Book 4 - Chapter 2

The Torn Nest Is Pierced by the Thorns

There is something sustaining in the very agitation that accompanies
the first shocks of trouble, just as an acute pain is often a
stimulus, and produces an excitement which is transient strength. It
is in the slow, changed life that follows; in the time when sorrow has
become stale, and has no longer an emotive intensity that counteracts
its pain; in the time when day follows day in dull, unexpectant
sameness, and trial is a dreary routine,--it is then that despair
threatens; it is then that the peremptory hunger of the soul is felt,
and eye and ear are strained after some unlearned secret of our
existence, which shall give to endurance the nature of satisfaction.

This time of utmost need was come to Maggie, with her short span of
thirteen years. To the usual precocity of the girl, she added that
early experience of struggle, of conflict between the inward impulse
and outward fact, which is the lot of every imaginative and passionate
nature; and the years since she hammered the nails into her wooden
Fetish among the worm-eaten shelves of the attic had been filled with
so eager a life in the triple world of Reality, Books, and Waking
Dreams, that Maggie was strangely old for her years in everything
except in her entire want of that prudence and self-command which were
the qualities that made Tom manly in the midst of his intellectual
boyishness. And now her lot was beginning to have a still, sad
monotony, which threw her more than ever on her inward self. Her
father was able to attend to business again, his affairs were settled,
and he was acting as Wakem's manager on the old spot. Tom went to and
fro every morning and evening, and became more and more silent in the
short intervals at home; what was there to say? One day was like
another; and Tom's interest in life, driven back and crushed on every
other side, was concentrating itself into the one channel of ambitious
resistance to misfortune. The peculiarities of his father and mother
were very irksome to him, now they were laid bare of all the softening
accompaniments of an easy, prosperous home; for Tom had very clear,
prosaic eyes, not apt to be dimmed by mists of feeling or imagination.
Poor Mrs. Tulliver, it seemed, would never recover her old self, her
placid household activity; how could she? The objects among which her
mind had moved complacently were all gone,--all the little hopes and
schemes and speculations, all the pleasant little cares about her
treasures which had made the world quite comprehensible to her for a
quarter of a century, since she had made her first purchase of the
sugar-tongs, had been suddenly snatched away from her, and she
remained bewildered in this empty life. Why that should