Book 1 - Chapter 9

To Garum Firs

While the possible troubles of Maggie's future were occupying her
father's mind, she herself was tasting only the bitterness of the
present. Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed by no
memories of outlived sorrow.

The fact was, the day had begun ill with Maggie. The pleasure of
having Lucy to look at, and the prospect of the afternoon visit to
Garum Firs, where she would hear uncle Pullet's musical box, had been
marred as early as eleven o'clock by the advent of the hair-dresser
from St. Ogg's, who had spoken in the severest terms of the condition
in which he had found her hair, holding up one jagged lock after
another and saying, "See here! tut, tut, tut!" in a tone of mingled
disgust and pity, which to Maggie's imagination was equivalent to the
strongest expression of public opinion. Mr. Rappit, the hair-dresser,
with his well-anointed coronal locks tending wavily upward, like the
simulated pyramid of flame on a monumental urn, seemed to her at that
moment the most formidable of her contemporaries, into whose street at
St. Ogg's she would carefully refrain from entering through the rest
of her life.

Moreover, the preparation for a visit being always a serious affair in
the Dodson family, Martha was enjoined to have Mrs. Tulliver's room
ready an hour earlier than usual, that the laying out of the best
clothes might not be deferred till the last moment, as was sometimes
the case in families of lax views, where the ribbon-strings were never
rolled up, where there was little or no wrapping in silver paper, and
where the sense that the Sunday clothes could be got at quite easily
produced no shock to the mind. Already, at twelve o'clock, Mrs.
Tulliver had on her visiting costume, with a protective apparatus of
brown holland, as if she had been a piece of satin furniture in danger
of flies; Maggie was frowning and twisting her shoulders, that she
might if possible shrink away from the prickliest of tuckers, while
her mother was remonstrating, "Don't, Maggie, my dear; don't make
yourself so ugly!" and Tom's cheeks were looking particularly
brilliant as a relief to his best blue suit, which he wore with
becoming calmness, having, after a little wrangling, effected what was
always the one point of interest to him in his toilet: he had
transferred all the contents of his every-day pockets to those
actually in wear.

As for Lucy, she was just as pretty and neat as she had been
yesterday; no accidents ever happened to her clothes, and she was
never uncomfortable in them, so that she looked with wondering pity at
Maggie, pouting and writhing under the exasperating tucker. Maggie
would certainly have torn it off, if she had not been checked by the