While the possible troubles of Maggie’s future were occupying her father’s mind, she herself was tasting only the bitterness of the present. Childhood has no forebodings; but then, it is soothed¹ by no memories of outlived sorrow.

The fact was, the day had begun ill with Maggie. The pleasure of having Lucy to look at, and the prospect² of the afternoon visit to Garum Firs, where she would hear uncle Pullet’s musical box, had been marred³ as early as eleven o’clock by the advent⁴ of the hair-dresser from St. Ogg’s, who had spoken in the severest terms of the condition in which he had found her hair, holding up one jagged lock after another and saying, “See here! tut, tut, tut!” in a tone of mingled⁵ disgust and pity, which to Maggie’s imagination was equivalent to the strongest expression of public opinion. Mr. Rappit, the hair-dresser, with his well-anointed coronal locks tending wavily⁶ upward, like the simulated pyramid of flame on a monumental urn⁷, seemed to her at that moment the most formidable of her contemporaries, into whose street at St. Ogg’s she would carefully refrain from entering through the rest of her life.

Moreover, the preparation for a visit being always a serious affair in the Dodson family, Martha was enjoined⁸ to have Mrs. Tulliver’s room ready an hour earlier than usual, that the laying out of the best clothes might not be deferred⁹ till the last moment, as was sometimes the case in families of lax views, where the ribbon-strings were never rolled up, where there was little or no wrapping in silver paper, and where the sense that the Sunday clothes could be got at quite easily produced no shock to the mind. Already, at twelve o’clock, Mrs. Tulliver had on her visiting costume, with a protective

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