 an opinion
at all, it is mere stupidity not to do it with an air of conviction and
well-founded knowledge. You make it your own in uttering it, and naturally get
fond of it. Thus, Mr. Riley, knowing no harm of Stelling to begin with, and
wishing him well, so far as he had any wishes at all concerning him, had no
sooner recommended him than he began to think with admiration of a man
recommended on such high authority, and would soon have gathered so warm an
interest on the subject, that if Mr. Tulliver had in the end declined to send
Tom to Stelling, Mr. Riley would have thought his »friend of the old school« a
thoroughly pig-headed fellow.
    If you blame Mr. Riley very severely for giving a recommendation on such
slight grounds, I must say you are rather hard upon him. Why should an
auctioneer and appraiser thirty years ago, who had as good as forgotten his
free-school Latin, be expected to manifest a delicate scrupulosity which is not
always exhibited by gentlemen of the learned professions, even in our present
advanced stage of morality?
    Besides, a man with the milk of human kindness in him can scarcely abstain
from doing a good-natured action, and one cannot be good-natured all round.
Nature herself occasionally quarters an inconvenient parasite on an animal
towards whom she has otherwise no ill-will. What then? We admire her care for
the parasite. If Mr. Riley had shrunk from giving a recommendation that was not
based on valid evidence, he would not have helped Mr. Stelling to a paying
pupil, and that would not have been so well for the reverend gentleman.
Consider, too, that all the pleasant little dim ideas and complacencies - of
standing well with Timpson, of dispensing advice when he was asked for it, of
impressing his friend Tulliver with additional respect, of saying something, and
saying it emphatically, with other inappreciably minute ingredients that went
along with the warm hearth and the brandy-and-water to make up Mr. Riley's
consciousness on this occasion - would have been a mere blank.
 

                                   Chapter IV

                                Tom Is Expected

It was a heavy disappointment to Maggie that she was not allowed to go with her
father in the gig when he went to fetch Tom home from the academy; but the
morning was too wet, Mrs. Tulliver said, for a little girl to go out in her best
bonnet. Maggie took the opposite view very strongly, and it was a direct
consequence of this difference of opinion that when her mother was in
