The Mill on the Floss Read Online Free PDF Page B

satisfaction to him
to say to Timpson on his return home, "I've secured a good pupil
for your son-in-law." Timpson had a large family of daughters; Mr.
Riley felt for him; besides, Louisa Timpson's face, with its light
curls, had been a familiar object to him over the pew wainscot on a
Sunday for nearly fifteen years; it was natural her husband should
be a commendable tutor. Moreover, Mr. Riley knew of no other
schoolmaster whom he had any ground for recommending in preference;
why, then, should be not recommend Stelling? His friend Tulliver
had asked him for an opinion; it is always chilling, in friendly
intercourse, to say you have no opinion to give. And if you deliver
an opinion at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of
conviction and well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in
uttering it, and naturally get fond of it. Thus Mr. Riley, knowing
no harm of Stelling to begin with, and wishing him well, so far as
he had any wishes at all concerning him, had no sooner recommended
him than he began to think with admiration of a man recommended on
such high authority, and would soon have gathered so warm an
interest on the subject, that if Mr. Tulliver had in the end
declined to send Tom to Stelling, Mr. Riley would have thought his
"friend of the old school" a thoroughly pig-headed fellow.
    If you blame Mr. Riley very severely for giving a recommendation
on such slight grounds, I must say you are rather hard upon him.
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.
Riley had shrunk from giving a recommendation that was not based on
valid evidence, he would not have helped Mr. Stelling to a paying
pupil, and that would not have been so well for the reverend
gentleman. Consider, too, that all the pleasant little dim ideas
and complacencies–of standing well with Timpson, of dispensing
advice when he was asked for it, of impressing his friend Tulliver
with additional respect, of saying something, and saying it
emphatically, with other inappreciably minute ingredients that went
along with the warm hearth and the brandy-and-water to make up Mr.
Riley's consciousness on this occasion–would have been a mere
blank.
    Chapter IV
Tom Is Expected
    It was a heavy disappointment to Maggie that she was not allowed
to go with her father in the gig when he went to fetch Tom home
from the academy; but the morning was too wet, Mrs. Tulliver said,
for a little girl to go out in her best bonnet. Maggie took the
opposite view very strongly, and it was a direct consequence of
this difference of opinion that when her mother was in the act of
brushing out the reluctant black crop Maggie suddenly rushed from
under her hands and dipped her head in a basin of water standing
near, in the vindictive determination that there should be no more
chance of curls that day.
    "Maggie, Maggie!" exclaimed Mrs. Tulliver, sitting stout and
helpless with the brushes on her lap, "what is to become of you if
you're so naughty? I'll tell your aunt Glegg and your aunt Pullet
when they come next week, and they'll never love you any more. Oh
dear, oh dear! look at your clean pinafore, wet from top to bottom.
Folks 'ull think it's a judgment on me as I've got such a
child,–they'll think I've done summat wicked."
    Before this remonstrance was finished, Maggie was already out of
hearing, making her way toward the great attic that run under the
old high-pitched roof, shaking the water from her black locks as
she