Good Work and Second Chances — Middlemarch

Eliot shifts to Caleb Garth's breakfast table, where nine costly letters arrive and Caleb reads over forgotten tea while Letty snatches unbroken seals. Mary has decided on a school at York: thirty-five pounds a year plus pay for teaching the smallest piano strummers. She dislikes schoolrooms and prefers the outside world, a very inconvenient fault in her mother's eyes.

Alfred calls the duty nasty and is corrected; he kisses Mary and calls her an old brick while she hides tears. Then Caleb reads Sir James's letter and laughs with joyous surprise. Brooke, through Sir James, asks him to resume the Tipton agency and manage Freshitt as well; the double post would bring between four and five hundred pounds.

Mrs. Garth tells the children their father is wanted again by those who once dismissed him twelve years ago. Caleb tells Mary to write and give up the school. He speaks of crop rotation, brick from Bott's corner, new tenant agreements, and says he would sooner have this honorable work than a fortune: it is a great gift of God, Susan, to manage land honestly for Brooke and Sir James after years of being passed over.

Evening brings Farebrother as envoy for Fred Vincy, too ashamed of the Garth debt to say good-by in person. Caleb waves the loss aside: they have had the pinch and got over it, and a boy's shame is not worth Mary's tears. With Mary out of the room Caleb reveals Featherstone's midnight attempt to make Mary burn the later will; if she had obeyed, Fred would have inherited ten thousand pounds. Mary was right, yet feels as if she broke another person's property while defending herself. Caleb wants to offer Fred work under him; Susan warns the Vincys will think they want Fred for Mary, and Caleb calls that improper pride unworthy of honest land work and a daughter's future. Almost in passing he mentions Bulstrode hiring him to value land Rigg Featherstone may sell, land the old man always meant for Fred and that will soon tie the Garths to Bulstrode's fever-hospital ambitions without their knowing it yet.