Free The Mill on the Floss by George Eliot Page B

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 mill-dam. 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.
    Chapter VII
Enter the Aunts and Uncles
    The Dodsons were certainly a handsome family, and Mrs. Glegg was
not the least handsome of the sisters. As she sat in Mrs.
Tulliver's arm-chair, no impartial observer could have denied that
for a woman of fifty she had a very comely face and figure, though
Tom and Maggie considered their aunt Glegg as the type of ugliness.
It is true she despised the advantages of costume, for though, as
she often observed, no woman had better clothes, it was not her way
to wear her new things out before her old ones. Other women, if
they liked, might have their best thread-lace in every wash; but
when Mrs. Glegg died, it would be found that she had better lace
laid by in the right-hand drawer of her wardrobe in the Spotted
Chamber than ever Mrs. Wooll of St. Ogg's had bought in her life,
although Mrs. Wooll wore her lace before it was paid for. So of her
curled fronts: Mrs. Glegg had doubtless the glossiest and crispest
brown curls in her drawers, as well as curls in various degrees of
fuzzy laxness; but to look out on the week-day world from under a
crisp and glossy front would be to introduce a most dreamlike and
unpleasant confusion between the sacred and the secular.
Occasionally, indeed, Mrs. Glegg wore one of her third-best fronts
on a week-day visit, but not at a sister's house; especially not at
Mrs. Tulliver's, who, since her marriage, had hurt her sister's
feelings greatly by wearing her own hair, though, as Mrs. Glegg
observed to Mrs. Deane, a mother of a family, like Bessy, with a
husband always going to law, might have been expected to know
better. But Bessy was always weak!
    So if Mrs. Glegg's front to-day was more fuzzy and lax than
usual, she had a design under it: she intended the most pointed and
cutting allusion to Mrs. Tulliver's bunches of blond curls,
separated from each other by a due wave of smoothness on each side
of the parting. Mrs. Tulliver had shed tears several times at
sister Glegg's unkindness on the subject of these unmatronly curls,
but the consciousness of looking the handsomer for them naturally
administered support. Mrs. Glegg chose to wear her bonnet in the
house to-day,–united and tilted slightly, of course–a frequent
practice of hers when she was on a visit, and happened to be in a
severe humor: she didn't know what draughts there might be in
strange houses. For the same reason she wore a small sable tippet,
which reached just to her shoulders, and was very far from meeting
across her well-formed chest, while her long neck was protected by
a
chevaux-de-frise
of miscellaneous frilling. One would
need to be learned in the fashions of those times to know how far
in the rear of them Mrs. Glegg's slate-colored silk gown must have
been; but from certain constellations of small yellow spots upon
it, and a mouldy odor about it suggestive of a damp clothes-chest,
it was probable that it belonged to a stratum of garments just old
enough to have come recently into wear.
    Mrs. Glegg held her large gold watch in her hand with the
many-doubled chain round her fingers, and observed to Mrs.
Tulliver, who had just returned from a visit to the kitchen, that
whatever it might be by other people's clocks and watches, it was
gone half-past twelve by hers.
    "I don't know what ails sister Pullet," she continued. "It used
to be the way in our family for one to be as early as