The Aunts and Uncles Are ing
IT was Easter week and Mrs Tullivers cheese-cakes were more exquisitely light than usual: `a puff o wind ud make em blow about like feathers, kezia, the house-maid said, feeling proud to live under a mistress who could make such pastry; so that no season or circumstances could have been more propitious for a family party, even if it had not been advisable to sult sister Glegg and sister Pullet about Toms going to school. `Id as lief not invite sister Deahis time, said Mrs Tulliver, `for shes as jealous and having as be, and s allays trying to make the worst o my poor children to their aunts and uncles.
`Yes, yes, said Mr Tulliver. `Ask her to e. I never hardly get a bit o talk with Deane now: we havent had him this six months. Whats it matter what she says? - my children need be beholding to nobody.
`Thats what you allays say, Mr Tulliver; but Im sure theres nobody o your side, her aunt nor uo leave em so much as a five-pound note for a leggicy. And theres sister Glegg, and sister Pullet too, saving money unknown - for they put by all their own i and butter-mooo - their husbands buy em everything. Mrs Tulliver was a mild woman, but even a sheep will face about a little when she has lambs.
`Tchuh! said Mr Tulliver. `It takes a big loaf when theres many to breakfast. What signifies your sisters bits o money when theyve got half-a-dozen nevvies and o divide it among? And your sister Deane wo em to leave all to one, I re, and make the try cry shame on em when they are dead?
`I dont know what she wo em to do, said Mrs Tulliver, `for my children are so awkard wi their aunts and uncles. Maggies ten times naughtier when they e than she is other days, and Tom doesnt like em, bless him - though its more natral in a boy than a gell - And theres Lucy Deanes such a good child - you may set her on a stool, and there shell sit for an hether and never offer to get off - I t help loving the child as if she was my own, and Im sure shes more like my child than sister Deanes, for shed allays a very poor colour for one of our family, sister Deane had.
`Well, well, if youre fond o the child, ask her father and mother t her with em. And wont you ask their aunt and uncle Moss too? and some o their children?
`O dear, Mr Tulliver, why, thered be eight people besides the children, and I must put two more leaves i the table, besides reag down more o the dinner service. And you know as well as I do, as my sisters and your sister dont suit well together.
`Well, well, do as you like, Bessy, said Mr Tulliver, taking up his hat and walking out to the mill. Few wives were more submissive than Mrs Tulliver on all points unected with her family relations; but she had been a Miss Dodson, and the Dodsons were a very respectable family indeed - as much looked up to as any in their own parish or the o it. The Miss Dodsons had always been thought to hold up their heads very high, and no one was surprised the two eldest had married so well: - not at an early age, for that was not the practice of the Dodson family. There were particular ways of doing everything in that family: particu-lar ways of bleag the linen, of making the cowslip wine g the hams and keeping the bottled gooseberries, so that no daughter of that house could be indifferent to the privilege of having been born a Dodson, rather than a Gibson or a Watson. Funerals were always ducted with peculiar propriety in the Dodson family: the