The Mill on the Floss - George Eliot (100 books to read .txt) 📗

that as makes her skin so brown, I shouldn’t wonder. Don’t you think so, sister Deane?”

“I can’t say, I’m sure, sister,” said Mrs. Deane, shutting her lips close again, and looking at Maggie with a critical eye.

“No, no,” said Mr. Tulliver, “the child’s healthy enough; there’s nothing ails her. There’s red wheat as well as white, for that matter, and some like the dark grain best. But it ’ud be as well if Bessy ’ud have the child’s hair cut, so as it ’ud lie smooth.”

A dreadful resolve was gathering in Maggie’s breast, but it was arrested by the desire to know from her aunt Deane whether she would leave Lucy behind. Aunt Deane would hardly ever let Lucy come to see them. After various reasons for refusal, Mrs. Deane appealed to Lucy herself.

“You wouldn’t like to stay behind without mother, should you, Lucy?”

“Yes, please, mother,” said Lucy, timidly, blushing very pink all over her little neck.

“Well done, Lucy! Let her stay, Mrs. Deane, let her stay,” said Mr. Deane, a large but alert-looking man, with a type of physique to be seen in all ranks of English society⁠—bald crown, red whiskers, full forehead, and general solidity without heaviness. You may see noblemen like Mr. Deane, and you may see grocers or day-labourers like him; but the keenness of his brown eyes was less common than his contour.

He held a silver snuffbox very tightly in his hand, and now and then exchanged a pinch with Mr. Tulliver, whose box was only silver-mounted, so that it was naturally a joke between them that Mr. Tulliver wanted to exchange snuffboxes also. Mr. Deane’s box had been given him by the superior partners in the firm to which he belonged, at the same time that they gave him a share in the business, in acknowledgment of his valuable services as manager. No man was thought more highly of in St. Ogg’s than Mr. Deane; and some persons were even of opinion that Miss Susan Dodson, who was once held to have made the worst match of all the Dodson sisters, might one day ride in a better carriage, and live in a better house, even than her sister Pullet. There was no knowing where a man would stop, who had got his foot into a great mill-owning, ship-owning business like that of Guest & Co., with a banking concern attached. And Mrs. Deane, as her intimate female friends observed, was proud and “having” enough; she wouldn’t let her husband stand still in the world for want of spurring.

“Maggie,” said Mrs. Tulliver, beckoning Maggie to her, and whispering in her ear, as soon as this point of Lucy’s staying was settled, “go and get your hair brushed, do, for shame. I told you not to come in without going to Martha first, you know I did.”

“Tom, come out with me,” whispered Maggie, pulling his sleeve as she passed him; and Tom followed willingly enough.

“Come upstairs with me, Tom,” she whispered, when they were outside the door. “There’s something I want to do before dinner.”

“There’s no time to play at anything before dinner,” said Tom, whose imagination was impatient of any intermediate prospect.

“Oh yes, there is time for this; do come, Tom.”

Tom followed Maggie upstairs into her mother’s room, and saw her go at once to a drawer, from which she took out a large pair of scissors.

“What are they for, Maggie?” said Tom, feeling his curiosity awakened.

Maggie answered by seizing her front locks and cutting them straight across the middle of her forehead.

“Oh, my buttons! Maggie, you’ll catch it!” exclaimed Tom; “you’d better not cut any more off.”

Snip! went the great scissors again while Tom was speaking, and he couldn’t help feeling it was rather good fun; Maggie would look so queer.

“Here, Tom, cut it behind for me,” said Maggie, excited by her own daring, and anxious to finish the deed.

“You’ll catch it, you know,” said Tom, nodding his head in an admonitory manner, and hesitating a little as he took the scissors.

“Never mind, make haste!” said Maggie, giving a little stamp with her foot. Her cheeks were quite flushed.

The black locks were so thick, nothing could be more tempting to a lad who had already tasted the forbidden pleasure of cutting the pony’s mane. I speak to those who know the satisfaction of making a pair of scissors meet through a duly resisting mass of hair. One delicious grinding snip, and then another and another, and the hinder-locks fell heavily on the floor, and Maggie stood cropped in a jagged, uneven manner, but with a sense of clearness and freedom, as if she had emerged from a wood into the open plain.

“Oh, Maggie,” said Tom, jumping round her, and slapping his knees as he laughed, “Oh, my buttons! what a queer thing you look! Look at yourself in the glass; you look like the idiot we throw out nutshells to at school.”

Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought beforehand chiefly at her own deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it, and something also of the triumph she should have over her mother and her aunts by this very decided course of action; she didn’t want her hair to look pretty⁠—that was out of the question⁠—she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl, and not to find fault with her. But now, when Tom began to laugh at her, and say she was like an idiot, the affair had quite a new aspect. She looked in the glass, and still Tom laughed and clapped his hands, and Maggie’s cheeks began to pale, and her lips to tremble a little.

“Oh, Maggie, you’ll have to go down to dinner directly,” said Tom. “Oh, my!”

“Don’t laugh at me, Tom,” said Maggie, in a passionate tone, with an outburst of angry tears, stamping, and giving him a push.

“Now, then, spitfire!” said Tom. “What did you cut it off for, then? I shall go down: I can smell the dinner going in.”

He hurried downstairs and left poor Maggie to that bitter sense of the irrevocable which