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 honour.
Under all this grim melancholy and narrowing concentration of desire, Mr Tulliver retained the feeling towards 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 her 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 civilised 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.
