Book 1 - Chapter 4

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 ran,
like a Skye terrier escaped from his bath. This attic was Maggie's
favorite retreat on a wet day, when the weather was not too cold; here
she fretted out all her ill humors, and talked aloud to the worm-eaten
floors and the worm-eaten shelves, and the dark rafters festooned with
cobwebs; and here she kept a Fetish which she punished for all her
misfortunes. This was the trunk of a large wooden doll, which once
stared with the roundest of eyes above the reddest of cheeks; but was
now entirely defaced by a long career of vicarious suffering. Three
nails driven into the head commemorated as many crises in Maggie's
nine years of earthly struggle; that luxury of vengeance having been
suggested to her by the picture of Jael destroying Sisera in the old
Bible. The last nail had been driven in with a fiercer stroke than
usual, for the Fetish on that occasion represented aunt Glegg. But
immediately afterward Maggie had reflected that if she drove many
nails in she would not be so well able to fancy that the head was hurt
when she knocked it against the wall, nor to comfort it, and make
believe to poultice it, when her fury was abated; for even aunt Glegg
would be pitiable when she had been hurt very much, and thoroughly
humiliated, so as to beg her niece's pardon. Since then she had driven
no more nails in, but had soothed herself by alternately grinding and
beating the wooden head against the rough brick of the great chimneys
that made two square