.

You have not even a vision of feelings by the side of which your shining virtues are mere darkness!”

“Shake hands wi’ me, my lad,” he said, suddenly putting out his hand. “It’s a great thing when a man can be proud as he’s got a good son. I’ve had that luck.”

Tom never lived to taste another moment so delicious as that; and Maggie couldn’t help forgetting her own grievances.

Tom was good; and in the sweet humility that springs in us all in moments of true admiration and gratitude, she felt that the faults he had to pardon in her had never been redeemed, as his faults were.

but presently, when she said to Maggie, “Go and seek for somebody to fetch the doctor,” he looked up at her with full comprehension, and said, “Doctor? No—no doctor. It’s my head, that’s all. Help me to bed.”

Sad ending to the day that had risen on them all like a beginning of better times! But mingled seed must bear a mingled crop.

In half an hour after his father had lain down Tom came home. Bob Jakin was with him, come to congratulate “the old master,” not without some excusable pride that he had had his share in bringing about Mr. Tom’s good luck;

… exquisite moment of youth, the freshest blossom-time of passion—when each is sure of the other’s love, but no formal declaration has been made, and all is mutual divination, exalting the most trivial word, the lightest gesture, into thrills delicate and delicious as wafted jasmine scent.

The explicitness of an engagement wears off this finest edge of susceptibility; it is jasmine gathered and presented in a large bouquet.

“But it is really odd that you should have hit so exactly on Maggie’s appearance and manners,” said the cunning Lucy, moving to reach her desk, “because she might have been like her brother, you know; and Tom has not round eyes;

“Oh no, I shall not respect an Adam who drags the tempo, as you will,” said Lucy, beginning to play the duet.

Surely the only courtship unshaken by doubts and fears must be that in which the lovers can sing together.

The sense of mutual fitness that springs from the two deep notes fulfilling expectation just at the right moment between the notes of the silvery soprano, from the perfect accord of descending thirds and fifths, from the preconcerted loving chase of a fugue, is likely …

I thought he must have got so stupid with the habit of turning backward and forward in that narrow space that he would keep doing it if they set him free.

One gets a bad habit of being unhappy.

”

She flashed a slightly defiant look at him; it was clear to her that he had been drawing a satirical portrait of her beforehand. Lucy had said he was inclined to be satirical, and Maggie had mentally supplied the addition, “and rather conceited.”

“An alarming amount of devil there,” was Stephen’s first thought.

The second, when she had bent over her work, was, “I wish she would look at me again.” The next was to answer—

A man is occasionally grateful when he says ‘Thank you.’ It’s rather hard upon him that he must use the same words with which all the world declines a disagreeable invitation, don’t you think so, Miss Tulliver?”

“No,” said Maggie, looking at him with her direct glance; “if we use common words on a great occasion, they are the more striking, because they are felt at once to have a particular meaning, like old banners, or everyday clothes, hung up in a sacred place.”

“Then my compliment ought to be eloquent,” said Stephen, really not quite knowing what he said while Maggie looked at him, “seeing that the words were so far beneath the occasion.”

They kissed each other, and Lucy went away, possessed of a confidence which had a strong influence over her subsequent impressions. Maggie had been thoroughly sincere; her nature had never found it easy to be otherwise.

But confidences are sometimes blinding, even when they are sincere.

She was obliged to be childish; the tears would come.

When Maggie was not angry, she was as dependent on kind or cold words as a daisy on the sunshine or the cloud; the need of being loved would always subdue her, as, in old days, it subdued her in the worm-eaten attic.

The brother’s goodness came uppermost at this appeal, but it could only show itself in Tom’s fashion. He put his hand gently on her arm, and said, in the tone of a kind pedagogue—

I never feel certain about anything with you. At one time you take pleasure in a sort of perverse self-denial, and at another you have not resolution to resist a thing that you know to be wrong.”

There was a terrible cutting truth in Tom’s words⁠—that hard rind of truth which is discerned by unimaginative, unsympathetic minds.

Maggie always writhed under this judgment of Tom’s; she rebelled and was humiliated in the same moment;

But you have known Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics, but her history, which is a thing hardly to be predicted even from the completest knowledge of characteristics.

For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within.

“Character,” says Novalis, in one of his questionable aphorisms—“character is destiny.” But not the whole of our destiny. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, was speculative and irresolute, and we have a great tragedy in consequence.

… uncle had died an early death, we can conceive Hamlet’s having married Ophelia, and got through life with a reputation of sanity, notwithstanding many soliloquies, and some moody sarcasms toward the fair daughter of Polonius, to say nothing of the frankest incivility to his father-in-law.

Maggie’s destiny, then, is at present hidden, and we must wait for it to reveal itself like the course of an unmapped river; we only know that the river is full and rapid, and that for all rivers there is the same final home.

Under the charm of her new pleasures, Maggie herself was ceasing to think, with her eager prefiguring imagination, of her future lot; and her anxiety about her first interview with Philip was losing its predominance;

… the day of the bazaar, when her simple noble beauty, clad in a white muslin of some soft-floating kind, which I suspect must have come from the stores of aunt Pullet’s wardrobe, appeared with marked distinction among the more adorned and conventional women around her.

We perhaps never detect how much of our social demeanour is made up of artificial airs until we see a person who is at once beautiful and simple; without the beauty, we are apt to call simplicity awkwardness.

The Miss Guests were much too well-bred to have any of the grimaces and affected tones that belong to pretentious vulgarity;

Maggie went on counting her money till she suddenly heard a deep gentle voice saying, “Aren’t you very tired? Do let me bring you something—some fruit or jelly, mayn’t I?”

The unexpected tones shook her like a sudden accidental vibration of a harp close by her.

“Oh no, thank you,” she said faintly, and only half looking up for an instant.

… nothing less than this when he wants to dash his cap on the table, throw himself astride a chair, and stare at a high brick wall with a frown which would not have been beneath the occasion if he had been slaying “the giant Python.”

The conduct that issues from a moral conflict has often so close a resemblance to vice that the distinction escapes all outward judgments founded on a mere comparison of actions.

It is clear to you, I hope, that Stephen was not a hypocrite—capable of deliberate doubleness for a selfish end;

It was one of those moments of implicit revelation which will sometimes happen even between people who meet quite transiently—on a mile’s journey, perhaps, or when resting by the wayside.

There is always this possibility of a word or look from a stranger to keep alive the sense of human brotherhood.

Dr. Kenn’s ear and eye took in all the signs that this brief confidence of Maggie’s was charged with meaning.

A mad impulse seized on Stephen; he darted toward the arm, and showered kisses on it, clasping the wrist.

But the next moment Maggie snatched it from him, and glared at him like a wounded war-goddess, quivering with rage and humiliation.

“How dare you?” She spoke in a deeply shaken, half-smothered voice. “What right have I given you to insult me?”

They sat hand in hand without looking at each other or speaking for a few minutes; in Maggie’s mind the first scenes of love and parting were more present than the actual moment, and she was looking at Philip in the Red Deeps.

Philip felt that he ought to have been thoroughly happy in that answer of hers; she was as open and transparent as a rock-pool.

Why was he not thoroughly happy? Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

Philip felt that he ought to have been thoroughly happy in that answer of hers; she was as open and transparent as a rock-pool. Why was he not thoroughly happy?

Jealousy is never satisfied with anything short of an omniscience that would detect the subtlest fold of the heart.

there are things we must renounce in life; some of us must resign love. Many things are difficult and dark to me; but I see one thing quite clearly—that I must not, cannot, seek my own happiness by sacrificing others.

Love is natural; but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too.

And they would live in me still, and punish me if I did not obey them. I should be haunted by the suffering I had caused. Our love would be poisoned. Don’t urge me; help me—help me, because I love you.”

“Oh, aunt Gritty, I’m very wretched!

I wish I could have died when I was fifteen. It seemed so easy to give things up then; it is so hard now.

”

it was a way of speaking to Maggie. Perhaps he was not distinctly conscious that he was impelled to it by a secret longing—running counter to all his self-confessed resolves—to deepen the hold he had on her.

Watch your own speech, and notice how it is guided by your less conscious purposes, and you will understand that contradiction in Stephen.

Philip Wakem was a less frequent visitor, but he came occasionally in the evening, and it happened that he was there when Lucy said, as they sat out on the lawn, near sunset—

She sat down again covered with the cloak, and Stephen took to his oars again, making haste; for they must try to get to Torby as fast as they could. Maggie was hardly conscious of having said or done anything decisive.

All yielding is attended with a less vivid consciousness than resistance; it is the partial sleep of thought; it is the submergence of our own personality by another.

Every influence tended to lull her into acquiescence. That dreamy gliding in the boat which had lasted for four hours, and had brought some weariness and exhaustion;

She sat down. Stephen, watching her with that look of desperation which had come over him like a lurid light, approached slowly from the door, seated himself close beside her, and grasped her hand.

Her heart beat like the heart of a frightened bird; but this direct opposition helped her.

She felt her determination growing stronger.

“That seems right—at first; but when I look further, I’m sure it is not right.

Faithfulness and constancy mean something else besides doing what is easiest and pleasantest to ourselves.

They mean renouncing whatever is opposed to the reliance others have in us—whatever would cause misery to those whom the course of our lives has made dependent on us.

“No, I don’t sacrifice you—I couldn’t sacrifice you,” she said, as soon as she could speak again; “but I can’t believe in a good for you, that I feel, that we both feel, is a wrong toward others.

We can’t choose happiness either for ourselves or for another; we can’t tell where that will lie.

We can only choose whether we will indulge ourselves in the present moment, or whether we will renounce that, for the sake of obeying the divine voice within us—for the sake of being true to all the motives that sanctify our lives.

Did she lie down in the gloomy bedroom of the old inn that night with her will bent unwaveringly on the path of penitent sacrifice?

The great struggles of life are not so easy as that; the great problems of life are not so clear.

In the darkness of that night she saw Stephen’s face turned toward her in passionate, reproachful misery;

Oh, the sweet rest of that embrace to the heart-stricken Maggie!

More helpful than all wisdom is one draught of simple human pity that will not forsake us.

Tom turned and walked into the house.

“He’s rare company, Mumps is; he knows iverything, an’ makes no bother about it. If I tell him, he’ll lie before you an’ watch you, as still—just as he watches my pack. You’d better let me leave him a bit; he’ll get fond on you.

Lors, it’s a fine thing to hev a dumb brute fond on you; it’ll stick to you, an’ make no jaw.

”

But she was at the Rectory now; there, perhaps, she would find something else than retribution.

Retribution may come from any voice; the hardest, cruelest, most imbruted urchin at the street-corner can inflict it; surely help and pity are rarer things, more needful for the righteous to bestow.

She was shown up at once, after being announced, into Dr. Kenn’s study, where he sat amongst piled-up books, for which he had little appetite, leaning his cheek against the head of his youngest child, a girl of three.