Mr Tulliver Shows His Weaker Side
`SUPPOSE sister Glegg should call her money in - it ud be very awkward for you to have to raise five hundred pounds now, said Mrs Tulliver to her husband that evening, as she took a plaintive review of the day. Mrs Tulliver had lived thirteen years with her husband, yet she retained in all the freshness of her early married life a facility of saying things which drove him in the opposite dire to the one she desired. Some minds are wonderful for keeping their bloom in this way, as a patriarchal gold-fish apparently retains to the last its youthful illusion that it swim in a straight line beyond the encirg glass. Mrs Tulliver was an amiable fish of this kind, and after running her head against the same resisting medium for thirteen years would go at it again to-day with undulled alacrity.
This observation of hers tended directly to vince Mr Tulliver that it would not be at all awkward for him to raise five hundred pounds, and when Mrs Tulliver became rather pressing to know how he would raise it without ming the mill and the house which he had said he never would me, sinoeople were none so ready to lend money without security, Mr Tulliver, getting warm, declared that Mrs Glegg might do as she liked about calling in her money - he should pay it in, whether or not. He was not going to be beholding to his wifes sisters. When a man had married into a family where there was a whole litter of women, he might have plenty to put up with if he choose. But Mr Tulliver did not choose.
Mrs Tulliver cried a little in a trig quiet way as she put on her nightcap; but presently sank into a fortable sleep, lulled by the thought that she would talk everything over with her sister Pullet tomorrow when she was to take the children to Garum Firs to tea. Not that she looked forward to any distinct issue from that talk, but it seemed impossible that past events should be so obstinate as to remain unmodified when they were plained against.
Her husband lay awake rather longer, for he too was thinking of a visit he would pay on the morrow, and his ideas on the subject were not of so vague and soothing a kind as those of his amiable partner.
Mr Tulliver, when uhe influence of a strong feeling, had a promptitude in a that may seem insistent with that painful sense of the plicated puzzling nature of human affairs under which his more dispassionate deliberations were ducted; but it is really not improbable that there was a direct relatioween these apparently tradictory phenomena, since I have observed that fetting a strong impression that a skein is tahere is nothing like snatg hastily at a sihread. It was owing to this promptitude that Mr Tulliver was on horse-back soon after dihe day - (he was not dyspeptic) - on his way to Basset to see his sister Moss and her husband. For having made up his mind irrevocably that he would pay Mrs Glegg her loan of five hundred pounds, it naturally occurred to him that he had a promissory note for three hundred pounds lent to his brother-in-law Moss, and if said brother-in-law could mao pay in the money within a given time, it would go far to lessen the fallacious air of invenience which Mr Tullivers spirited step might have worn in the eyes of eople who require to know precisely how a thing is to be done before they are strongly fident that it will be easy.
For Mr Tulliver was in a positioher new nor striking but, like other everyday things, sure to have a