Margaret's Final Farewell — North and South

The chapter of departure. Aunt Shaw manages the logistics of leaving Milton with her characteristic combination of genuine affection and social efficiency; she has never understood why Milton was interesting and she sees the departure as entirely straightforwardly good. Margaret understands that tomorrow will be the hardest part and says so quietly, in a sentence that her aunt receives as manageable rather than as the small revelation it is. The farewells are the chapter's emotional substance. Thornton is present in a formal capacity at the departure but the full weight of what this means for him cannot be expressed in the social context of a carriage pulling away. The farewell to Higgins is different: he says goodbye in his dialect, with the only words adequate to the feeling, a repeated blessing and an amen, and the chapter closes with the unadorned simplicity of that. The meanest thing loses its meanness in the parting hour. What Milton was, with all its difficulty, is also what Margaret is. She is leaving a place she arrived in resisting and is leaving as someone who was partly made there.