prompt:
Chapter: An Item Added to the Family Register

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; he had promised her without knowing
what she was going to say,--she might as well have asked him to carry
a ton weight on his back. But again, there were many feelings arguing
on her side, besides the sense that life had been made hard to her by
having married him. He saw a possibility, by much pinching, of saving
money out of his salary toward paying a second dividend to his
creditors, and it would not be easy elsewhere to get a situation such
as he could fill.

He had led an easy life, ordering much and working little, and had no
aptitude for any new business. He must perhaps take to day-labor, and
his wife must have help from her sisters,--a prospect doubly bitter to
him, now they had let all Bessy's precious things be sold, probably
because they liked to set her against him, by making her feel that he
had brought her to that pass. He listened to their admonitory talk,
when they came to urge on him what he was bound to do for poor Bessy's
sake, with averted eyes, that every now and then flashed on them
furtively when their backs were turned. Nothing but the dread of
needing their help could have made it an easier alternative to take
their advice.

But the strongest influence of all was the love of the old premises
where he had run about when he was a boy, just as Tom had done after
him. The Tullivers had lived on this spot for generations, and he had
sat listening on a low stool on winter evenings while his father
talked of the old half-timbered mill that had been there before the
last great floods which damaged it so that his grandfather pulled it
down and built the new one. It was when he got able to walk about and
look at all the old objects that he felt the strain of his clinging
affection for the old home as part of his life, part of himself. He
couldn't bear to think of himself living on any other spot than this,
where he knew the sound of every gate door, and felt that the shape
and color of every roof and weather-stain and broken hillock was good,
because his growing senses had been fed on them. Our instructed
vagrancy, which was hardly time to linger by the hedgerows, but runs
away early to the tropics, and is at home with palms and
banyans,--which is nourished on books of travel and stretches the
theatre of its imagination to the Zambesi,--can hardly get a dim
notion of what an old-fashioned man like Tulliver felt for this spot,
where all his memories centred, and where life seemed like a familiar
smooth-handled tool that the fingers clutch with loving ease. And just
now he was living in that freshened memory of the far-off time which
comes to us in the passive hours of recovery from sickness.

"Ay, Luke," he said one afternoon, as he stood looking over the
orchard gate, "I remember the day they planted those apple-trees. My
father was a huge man for planting,--it was like a merry-making to him
to get a cart full o' young trees; and I used to stand i' the cold
with him, and follow him about like a dog."

Then he turned round, and leaning against the gate-post, looked at the
opposite buildings.

"The old mill 'ud miss me, I think, Luke. There's a story as when the
mill changes hands, the river's angry; I've heard my father say it
many a time. There's no telling whether there mayn't be summat _in_
the story, for this is a puzzling world, and Old Harry's got a finger
in it--it's been too many for me, I know."

"Ay, sir," said Luke, with soothing sympathy, "what wi' the rust on
the wheat, an' the firin' o' the ricks an' that, as I've seen i' my
time,--things often looks comical; there's the bacon fat wi' our last
pig run away like butter,--it leaves nought but a scratchin'."

"It's just as if it was yesterday, now," Mr. Tulliver went on, "when
my father began the malting. I remember, the day they finished the
malt-house, I thought summat great was to come of it; for we'd a
plum-pudding that day and a bit of a feast, and I said to my
mother,--she was a fine dark-eyed woman, my mother was,--the little
wench 'ull be as like her as two peas." Here Mr. Tulliver put his
stick between his legs, and took out his snuff-box, for the greater
enjoyment of this anecdote, which dropped from him in fragments, as if
he every other moment lost narration in vision. "I was a little chap
no higher much than my mother's knee,--she was sore fond of us
children, Gritty and me,--and so I said to her, 'Mother,' I said,
'shall we have plum-pudding _every_ day because o' the malt-house? She
used to tell me o' that till her dying day. She was but a young woman
when she died, my mother was. But it's forty good year since they
finished the malt-house, and it isn't many days out of 'em all as I
haven't looked out into the yard there, the first thing in the
morning,--all weathers, from year's end to year's end. I should go off
my head in a new place. I should be like as if I'd lost my way. It's
all hard, whichever way I look at it,--the harness 'ull gall me, but
it 'ud be summat to draw along the old road, instead of a new un."

"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' oat-cake i' some places, tow'rt th' head o' the Floss,
there. It's poor work, changing your country-side."

"But I doubt, Luke, they'll be for getting rid o' Ben, and making you
do with a lad; and I must help a bit wi' the mill. You'll have a worse
place."

"Ne'er mind, sir," said Luke, "I sha'n'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."

The walk was finished in silence after this, for Luke had disburthened
himself of thoughts to an extent that left his conversational
resources quite barren, and Mr. Tulliver had relapsed from his
recollections into a painful meditation on the choice of hardships
before him. Maggie noticed that he was unusually absent that evening
at tea; and afterward he sat leaning forward in his chair, looking at
the ground, moving his lips, and shaking his head from time to time.
Then he looked hard at Mrs. Tulliver, who was knitting opposite him,
then at Maggie, who, as she bent over her sewing, was intensely
conscious of some drama going forward in her father's mind. Suddenly
he took up the poker and broke the large coal fiercely.

"Dear heart, Mr. Tulliver, what can you be thinking of?" said his
wife, looking up in alarm; "it's very wasteful, breaking the coal, and
we've got hardly any large coal left, and I don't know where the rest
is to come from."

"I don't think you're quite so well to-night, are you, father?" said
Maggie; "you seem uneasy."

"Why, how is it Tom doesn't come?" said Mr. Tulliver, impatiently.

"Dear heart, is it time? I must go and get his supper," said Mrs.
Tulliver, laying down her knitting, and leaving the room.

"It's nigh upon half-past eight," said Mr. Tulliver. "He'll be here
soon. Go, go and get the big Bible, and open it at the beginning,
where everything's set down. And get the pen and ink."

Maggie obeyed, wondering; but her father gave no further orders, and
only sat listening for Tom's footfall on the gravel, apparently
irritated by the wind, which had risen, and was roaring so as to drown
all other sounds. There was a strange light in his eyes that rather
frightened Maggie; _she_ began to wish that Tom would come, too.

"There he is, then," said Mr. Tulliver, in an excited way, when the
knock came at last. Maggie went to open the door, but her mother came
out of the kitchen hurriedly, saying, "Stop a bit, Maggie; I'll open
it."

Mrs. Tulliver had begun to be a little frightened at her boy, but she
was jealous of every office others did for him.

"Your supper's ready by the kitchen-fire, my boy," she said, as he
took off his hat and coat. "You shall have it by yourself, just as you
like, and I won't speak to you."

"I think my father wants Tom, mother," said Maggie; "he must come into
the parlor first."

Tom entered with his usual saddened evening face, but his eyes fell
immediately on the open Bible and the inkstand, and he glanced with a
look of anxious surprise at his father, who was saying,--

"Come, come, you're late; I want you."

"Is there anything the matter, father?" said Tom.

"You sit down, all of you," said Mr. Tulliver, peremptorily.

"And, Tom, sit down here; I've got something for you to write i' the
Bible."

They all three sat down, looking at him. He began to speak slowly,
looking first at his wife.

"I've made up my mind, Bessy, and I'll be as good as my word to you.
There'll be the same grave made for us to lie down in, and we mustn't
be bearing one another ill-will. I'll stop in the old place, and I'll
serve under Wakem, and I'll serve him like an honest man; there's no
Tulliver but what's honest, mind that, Tom,"--here his voice
rose,--"they'll have it to throw up against me as I paid a dividend,
but it wasn't my fault; it was because there's raskills in the world.
They've been too many for me, and I must give in. I'll put my neck in
harness,--for you've a right to say as I've brought you into trouble,
Bessy,--and I'll serve him as honest as if he was no raskill; I'm an
honest man, though I shall never hold my head up no more. I'm a tree
as is broke--a tree as is broke."

He paused and looked on the ground. Then suddenly raising his head, he
said, in a louder yet deeper tone:

"But I won't forgive him! I know what they say, he never meant me any
harm. That's the way Old Harry props up the rascals. He's been at the
bottom of everything; but he's a fine gentleman,--I know, I know. I
shouldn't ha' gone to law, they say. But who made it so as there was
no arbitratin', and no justice to be got? It signifies nothing to him,
I know that; he's one o' them fine gentlemen as get money by doing
business for poorer folks, and when he's made beggars of 'em he'll
give 'em charity. I won't forgive him! I wish he might be punished
with shame till his own son 'ud like to forget him. I wish he may do
summat as they'd make him work at the treadmill! But he won't,--he's
too big a raskill to let the law lay hold on him. And you mind this,
Tom,--you never forgive him neither, if you mean to be my son.
There'll maybe come a time when you may make him feel; it'll never
come to me; I'n got my head under the yoke. Now write--write it i' the
Bible."

"Oh, father, what?" said Maggie, sinking down by his knee, pale and
trembling. "It's wicked to curse and bear malice."

"It isn't wicked, I tell you," said her father, fiercely. "It's wicked
as the raskills should prosper; it's the Devil's doing. Do as I tell
you, Tom. Write."

"What am I to write?" said Tom, with gloomy submission.

"Write as your father, Edward Tulliver, took service under John Wakem,
the man as had helped to ruin him, because I'd promised my wife to
make her what amends I could for her trouble, and because I wanted to
die in th' old place where I was born and my father was born. Put that
i' the right words--you know how--and then write, as I don't forgive
Wakem for all that; and for all I'll serve him honest, I wish evil may
befall him. Write that."

There was a dead silence as Tom's pen moved along the paper; Mrs.
Tulliver looked scared, and Maggie trembled like a leaf.

"Now let me hear what you've wrote," said Mr. Tulliver, Tom read aloud
slowly.

"Now write--write as you'll remember what Wakem's done to your father,
and you'll make him and his feel it, if ever the day comes. And sign
your name Thomas Tulliver."

"Oh no, father, dear father!" said Maggie, almost choked with fear.
"You shouldn't make Tom write that."

"Be quiet, Maggie!" said Tom. "I _shall_ write it."

Book IV

_The Valley of Humiliation_

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: As Mr. Tulliver grows stronger, he must struggle with himself to keep his promise to work for Wakem. His wife's sisters remind him "what he was bound to do for poor Bessy's sake," and only "dread of needing their help" keeps him from disregarding their advice. His inability to do other work, and most of all his love of his home ground, influence him to stay. But one evening his "choice of hardships" makes him particularly irritable, and when Tom comes home from work Mr. Tulliver tells him there is something he must write in the family Bible. Tulliver says he has decided to stay and serve Wakem, but he will not forgive him. Maggie argues that it is "wicked to curse and bear malice," but her father makes Tom write that he takes service under Wakem to make amends to his wife, but that he wishes "evil may befall him." After Tom reads it over, Tulliver has him write that Tom himself will "make him and his feel it," when the chance comes. Over Maggie's protest, Tom writes and signs it.


prompt:
Chapter: A Variation of Protestantism Unknown to Bossuet

Journeying down the Rhone on a summer's day, you have perhaps felt the
sunshine made dreary by those ruined villages which stud the banks in
certain parts of its course, telling how the swift river once rose,
like an angry, destroying god, sweeping down the feeble generations
whose breath is in their nostrils, and making their dwellings a
desolation. Strange contrast, you may have thought, between the
effect produced on us by these dismal remnants of commonplace
houses, which in their best days were but the sign of a sordid life,
belonging in all its details to our own vulgar era, and the effect
produced by those ruins on the castled Rhine, which have crumbled and
mellowed into such harmony with the green and rocky steeps that they
seem to have a natural fitness, like the mountain-pine; nay, even in
the day when they were built they must have had this fitness, as if
they had been raised by an earth-born race, who had inherited from
their mighty parent a sublime instinct of form. And that was a day of
romance; If those robber-barons were somewhat grim and drunken ogres,
they had a certain grandeur of the wild beast in them,--they were
forest boars with tusks, tearing and rending, not the ordinary
domestic grunter; they represented the demon forces forever in
collision with beauty, virtue, and the gentle uses of life; they made
a fine contrast in the picture with the wandering minstrel, the
soft-lipped princess, the pious recluse, and the timid Israelite. That
was a time of color, when the sunlight fell on glancing steel and
floating banners; a time of adventure and fierce struggle,--nay, of
living, religious art and religious enthusiasm; for were not
cathedrals built in those days, and did not great emperors leave their
Western palaces to die before the infidel strongholds in the sacred
East? Therefore it is that these Rhine castles thrill me with a sense
of poetry; they belong to the grand historic life of humanity, and
raise up for me the vision of an echo. But these dead-tinted,
hollow-eyed, angular skeletons of villages on the Rhone oppress me
with the feeling that human life--very much of it--is a narrow, ugly,
grovelling existence, which even calamity does not elevate, but rather
tends to exhibit in all its bare vulgarity of conception; and I have a
cruel conviction that the lives these ruins are the traces of were
part of a gross sum of obscure vitality, that will be swept into the
same oblivion with the generations of ants and beavers.

Perhaps something akin to this oppressive feeling may have weighed
upon you in watching this old-fashioned family life on the banks of
the Floss, which even sorrow hardly suffices to lift above the level
of the tragi-comic. It is a sordid life, you say, this of the
Tullivers and Dodsons, irradiated by no sublime principles, no
romantic visions, no active, self-renouncing faith; moved by none of
those wild, uncontrollable passions which create the dark shadows of
misery and crime; without that primitive, rough simplicity of wants,
that hard, submissive, ill-paid toil, that childlike spelling-out of
what nature has written, which gives its poetry to peasant life. Here
one has conventional worldly notions and habits without instruction
and without polish, surely the most prosaic form of human life; proud
respectability in a gig of unfashionable build; worldliness without
side-dishes. Observing these people narrowly, even when the iron hand
of misfortune has shaken them from their unquestioning hold on the
world, one sees little trace of religion, still less of a
distinctively Christian creed. Their belief in the Unseen, so far as
it manifests itself at all, seems to be rather a pagan kind; their
moral notions, though held with strong tenacity, seem to have no
standard beyond hereditary custom. You could not live among such
people; you are stifled for want of an outlet toward something
beautiful, great, or noble; you are irritated with these dull men and
women, as a kind of population out of keeping with the earth on which
they live,--with this rich plain where the great river flows forever
onward, and links the small pulse of the old English town with the
beatings of the world's mighty heart. A vigorous superstition, that
lashes its gods or lashes its own back, seems to be more congruous
with the mystery of the human lot, than the mental condition of these
emmet-like Dodsons and Tullivers.

I share with you this sense of oppressive narrowness; but it is
necessary that we should feel it, if we care to understand how it
acted on the lives of Tom and Maggie,--how it has acted on young
natures in many generations, that in the onward tendency of human
things have risen above the mental level of the generation before
them, to which they have been nevertheless tied by the strongest
fibres of their hearts. The suffering, whether of martyr or victim,
which belongs to every historical advance of mankind, is represented
in this way in every town, and by hundreds of obscure hearths; and we
need not shrink from this comparison of small things with great; for
does not science tell us that its highest striving is after the
ascertainment of a unity which shall bind the smallest things with the
greatest? In natural science, I have understood, there is nothing
petty to the mind that has a large vision of relations, and to which
every single object suggests a vast sum of conditions. It is surely
the same with the observation of human life.

Certainly the religious and moral ideas of the Dodsons and Tullivers
were of too specific a kind to be arrived at deductively, from the
statement that they were part of the Protestant population of Great
Britain. Their theory of life had its core of soundness, as all
theories must have on which decent and prosperous families have been
reared and have flourished; but it had the very slightest tincture of
theology. If, in the maiden days of the Dodson sisters, their Bibles
opened more easily at some parts than others, it was because of dried
tulip-petals, which had been distributed quite impartially, without
preference for the historical, devotional, or doctrinal. 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
baptized, else one could not be buried in the church-yard, and to take
the sacrament before death, as a security against more dimly
understood perils; but it was of equal necessity to have the proper
pall-bearers and well-cured hams at one's funeral, and to leave an
unimpeachable will. A Dodson would not be taxed with the omission of
anything that was becoming, or that belonged to that eternal fitness
of things which was plainly indicated in the practice of the most
substantial parishioners, and in the family traditions,--such as
obedience to parents, faithfulness to kindred, industry, rigid
honesty, thrift, the thorough scouring of wooden and copper utensils,
the hoarding of coins likely to disappear from the currency, the
production of first-rate commodities for the market, and the general
preference of whatever was home-made. The Dodsons were a very proud
race, and their pride lay in the utter frustration of all desire to
tax them with a breach of traditional duty or propriety. A wholesome
pride in many respects, since it identified honor with perfect
integrity, thoroughness of work, and faithfulness to admitted rules;
and society owes some worthy qualities in many of her members to
mothers of the Dodson class, who made their butter and their fromenty
well, and would have felt disgraced to make it otherwise. To be honest
and poor was never a Dodson motto, still less to seem rich though
being poor; rather, the family badge was to be honest and rich, and
not only rich, but richer than was supposed. To live respected, and
have the proper bearers at your funeral, was an achievement of the
ends of existence that would be entirely nullified if, on the reading
of your will, you sank in the opinion of your fellow-men, either by
turning out to be poorer than they expected, or by leaving your money
in a capricious manner, without strict regard to degrees of kin. The
right thing must always be done toward kindred. The right thing was to
correct them severely, if they were other than a credit to the family,
but still not to alienate from them the smallest rightful share in the
family shoebuckles and other property. A conspicuous quality in the
Dodson character was its genuineness; its vices and virtues alike were
phases of a proud honest egoism, which had a hearty dislike to
whatever made against its own credit and interest, and would be
frankly hard of speech to inconvenient "kin," but would never forsake
or ignore them,--would not let them want bread, but only require them
to eat it with bitter herbs.

The same sort of traditional belief ran in the Tulliver veins, but it
was carried in richer blood, having elements of generous imprudence,
warm affection, and hot-tempered rashness. Mr. Tulliver's grandfather
had been heard to say that he was descended from one Ralph Tulliver, a
wonderfully clever fellow, who had ruined himself. It is likely enough
that the clever Ralph was a high liver, rode spirited horses, and was
very decidedly of his own opinion. On the other hand, nobody had ever
heard of a Dodson who had ruined himself; it was not the way of that
family.

If such were the views of life on which the Dodsons and Tullivers had
been reared in the praiseworthy past of Pitt and high prices, you will
infer from what you already know concerning the state of society in
St. Ogg's, that there had been no highly modifying influence to act on
them in their maturer life. It was still possible, even in that later
time of anti-Catholic preaching, for people to hold many pagan ideas,
and believe themselves good church-people, notwithstanding; so we need
hardly feel any surprise at the fact that Mr. Tulliver, though a
regular church-goer, recorded his vindictiveness on the fly-leaf of
his Bible. It was not that any harm could be said concerning the vicar
of that charming rural parish to which Dorlcote Mill belonged; he was
a man of excellent family, an irreproachable bachelor, of elegant
pursuits,--had taken honors, and held a fellowship. Mr. Tulliver
regarded him with dutiful respect, as he did everything else belonging
to the church-service; but he considered that church was one thing and
common-sense another, and he wanted nobody to tell _him_ what
commonsense was. Certain seeds which are required to find a nidus for
themselves under unfavorable 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.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The great ruined castles to be seen on a Rhine journey are contrasted by the author to the "angular skeletons of villages" on the Rhone, villages which lend a feeling that "human life . . . is a narrow, ugly, grovelling existence . . . ." Family life on the Floss may strike the reader much the same way through its conventionality and "oppressive narrowness"; but it must be felt if the reader is to understand the lives of Tom and Maggie and other "young natures in many generations." The religion of the Dodsons and Tullivers is "of a simple, semi-pagan kind." It consists of "whatever was customary and respectable." The Dodson character is "a proud, honest egoism" that dislikes anything which is against its own interest. It will not allow kin to "want bread, but only require them to eat it with bitter herbs." The Tulliver character is much the same, but with a dash of rashness and affection. Such were the traditional views of the Dodsons and Tullivers, and their society contains no modifying influences. Since pagan ideas are freely held, it should be no surprise that Mr. Tulliver "recorded his vindictiveness on the fly-leaf of his Bible, church was one thing and common-sense another."


prompt:
Chapter: The Torn Nest Is Pierced by the Thorns

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; in the time when day follows day in dull, unexpectant
sameness, and trial is a dreary routine,--it is then that despair
threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt,
and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our
existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.

This time of utmost need was come to Maggie, with her short span of
thirteen years. To the usual precocity of the girl, she added that
early experience of struggle, of conflict between the inward impulse
and outward fact, which is the lot of every imaginative and passionate
nature; and the years since she hammered the nails into her wooden
Fetish among the worm-eaten shelves of the attic had been filled with
so eager a life in the triple world of Reality, Books, and Waking
Dreams, that Maggie was strangely old for her years in everything
except in her entire want of that prudence and self-command which were
the qualities that made Tom manly in the midst of his intellectual
boyishness. And now her lot was beginning to have a still, sad
monotony, which threw her more than ever on her inward self. Her
father was able to attend to business again, his affairs were settled,
and he was acting as Wakem's manager on the old spot. Tom went to and
fro every morning and evening, and became more and more silent in the
short intervals at home; what was there to say? One day was like
another; and Tom's interest in life, driven back and crushed on every
other side, was concentrating itself into the one channel of ambitious
resistance to misfortune. The peculiarities of his father and mother
were very irksome to him, now they were laid bare of all the softening
accompaniments of an easy, prosperous home; for Tom had very clear,
prosaic eyes, not apt to be dimmed by mists of feeling or imagination.
Poor Mrs. Tulliver, it seemed, would never recover her old self, her
placid household activity; how could she? The objects among which her
mind had moved complacently were all gone,--all the little hopes and
schemes and speculations, all the pleasant little cares about her
treasures which had made the world quite comprehensible to her for a
quarter of a century, since she had made her first purchase of the
sugar-tongs, had been suddenly snatched away from her, and she
remained bewildered in this empty life. Why that should have happened
to her which had not happened to other women remained an insoluble
question by which she expressed her perpetual ruminating comparison of
the past with the present. It was piteous to see the comely woman
getting thinner and more worn under a bodily as well as mental
restlessness, which made her often wander about the empty house after
her work was done, until Maggie, becoming alarmed about her, would
seek her, and bring her down by telling her how it vexed Tom that she
was injuring her health by never sitting down and resting herself. Yet
amidst this helpless imbecility there was a touching trait of humble,
self-devoting maternity, which made Maggie feel tenderly toward her
poor mother amidst all the little wearing griefs caused by her mental
feebleness. She would let Maggie do none of the work that was heaviest
and most soiling to the hands, and was quite peevish when Maggie
attempted to relieve her from her grate-brushing and scouring: "Let it
alone, my dear; your hands 'ull get as hard as hard," she would say;
"it's your mother's place to do that. I can't do the sewing--my eyes
fail me." And she would still brush and carefully tend Maggie's hair,
which she had become reconciled to, in spite of its refusal to curl,
now it was so long and massy. Maggie was not her pet child, and, in
general, would have been much better if she had been quite different;
yet the womanly heart, so bruised in its small personal desires, found
a future to rest on in the life of this young thing, and the mother
pleased herself with wearing out her own hands to save the hands that
had so much more life in them.

But the constant presence of her mother's regretful bewilderment was
less painful to Maggie than that of her father's sullen,
incommunicative depression. As long as the paralysis was upon him, and
it seemed as if he might always be in a childlike condition of
dependence,--as long as he was still only half awakened to his
trouble,--Maggie had felt the strong tide of pitying love almost as an
inspiration, a new power, that would make the most difficult life easy
for his sake; but now, instead of childlike dependence, there had come
a taciturn, hard concentration of purpose, in strange contrast with
his old vehement communicativeness and high spirit; and this lasted
from day to day, and from week to week, the dull eye never brightening
with any eagerness or any joy. It is something cruelly incomprehensible
to youthful natures, this sombre sameness in middle-aged and elderly
people, whose life has resulted in disappointment and discontent, to
whose faces a smile becomes so strange that the sad lines all about
the lips and brow seem to take no notice of it, and it hurries away
again for want of a welcome. "Why will they not kindle up and be
glad sometimes?" thinks young elasticity. "It would be so easy if they
only liked to do it." And these leaden clouds that never part are apt
to create impatience even in the filial affection that streams forth in
nothing but tenderness and pity in the time of more obvious affliction.

Mr. Tulliver lingered nowhere away from home; he hurried away from
market, he refused all invitations to stay and chat, as in old times,
in the houses where he called on business. He could not be reconciled
with his lot. There was no attitude in which his pride did not feel
its bruises; and in all behavior toward him, whether kind or cold, he
detected an allusion to the change in his circumstances. Even the days
on which Wakem came to ride round the land and inquire into the
business were not so black to him as those market-days on which he had
met several creditors who had accepted a composition from him. To save
something toward the repayment of those creditors was the object
toward which he was now bending all his thoughts and efforts; and
under the influence of this all-compelling demand of his nature, the
somewhat profuse man, who hated to be stinted or to stint any one else
in his own house, was gradually metamorphosed into the keen-eyed
grudger of morsels. Mrs. Tulliver could not economize enough to
satisfy him, in their food and firing; and he would eat nothing
himself but what was of the coarsest quality. Tom, though depressed
and strongly repelled by his father's sullenness, and the dreariness
of home, entered thoroughly into his father's feelings about paying
the creditors; and the poor lad brought his first quarter's money,
with a delicious sense of achievement, and gave it to his father to
put into the tin box which held the savings. The little store of
sovereigns in the tin box seemed to be the only sight that brought a
faint beam of pleasure into the miller's eyes,--faint and transient,
for it was soon dispelled by the thought that the time would be
long--perhaps longer than his life,--before the narrow savings could
remove the hateful incubus of debt. A deficit of more than five
hundred pounds, with the accumulating interest, seemed a deep pit to
fill with the savings from thirty shillings a-week, even when Tom's
probable savings were to be added. On this one point there was entire
community of feeling in the four widely differing beings who sat round
the dying fire of sticks, which made a cheap warmth for them on the
verge of bedtime. Mrs. Tulliver carried the proud integrity of the
Dodsons in her blood, and had been brought up to think that to wrong
people of their money, which was another phrase for debt, was a sort
of moral pillory; it would have been wickedness, to her mind, to have
run counter to her husband's desire to "do the right thing," and
retrieve his name. She had a confused, dreamy notion that, if the
creditors were all paid, her plate and linen ought to come back to
her; but she had an inbred perception that while people owed money
they were unable to pay, they couldn't rightly call anything their
own. She murmured a little that Mr. Tulliver so peremptorily refused
to receive anything in repayment from Mr. and Mrs. Moss; but to all
his requirements of household economy she was submissive to the point
of denying herself the cheapest indulgences of mere flavor; her only
rebellion was to smuggle into the kitchen something that would make
rather a better supper than usual for Tom.

These narrow notions about debt, held by the old fashioned Tullivers,
may perhaps excite a smile on the faces of many readers in these days
of wide commercial views and wide philosophy, according to which
everything rights itself without any trouble of ours. The fact that my
tradesman is out of pocket by me is to be looked at through the serene
certainty that somebody else's tradesman is in pocket by somebody
else; and since there must be bad debts in the world, why, it is mere
egoism not to like that we in particular should make them instead of
our fellow-citizens. I am telling the history of very simple people,
who had never had any illuminating doubts as to personal integrity and
honor.

Under all this grim melancholy and narrowing concentration of desire,
Mr. Tulliver retained the feeling toward his "little wench" which made
her presence a need to him, though it would not suffice to cheer him.
She was still the desire of his eyes; but the sweet spring of fatherly
love was now mingled with bitterness, like everything else. When
Maggie laid down her work at night, it was her habit to get a low
stool and sit by her father's knee, leaning her cheek against it. How
she wished he would stroke her head, or give some sign that he was
soothed by the sense that he had a daughter who loved him! But now she
got no answer to her little caresses, either from her father or from
Tom,--the two idols of her life. Tom was weary and abstracted in the
short intervals when he was at home, and her father was bitterly
preoccupied with the thought that the girl was growing up, was
shooting up into a woman; and how was she to do well in life? She had
a poor chance for marrying, down in the world as they were. And he
hated the thought of her marrying poorly, as her aunt Gritty had done;
_that_ would be a thing to make him turn in his grave,--the little
wench so pulled down by children and toil, as her aunt Moss was. When
uncultured minds, confined to a narrow range of personal experience,
are under the pressure of continued misfortune, their inward life is
apt to become a perpetually repeated round of sad and bitter thoughts;
the same words, the same scenes, are revolved over and over again, the
same mood accompanies them; the end of the year finds them as much
what they were at the beginning as if they were machines set to a
recurrent series of movements.

The sameness of the days was broken by few visitors. Uncles and aunts
paid only short visits now; of course, they could not stay to meals,
and the constraint caused by Mr. Tulliver's savage silence, which
seemed to add to the hollow resonance of the bare, uncarpeted room
when the aunts were talking, heightened the unpleasantness of these
family visits on all sides, and tended to make them rare. As for other
acquaintances, there is a chill air surrounding those who are down in
the world, and people are glad to get away from them, as from a cold
room; human beings, mere men and women, without furniture, without
anything to offer you, who have ceased to count as anybody, present an
embarrassing negation of reasons for wishing to see them, or of
subjects on which to converse with them. At that distant day, there
was a dreary isolation in the civilized Christian society of these
realms for families that had dropped below their original level,
unless they belonged to a sectarian church, which gets some warmth of
brotherhood by walling in the sacred fire.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Maggie, at thirteen, is old for her years but lacks Tom's self-command. Tom throws himself into his work, but Maggie has nothing to do. Mrs. Tulliver remains "Bewildered in this empty life," but this is less painful to Maggie than her father's sullenness. She finds it incomprehensible that they never feel any joy. Mr. Tulliver refuses to be "reconciled with his lot," but all of the family feel that his debts must be paid, although that seems "a deep pit to fill. Few visitors come now, for "there is a chill air surrounding those who are down in the world . . . ."


prompt:
Chapter: A Voice from the Past

One afternoon, when the chestnuts were coming into flower, Maggie had
brought her chair outside the front door, and was seated there with a
book on her knees. Her dark eyes had wandered from the book, but they
did not seem to be enjoying the sunshine which pierced the screen of
jasmine on the projecting porch at her right, and threw leafy shadows
on her pale round cheek; they seemed rather to be searching for
something that was not disclosed by the sunshine. It had been a more
miserable day than usual; her father, after a visit of Wakem's had had
a paroxysm of rage, in which for some trifling fault he had beaten the
boy who served in the mill. Once before, since his illness, he had had
a similar paroxysm, in which he had beaten his horse, and the scene
had left a lasting terror in Maggie's mind. The thought had risen,
that some time or other he might beat her mother if she happened to
speak in her feeble way at the wrong moment. The keenest of all dread
with her was lest her father should add to his present misfortune the
wretchedness of doing something irretrievably disgraceful. The
battered school-book of Tom's which she held on her knees could give
her no fortitude under the pressure of that dread; and again and again
her eyes had filled with tears, as they wandered vaguely, seeing
neither the chestnut-trees, nor the distant horizon, but only future
scenes of home-sorrow.

Suddenly she was roused by the sound of the opening gate and of
footsteps on the gravel. It was not Tom who was entering, but a man in
a sealskin cap and a blue plush waistcoat, carrying a pack on his
back, and followed closely by a bullterrier of brindled coat and
defiant aspect.

"Oh, Bob, it's you!" said Maggie, starting up with a smile of pleased
recognition, for there had been no abundance of kind acts to efface
the recollection of Bob's generosity; "I'm so glad to see you."

"Thank you, Miss," said Bob, lifting his cap and showing a delighted
face, but immediately relieving himself of some accompanying
embarrassment by looking down at his dog, and saying in a tone of
disgust, "Get out wi' you, you thunderin' sawney!"

"My brother is not at home yet, Bob," said Maggie; "he is always at
St. Ogg's in the daytime."

"Well, Miss," said Bob, "I should be glad to see Mr. Tom, but that
isn't just what I'm come for,--look here!"

Bob was in the act of depositing his pack on the door-step, and with
it a row of small books fastened together with string.

Apparently, however, they were not the object to which he wished to
call Maggie's attention, but rather something which he had carried
under his arm, wrapped in a red handkerchief.

"See here!" he said again, laying the red parcel on the others and
unfolding it; "you won't think I'm a-makin' too free, Miss, I hope,
but I lighted on these books, and I thought they might make up to you
a bit for them as you've lost; for I heared you speak o' picturs,--an'
as for picturs, _look_ here!"

The opening of the red handkerchief had disclosed a superannuated
"Keepsake" and six or seven numbers of a "Portrait Gallery," in royal
octavo; and the emphatic request to look referred to a portrait of
George the Fourth in all the majesty of his depressed cranium and
voluminous neckcloth.

"There's all sorts o' genelmen here," Bob went on, turning over the
leaves with some excitement, "wi' all sorts o' nones,--an' some bald
an' some wi' wigs,--Parlament genelmen, I reckon. An' here," he added,
opening the "Keepsake,"--"_here's_ ladies for you, some wi' curly hair
and some wi' smooth, an' some a-smiling wi' their heads o' one side,
an' some as if they were goin' to cry,--look here,--a-sittin' on the
ground out o' door, dressed like the ladies I'n seen get out o' the
carriages at the balls in th' Old Hall there. My eyes! I wonder what
the chaps wear as go a-courtin' 'em! I sot up till the clock was gone
twelve last night, a-lookin' at 'em,--I did,--till they stared at me
out o' the picturs as if they'd know when I spoke to 'em. But, lors! I
shouldn't know what to say to 'em. They'll be more fittin' company for
you, Miss; and the man at the book-stall, he said they banged
iverything for picturs; he said they was a fust-rate article."

"And you've bought them for me, Bob?" said Maggie, deeply touched by
this simple kindness. "How very, very good of you! But I'm afraid you
gave a great deal of money for them."

"Not me!" said Bob. "I'd ha' gev three times the money if they'll make
up to you a bit for them as was sold away from you, Miss. For I'n
niver forgot how you looked when you fretted about the books bein'
gone; it's stuck by me as if it was a pictur hingin' before me. An'
when I see'd the book open upo' the stall, wi' the lady lookin' out of
it wi' eyes a bit like your'n when you was frettin',--you'll excuse my
takin' the liberty, Miss,--I thought I'd make free to buy it for you,
an' then I bought the books full o' genelmen to match; an' then"--here
Bob took up the small stringed packet of books--"I thought you might
like a bit more print as well as the picturs, an' I got these for a
sayso,--they're cram-full o' print, an' I thought they'd do no harm
comin' along wi' these bettermost books. An' I hope you won't say me
nay, an' tell me as you won't have 'em, like Mr. Tom did wi' the
suvreigns."

"No, indeed, Bob," said Maggie, "I'm very thankful to you for thinking
of me, and being so good to me and Tom. I don't think any one ever did
such a kind thing for me before. I haven't many friends who care for
me."

"Hev a dog, Miss!--they're better friends nor any Christian," said
Bob, laying down his pack again, which he had taken up with the
intention of hurrying away; for he felt considerable shyness in
talking to a young lass like Maggie, though, as he usually said of
himself, "his tongue overrun him" when he began to speak. "I can't
give you Mumps, 'cause he'd break his heart to go away from me--eh,
Mumps, what do you say, you riff-raff?" (Mumps declined to express
himself more diffusely than by a single affirmative movement of his
tail.) "But I'd get you a pup, Miss, an' welcome."

"No, thank you, Bob. We have a yard dog, and I mayn't keep a dog of my
own."

"Eh, that's a pity; else there's a pup,--if you didn't mind about it
not being thoroughbred; its mother acts in the Punch show,--an
uncommon sensible bitch; she means more sense wi' her bark nor half
the chaps can put into their talk from breakfast to sundown. There's
one chap carries pots,--a poor, low trade as any on the road,--he
says, 'Why Toby's nought but a mongrel; there's nought to look at in
her.' But I says to him, 'Why, what are you yoursen but a mongrel?
There wasn't much pickin' o' _your_ feyther an' mother, to look at
you.' Not but I like a bit o' breed myself, but I can't abide to see
one cur grinnin' at another. I wish you good evenin', Miss," said Bob,
abruptly taking up his pack again, under the consciousness that his
tongue was acting in an undisciplined manner.

"Won't you come in the evening some time, and see my brother, Bob?"
said Maggie.

"Yes, Miss, thank you--another time. You'll give my duty to him, if
you please. Eh, he's a fine growed chap, Mr. Tom is; he took to
growin' i' the legs, an' _I_ didn't."

The pack was down again, now, the hook of the stick having somehow
gone wrong.

"You don't call Mumps a cur, I suppose?" said Maggie, divining that
any interest she showed in Mumps would be gratifying to his master.

"No, Miss, a fine way off that," said Bob, with pitying smile; "Mumps
is as fine a cross as you'll see anywhere along the Floss, an' I'n
been up it wi' the barge times enow. Why, the gentry stops to look at
him; but you won't catch Mumps a-looking at the gentry much,--he minds
his own business, he does."

The expression of Mump's face, which seemed to be tolerating the
superfluous existence of objects in general, was strongly confirmatory
of this high praise.

"He looks dreadfully surly," said Maggie. "Would he let me pat him?"

"Ay, that would he, and thank you. He knows his company, Mumps does.
He isn't a dog as 'ull be caught wi' gingerbread; he'd smell a thief a
good deal stronger nor the gingerbread, he would. Lors, I talk to him
by th' hour together, when I'm walking i' lone places, and if I'n done
a bit o' mischief, I allays tell him. I'n got no secrets but what
Mumps knows 'em. He knows about my big thumb, he does."

"Your big thumb--what's that, Bob?" said Maggie.

"That's what it is, Miss," said Bob, quickly, exhibiting a singularly
broad specimen of that difference between the man and the monkey. "It
tells i' measuring out the flannel, you see. I carry flannel, 'cause
it's light for my pack, an' it's dear stuff, you see, so a big thumb
tells. I clap my thumb at the end o' the yard and cut o' the hither
side of it, and the old women aren't up to't."

"But Bob," said Maggie, looking serious, "that's cheating; I don't
like to hear you say that."

"Don't you, Miss?" said Bob regretfully. "Then I'm sorry I said it.
But I'm so used to talking to Mumps, an' he doesn't mind a bit o'
cheating, when it's them skinflint women, as haggle an' haggle, an'
'ud like to get their flannel for nothing, an' 'ud niver ask
theirselves how I got my dinner out on't. I niver cheat anybody as
doesn't want to cheat me, Miss,--lors, I'm a honest chap, I am; only I
must hev a bit o' sport, an' now I don't go wi' th' ferrets, I'n got
no varmint to come over but them haggling women. I wish you good
evening, Miss."

"Good-by, Bob. Thank you very much for bringing me the books. And come
again to see Tom."

"Yes, Miss," said Bob, moving on a few steps; then turning half round
he said, "I'll leave off that trick wi' my big thumb, if you don't
think well on me for it, Miss; but it 'ud be a pity, it would. I
couldn't find another trick so good,--an' what 'ud be the use o'
havin' a big thumb? It might as well ha' been narrow."

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 favoring 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.

That gleam of merriment soon died away from Maggie's face, and perhaps
only made the returning gloom deeper by contrast. She was too
dispirited even to like answering questions about Bob's present of
books, and she carried them away to her bedroom, laying them down
there and seating herself on her one stool, without caring to look at
them just yet. She leaned her cheek against the window-frame, and
thought that the light-hearted Bob had a lot much happier than hers.

Maggie's sense of loneliness, and utter privation of joy, had deepened
with the brightness of advancing spring. All the favorite 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
harmonized voices, no delicious stringed instruments, with their
passionate cries of imprisoned spirits sending a strange vibration
through her frame. And of all her school-life there was nothing left
her now but her little collection of school-books, which she turned
over with a sickening sense that she knew them all, and they were all
barren of comfort. Even at school she had often wished for books with
_more_ in them; everything she learned there seemed like the ends of
long threads that snapped immediately. And now--without the indirect
charm of school-emulation--Telemaque was mere bran; so were the hard,
dry questions on Christian Doctrine; there was no flavor in them, no
strength. Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with
absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott's novels and all
Byron's poems!--then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough
to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life. And yet they were
hardly what she wanted. She could make dream-worlds of her own, but no
dream-world would satisfy her now. She wanted some explanation of this
hard, real life,--the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull
breakfast-table; the childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid
tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of
weary, joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love;
the cruel sense that Tom didn't mind what she thought or felt, and
that they were no longer playfellows together; the privation of all
pleasant things that had come to _her_ more than to others,--she
wanted some key that would enable her to understand, and in
understanding, to endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her
young heart. If she had been taught "real learning and wisdom, such as
great men knew," she thought she should have held the secrets of life;
if she had only books, that she might learn for herself what wise men
knew! Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages
and poets. She knew little of saints and martyrs, and had gathered, as
a general result of her teaching, that they were a temporary provision
against the spread of Catholicism, and had all died at Smithfield.

In one of these meditations it occurred to her that she had forgotten
Tom's school-books, which had been sent home in his trunk. But she
found the stock unaccountably shrunk down to the few old ones which
had been well thumbed,--the Latin Dictionary and Grammar, a Delectus,
a torn Eutropius, the well-worn Virgil, Aldrich's Logic, and the
exasperating Euclid. Still, Latin, Euclid, and Logic would surely be a
considerable step in masculine wisdom,--in that knowledge which made
men contented, and even glad to live. Not that the yearning for
effectual wisdom was quite unmixed; a certain mirage would now and
then rise on the desert of the future, in which she seemed to see
herself honored for her surprising attainments. And so the poor child,
with her soul's hunger and her illusions of self-flattery, began to
nibble at this thick-rinded fruit of the tree of knowledge, filling
her vacant hours with Latin, geometry, and the forms of the syllogism,
and feeling a gleam of triumph now and then that her understanding was
quite equal to these peculiarly masculine studies. For a week or two
she went on resolutely enough, though with an occasional sinking of
heart, as if she had set out toward the Promised Land alone, and found
it a thirsty, trackless, uncertain journey. In the severity of her
early resolution, she would take Aldrich out into the fields, and then
look off her book toward the sky, where the lark was twinkling, or to
the reeds and bushes by the river, from which the waterfowl rustled
forth on its anxious, awkward flight,--with a startled sense that the
relation between Aldrich and this living world was extremely remote
for her. The discouragement deepened as the days went on, and the
eager heart gained faster and faster on the patient mind. Somehow,
when she sat at the window with her book, her eyes _would_ fix
themselves blankly on the outdoor sunshine; then they would fill with
tears, and sometimes, if her mother was not in the room, the studies
would all end in sobbing. She rebelled against her lot, she fainted
under its loneliness, and fits even of anger and hatred toward her
father and mother, who were so unlike what she would have them to be;
toward Tom, who checked her, and met her thought or feeling always by
some thwarting difference,--would flow out over her affections and
conscience like a lava stream, and frighten her with a sense that it
was not difficult for her to become a demon. Then her brain would be
busy with wild romances of a flight from home in search of something
less sordid and dreary; she would go to some great man--Walter Scott,
perhaps--and tell him how wretched and how clever she was, and he
would surely do something for her. But, in the middle of her vision,
her father would perhaps enter the room for the evening, and,
surprised that she sat still without noticing him, would say
complainingly, "Come, am I to fetch my slippers myself?" The voice
pierced through Maggie like a sword; there was another sadness besides
her own, and she had been thinking of turning her back on it and
forsaking it.

This afternoon, the sight of Bob's cheerful freckled face had given
her discontent a new direction. She thought it was part of the
hardship of her life that there was laid upon her the burthen of
larger wants than others seemed to feel,--that she had to endure this
wide, hopeless yearning for that something, whatever it was, that was
greatest and best on this earth. She wished she could have been like
Bob, with his easily satisfied ignorance, or like Tom, who had
something to do on which he could fix his mind with a steady purpose,
and disregard everything else. Poor child! as she leaned her head
against the window-frame, with her hands clasped tighter and tighter,
and her foot beating the ground, she was as lonely in her trouble as
if she had been the only girl in the civilized world of that day who
had come out of her school-life with a soul untrained for inevitable
struggles, with no other part of her inherited share in the hard-won
treasures of thought which generations of painful toil have laid up
for the race of men, than shreds and patches of feeble literature and
false history, with much futile information about Saxon and other
kings of doubtful example, but unhappily quite without that knowledge
of the irreversible laws within and without her, which, governing the
habits, becomes morality, and developing the feelings of submission
and dependence, becomes religion,--as lonely in her trouble as if
every other girl besides herself had been cherished and watched over
by elder minds, not forgetful of their own early time, when need was
keen and impulse strong.

At last Maggie's eyes glanced down on the books that lay on the
window-shelf, and she half forsook her reverie to turn over listlessly
the leaves of the "Portrait Gallery," but she soon pushed this aside
to examine the little row of books tied together with string.
"Beauties of the Spectator," "Rasselas," "Economy of Human Life,"
"Gregory's Letters,"--she knew the sort of matter that was inside all
these; the "Christian Year,"--that seemed to be a hymnbook, and she
laid it down again; but _Thomas a Kempis?_--the name had come across
her in her reading, and she felt the satisfaction, which every one
knows, of getting some ideas to attach to a name that strays solitary
in the memory. She took up the little, old, clumsy book with some
curiosity; it had the corners turned down in many places, and some
hand, now forever quiet, had made at certain passages strong
pen-and-ink marks, long since browned by time. Maggie turned from leaf
to leaf, and read where the quiet hand pointed: "Know that the love of
thyself doth hurt thee more than anything in the world.... If thou
seekest this or that, and wouldst be here or there to enjoy thy own
will and pleasure, thou shalt never be quiet nor free from care; for
in everything somewhat will be wanting, and in every place there will
be some that will cross thee.... Both above and below, which way
soever thou dost turn thee, everywhere thou shalt find the Cross; and
everywhere of necessity thou must have patience, if thou wilt have
inward peace, and enjoy an everlasting crown.... If thou desirest to
mount unto this height, thou must set out courageously, and lay the
axe to the root, that thou mayest pluck up and destroy that hidden
inordinate inclination to thyself, and unto all private and earthly
good. On this sin, that a man inordinately loveth himself, almost all
dependeth, whatsoever is thoroughly to be overcome; which evil being
once overcome and subdued, there will presently ensue great peace and
tranquillity.... It is but little thou sufferest in comparison of them
that have suffered so much, were so strongly tempted, so grievously
afflicted, so many ways tried and exercised. Thou oughtest therefore
to call to mind the more heavy sufferings of others, that thou mayest
the easier bear thy little adversities. And if they seem not little
unto thee, beware lest thy impatience be the cause thereof.... Blessed
are those ears that receive the whispers of the divine voice, and
listen not to the whisperings of the world. Blessed are those ears
which hearken not unto the voice which soundeth outwardly, but unto
the Truth, which teacheth inwardly."

A strange thrill of awe passed through Maggie while she read, as if
she had been wakened in the night by a strain of solemn music, telling
of beings whose souls had been astir while hers was in stupor. She
went on from one brown mark to another, where the quiet hand seemed to
point, hardly conscious that she was reading, seeming rather to listen
while a low voice said;

"Why dost thou here gaze about, since this is not the place of thy
rest? In heaven ought to be thy dwelling, and all earthly things are
to be looked on as they forward thy journey thither. All things pass
away, and thou together with them. Beware thou cleavest not unto them,
lest thou be entangled and perish.... If a man should give all his
substance, yet it is as nothing. And if he should do great penances,
yet are they but little. And if he should attain to all knowledge, he
is yet far off. And if he should be of great virtue, and very fervent
devotion, yet is there much wanting; to wit, one thing, which is most
necessary for him. What is that? That having left all, he leave
himself, and go wholly out of himself, and retain nothing of
self-love.... I have often said unto thee, and now again I say the
same, Forsake thyself, resign thyself, and thou shalt enjoy much
inward peace.... Then shall all vain imaginations, evil perturbations,
and superfluous cares fly away; then shall immoderate fear leave thee,
and inordinate love shall die."

Maggie drew a long breath and pushed her heavy hair back, as if to see
a sudden vision more clearly. Here, then, was a secret of life that
would enable her to renounce all other secrets; here was a sublime
height to be reached without the help of outward things; here was
insight, and strength, and conquest, to be won by means entirely
within her own soul, where a supreme Teacher was waiting to be heard.
It flashed through her like the suddenly apprehended solution of a
problem, that all the miseries of her young life had come from fixing
her heart on her own pleasure, as if that were the central necessity
of the universe; and for the first time she saw the possibility of
shifting the position from which she looked at the gratification of
her own desires,--of taking her stand out of herself, and looking at
her own life as an insignificant part of a divinely guided whole. She
read on and on in the old book, devouring eagerly the dialogues with
the invisible Teacher, the pattern of sorrow, the source of all
strength; returning to it after she had been called away, and reading
till the sun went down behind the willows. With all the hurry of an
imagination that could never rest in the present, she sat in the
deepening twilight forming plans of self-humiliation and entire
devotedness; and in the ardor of first discovery, renunciation seemed
to her the entrance into that satisfaction which she had so long been
craving in vain. She had not perceived--how could she until she had
lived longer?--the inmost truth of the old monk's out-pourings, 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.

I suppose that is the reason why the small old-fashioned book, for
which you need only pay sixpence at a book-stall, 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.
And so it remains to all time a lasting record of human needs and
human consolations; the voice of a brother who, ages ago, felt and
suffered and renounced,--in the cloister, perhaps, with serge gown and
tonsured head, with much chanting and long fasts, and with a fashion
of speech different from ours,--but under the same silent far-off
heavens, and with the same passionate desires, the same strivings, the
same failures, the same weariness.

In writing the history of unfashionable families, one is apt to fall
into a tone of emphasis which is very far from being the tone of good
society, where principles and beliefs are not only of an extremely
moderate kind, but are always presupposed, no subjects being eligible
but such as can be touched with a light and graceful irony. But then
good society has its claret and its velvet carpets, its
dinner-engagements six weeks deep, its opera and its faery ball-rooms;
rides off its _ennui_ on thoroughbred horses; lounges at the club; has
to keep clear of crinoline vortices; gets its science done by Faraday,
and its religion by the superior clergy who are to be met in the best
houses,--how should it have time or need for belief and emphasis? But
good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very
expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous
national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping
itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving
under more or less oppression of carbonic acid, or else, spread over
sheepwalks, and scattered in lonely houses and huts on the clayey or
chalky corn-lands, where the rainy days look dreary. This wide
national life is based entirely on emphasis,--the emphasis of want,
which urges it into all the activities necessary for the maintenance
of good society and light irony; it spends its heavy years often in a
chill, uncarpeted fashion, amidst family discord unsoftened by long
corridors. Under such circumstances, there are many among its myriads
of souls who have absolutely needed an emphatic belief, life in this
unpleasurable shape demanding some solution even to unspeculative
minds,--just as you inquire into the stuffing of your couch when
anything galls you there, whereas eider-down and perfect French
springs excite no question. Some have an emphatic belief in alcohol,
and seek their _ekstasis_ or outside standing-ground in gin; but the
rest require something that good society calls "enthusiasm," something
that will present motives in an entire absence of high prizes;
something that will give patience and feed human love when the limbs
ache with weariness, and human looks are hard upon us; something,
clearly, that lies outside personal desires, that includes resignation
for ourselves and active love for what is not ourselves. Now and then
that sort of enthusiasm finds a far-echoing voice that comes from an
experience springing out of the deepest need; and it was by being
brought within the long lingering vibrations of such a voice that
Maggie, with her girl's face and unnoted sorrows, found an effort and
a hope that helped her through years of loneliness, making out a faith
for herself without the aid of established authorities and appointed
guides; for they were not at hand, and her need was pressing. From
what you know of her, you will not be surprised that she threw some
exaggeration and wilfulness, some pride and impetuosity, even into her
self-renunciation; her own life was still a drama for her, in which
she demanded of herself that her part should be played with intensity.
And so it came to pass that she often lost the spirit of humility by
being excessive in the outward act; she often strove after too high a
flight, and came down with her poor little half-fledged wings dabbled
in the mud. For example, she not only determined to work at plain
sewing, that she might contribute something toward the fund in the tin
box, but she went, in the first instance, in her zeal of
self-mortification, to ask for it at a linen shop in St. Ogg's,
instead of getting it in a more quiet and indirect way; and could see
nothing but what was entirely wrong and unkind, nay, persecuting, in
Tom's reproof of her for this unnecessary act. "I don't like _my_
sister to do such things," said Tom, "_I'll_ take care that the debts
are paid, without your lowering yourself in that way." Surely there
was some tenderness and bravery mingled with the worldliness and
self-assertion of that little speech; but Maggie held it as dross,
overlooking the grains of gold, and took Tom's rebuke as one of her
outward crosses. Tom was very hard to her, she used to think, in her
long night-watchings,--to her who had always loved him so; and then
she strove to be contented with that hardness, and to require nothing.
That is the path we all like when we set out on our abandonment of
egoism,--the path of martyrdom and endurance, where the palm-branches
grow, rather than the steep highway of tolerance, just allowance, and
self-blame, where there are no leafy honors to be gathered and worn.

The old books, Virgil, Euclid, and Aldrich--that wrinkled fruit of the
tree of knowledge--had been all laid by; for Maggie had turned her
back on the vain ambition to share the thoughts of the wise. In her
first ardor she flung away the books with a sort of triumph that she
had risen above the need of them; and if they had been her own, she
would have burned them, believing that she would never repent. She
read so eagerly and constantly in her three books, the Bible, Thomas a
Kempis, and the "Christian Year" (no longer rejected as a
"hymn-book"), that they filled her mind with a continual stream of
rhythmic memories; and she was too ardently learning to see all nature
and life in the light of her new faith, to need any other material for
her mind to work on, as she sat with her well-plied needle, making
shirts and other complicated stitchings, falsely called "plain,"--by
no means plain to Maggie, since wristband and sleeve and the like had
a capability of being sewed in wrong side outward in moments of mental
wandering.

Hanging diligently over her sewing, Maggie was a sight any one might
have been pleased to look at. That new inward life of hers,
notwithstanding some volcanic upheavings of imprisoned passions, yet
shone out in her face with a tender soft light that mingled itself as
added loveliness with the gradually enriched color and outline of her
blossoming youth. Her mother felt the change in her with a sort of
puzzled wonder that Maggie should be "growing up so good"; it was
amazing that this once "contrairy" child was become so submissive, so
backward to assert her own will. Maggie used to look up from her work
and find her mother's eyes fixed upon her; they were watching and
waiting for the large young glance, as if her elder frame got some
needful warmth from it. The mother was getting fond of her tall, brown
girl,--the only bit of furniture now on which she could bestow her
anxiety and pride; and Maggie, in spite of her own ascetic wish to
have no personal adornment, was obliged to give way to her mother
about her hair, and submit to have the abundant black locks plaited
into a coronet on the summit of her head, after the pitiable fashion
of those antiquated times.

"Let your mother have that bit o' pleasure, my dear," said Mrs.
Tulliver; "I'd trouble enough with your hair once."

So Maggie, glad of anything that would soothe her mother, and cheer
their long day together, consented to the vain decoration, and showed
a queenly head above her old frocks, steadily refusing, however, to
look at herself in the glass. Mrs. Tulliver liked to call the father's
attention to Maggie's hair and other unexpected virtues, but he had a
brusk reply to give.

"I knew well enough what she'd be, before now,--it's nothing new to
me. But it's a pity she isn't made o' commoner stuff; she'll be thrown
away, I doubt,--there'll be nobody to marry her as is fit for her."

And Maggie's graces of mind and body fed his gloom. He sat patiently
enough while she read him a chapter, or said something timidly when
they were alone together about trouble being turned into a blessing.
He took it all as part of his daughter's goodness, which made his
misfortunes the sadder to him because they damaged her chance in life.
In a mind charged with an eager purpose and an unsatisfied
vindictiveness, there is no room for new feelings; Mr. Tulliver did
not want spiritual consolation--he wanted to shake off the degradation
of debt, and to have his revenge.

Book V

_Wheat and Tares_

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: One afternoon in the spring Bob Jakin, carrying a pack and followed by a bull terrier, comes to the house. He has brought Maggie a gift of books, chosen mainly for their pictures, but with others comprised of print. Maggie thanks him, saying she hasn't many friends. Bob advises her to "hev a dog, they're better friends nor any Christian." He says Mumps is good company and knows all his secrets, including his "big thumb." He explains that his broad thumb gives him the advantage of measuring out the yard goods he carries for sale. Bob cheerfully admits that this is cheating, but he only cheats those who want to cheat him. Maggie's merriment soon dies out when Bob leaves. Her loneliness is deeper than ever; where she has always wanted more of everything, now there is nothing. She longs to go to some great man and tell him "how wretched and how clever" she is, so that she may be comforted. But she is always called back to the fact that her father's sadness is deeper than her own. Maggie leafs through Bob's books. One is by Thomas a Kempis. She begins to read, and is thrilled by the words that promise that renunciation of the world's delights shall bring the death of "vain imaginations," of "inordinate love." Maggie clasps this as a means of conquest to be won entirely "within her own soul." She clutches at self-renunciation with "some exaggeration and willfulness, some pride and impetuosity," just as she has taken up sewing to help the family finances in a way calculated to give the most "self-mortification," rather than quietly. But she is sincere, and from this time her "new inward life" may be seen in her face and in her actions. But her "graces of mind and body" only feed her father's gloom as he sees his daughter being "thrown away" in the "degradation of debt."