The Mill on the Floss Read Free Page A

of her
mane,–"tearing things to pieces to sew 'em together again. And I
don't want to do anything for my aunt Glegg. I don't like her."
    Exit Maggie, dragging her bonnet by the string, while Mr.
Tulliver laughs audibly.
    "I wonder at you, as you'll laugh at her, Mr. Tulliver," said
the mother, with feeble fretfulness in her tone. "You encourage her
i' naughtiness. An' her aunts will have it as it's me spoils
her."
    Mrs. 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. I think they must have been given to feeble
remonstrance, getting more and more peevish as it became more and
more ineffectual.
    Chapter III
Mr. Riley Gives His Advice Concerning a School for Tom
    The gentleman in the ample white cravat and shirt-frill, taking
his brandy-and-water so pleasantly with his good friend Tulliver,
is Mr. Riley, a gentleman with a waxen complexion and fat hands,
rather highly educated for an auctioneer and appraiser, but
large-hearted enough to show a great deal of
bonhomie
toward simple country acquaintances of hospitable habits. Mr. Riley
spoke of such acquaintances kindly as "people of the old
school."
    The conversation had come to a pause. Mr. Tulliver, not without
a particular reason, had abstained from a seventh recital of the
cool retort by which Riley had shown himself too many for Dix, and
how Wakem had had his comb cut for once in his life, now the
business of the dam had been settled by arbitration, and how there
never would have been any dispute at all about the height of water
if everybody was what they should be, and Old Harry hadn't made the
lawyers.
    Mr. Tulliver was, on the whole, a man of safe traditional
opinions; but on one or two points he had trusted to his unassisted
intellect, and had arrived at several questionable conclusions;
amongst the rest, that rats, weevils, and lawyers were created by
Old Harry. Unhappily he had no one to tell him that this was
rampant Manichæism, else he might have seen his error. But to-day
it was clear that the good principle was triumphant: this affair of
the water-power had been a tangled business somehow, for all it
seemed–look at it one way–as plain as water's water; but, big a
puzzle as it was, it hadn't got the better of Riley. Mr. Tulliver
took his brandy-and-water a little stronger than usual, and, for a
man who might be supposed to have a few hundreds lying idle at his
banker's, was rather incautiously open in expressing his high
estimate of his friend's business talents.
    But the dam was a subject of conversation that would keep; it
could always be taken up again at the same point, and exactly in
the same condition; and there was another subject, as you know, on
which Mr. Tulliver was in pressing want of Mr. Riley's advice. This
was his particular reason for remaining silent for a short space
after his last draught, and rubbing his knees in a meditative
manner. He was not a man to make an abrupt transition. This was a
puzzling world, as he often said, and if you drive your wagon in a
hurry, you may light on an awkward corner. Mr. Riley, meanwhile,
was not impatient. Why should he be? Even Hotspur, one would think,
must have been patient in his slippers on a warm hearth, taking
copious snuff, and sipping gratuitous brandy-and-water.
    "There's a thing I've got i' my head," said Mr. Tulliver at
last, in rather a lower tone than usual, as he turned his head and
looked