“Go and speak to your aunts and uncles, my dears,” said Mrs Tulliver, looking anxious and melancholy. She wanted to whisper to Maggie a command to go and have her hair brushed.
“Well, and how do you do? And I hope you’re good children, are you?” said Aunt Glegg, in the same loud, emphatic way, as she took their hands, hurting them with her large rings, and kissing their cheeks much against their desire. “Look up, Tom, look up. Boys as go to boarding-schools should hold their heads up. Look at me now.” Tom declined that pleasure apparently, for he tried to draw his hand away. “Put your hair behind your ears, Maggie, and keep your frock on your shoulder.”
Aunt Glegg always spoke to them in this loud, emphatic way, as if she considered them deaf, or perhaps rather idiotic; it was a means, she thought, of making them feel that they were accountable creatures, and might be a salutary check on naughty tendencies. Bessy’s children were so spoiled—they’d need have somebody to make them feel their duty.
“Well, my dears,” said aunt Pullet, in a compassionate voice, “you grow wonderful fast. I doubt they’ll outgrow their strength,” she added, looking over their heads, with a melancholy expression, at their mother. “I think the gell has too much hair. I’d have it thinned and cut shorter, sister, if I was you; it isn’t good for her health. It’s that as makes her skin so brown, I shouldn’t wonder. Don’t you think so, sister Deane?”
“I can’t say, I’m sure, sister,” said Mrs Deane, shutting her lips close again, and looking at Maggie with a critical eye.
“No, no,” said Mr Tulliver, “the child’s healthy enough; there’s nothing ails her. There’s red wheat as well as white, for that matter, and some like the dark grain best. But it ’ud be as well if Bessy ’ud have the child’s hair cut, so as it ’ud lie smooth.”
A dreadful resolve was gathering in Maggie’s breast, but it was arrested by the desire to know from her aunt Deane whether she would leave Lucy behind. Aunt Deane would hardly ever let Lucy come to see them. After various reasons for refusal, Mrs Deane appealed to Lucy herself.
“You wouldn’t like to stay behind without mother, should you, Lucy?”
“Yes, please, mother,” said Lucy, timidly, blushing very pink all over her little neck.
“Well done, Lucy! Let her stay, Mrs Deane, let her stay,” said Mr Deane, a large but alert-looking man, with a type of physique to be seen in all ranks of English society,—bald crown, red whiskers, full forehead, and general solidity without heaviness. You may see noblemen like Mr Deane, and you may see grocers or day-labourers like him; but the keenness of his brown eyes was less common than his contour.