Middlemarch

Fred arrives at Stone Court having left his horse in the yard to avoid the sound on the gravel. Mary is in her usual corner, laughing over Mrs. Piozzi's recollections of Johnson. The laughter fades as she sees him stand before her, silent, looking ill. "Mary," he begins. "I am a good-for-nothing blackguard." She tells him she would rather know the painful truth than imagine it. He tells her everything — the bill, Caleb's signature, the horse accident, the fifty pounds. Her first words are not for Fred: "Oh, poor mother, poor father!" She fills with tears, looking straight before her. Then she recovers and is hard. He pleads unluckiness. She replies: "I know that people who spend a great deal of money on themselves without knowing how they shall pay, must be selfish." He compares himself to Caleb, who also got into financial trouble once. Her voice drops to deep indignation: "How dare you make any comparison between my father and you?... He never got into trouble by thinking of his own idle pleasures, but because he was always thinking of the work he was doing for other people." Fred threatens to leave and never speak to her again. She looks up, sees how ill he looks, and feels something maternal — "the instantaneous pang... something like what a mother feels at the imagined sobs or cries of her naughty truant child." Her pity surmounts her anger. She asks him to stay, to see his uncle. He presses for one word of encouragement. She gives him instead a sarcastic vision of his future as a forty-year-old idler: "fat and shabby, hoping somebody will invite you to dinner—spending your morning in... learning a tune on the flute." Her lips are curling even as she says it. It is the cessation of an ache to him that she can still laugh. After Fred has gone up to visit Featherstone, Caleb arrives at dusk. Father and daughter move into a cold, dark parlor with one candle, and Mary puts her arms around her father's neck and kisses him "with childish kisses which he delighted in." He asks for her savings: she already has them ready in her reticule — more than twenty-four pounds. Then he gently warns her about Fred. She answers: "I will never engage myself to one who has no manly independence, and who goes on loitering away his time on the chance that others will provide for him. You and my mother have taught me too much pride for that."