-wine, did a little amateur farming, and had certainly been an excellent
husband and father: at church, when he went there, he sat under the handsomest
of mural monuments erected to the memory of his wife. Most men would have
married again under his circumstances, but he was said to be more tender to his
deformed son than most men were to their best-shapen offspring. Not that Mr.
Wakem had not other sons besides Philip; but towards them he held only a
chiaroscuro parentage, and provided for them in a grade of life duly beneath his
own. In this fact, indeed, there lay the clenching motive to the purchase of
Dorlcote Mill. While Mrs. Tulliver was talking, it had occurred to the
rapid-minded lawyer, among all the other circumstances of the case, that this
purchase would, in a few years to come, furnish a highly suitable position for a
certain favourite lad whom he meant to bring on in the world.
    These were the mental conditions on which Mrs. Tulliver had undertaken to
act persuasively, and had failed: a fact which may receive some illustration
from the remark of a great philosopher, that fly-fishers fail in preparing their
bait so as to make it alluring in the right quarter, for want of a due
acquaintance with the subjectivity of fishes.
 

                                  Chapter VIII

                             Daylight on the Wreck

It was a clear frosty January day on which Mr. Tulliver first came down-stairs:
the bright sun on the chestnut boughs and the roofs opposite his window had made
him impatiently declare that he would be caged up no longer: he thought
everywhere would be more cheery under this sunshine than his bedroom; for he
knew nothing of the bareness below, which made the flood of sunshine
importunate, as if it had an unfeeling pleasure in showing the empty places, and
the marks where well-known objects once had been. The impression on his mind
that it was but yesterday when he received the letter from Mr. Gore was so
continually implied in his talk, and the attempts to convey to him the idea that
many weeks had passed and much had happened since then, had been so soon swept
away by recurrent for-getfulness, that even Mr. Turnbull had begun to despair of
preparing him to meet the facts by previous knowledge. The full sense of the
present could only be imparted gradually by new experience - not by mere words,
which must remain weaker than the impressions left by the old experience. This
resolution to come down-stairs was heard with trembling by the wife and
children. Mrs. Tulliver said Tom must not go
