Mr. Tulliver Shows His Weaker Side
“Suppose sister Glegg should call her money
in; it ’ud be very awkward for you to have to
raise five hundred pounds now,” said Mrs. Tulliver
to her husband that evening, as she took a plaintive
review of the day.
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 to-day
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. Tulliver
became rather pressing to know how he would
raise it without mortgaging the mill and the house
which he had said he never would mortgage,
since nowadays people were none so ready to lend money
without security, Mr. Tulliver, getting warm, declared
that Mrs. Glegg might do as she liked about calling
in her money, he should pay it in whether or not.
He was not going to be beholden to his wife’s
sisters. When a man had married into a family
where there was a whole litter of women, he might
have plenty to put up with if he chose. But Mr.
Tulliver did not choose.
Mrs. Tulliver cried a little in a trickling, quiet
way as she put on her nightcap; but presently sank
into a comfortable sleep, lulled by the thought that
she would talk everything over with her sister Pullet
to-morrow, when she was to take the children to Garum
Firs to tea. Not that she looked forward to any
distinct issue from that talk; but it seemed impossible
that past events should be so obstinate as to remain
unmodified when they were complained against.
Her husband lay awake rather longer, for he too was
thinking of a visit he would pay on the morrow; and
his ideas on the subject were not of so vague and
soothing a kind as those of his amiable partner.
Mr. Tulliver, when under the influence of a strong
feeling, had a promptitude in action that may seem
inconsistent with that painful sense of the complicated,
puzzling nature of human affairs under which his more
dispassionate deliberations were conducted; 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
