Owing to this new adjustment of Mrs. Glegg’s thoughts, Mrs. Pullet found her task of mediation¹ the next day surprisingly easy. Mrs. Glegg, indeed checked her rather sharply for thinking it would be necessary to tell her elder sister what was the right mode of behavior in family matters. Mrs. Pullet’s argument, that it would look ill in the neighborhood if people should have it in their power to say that there was a quarrel in the family, was particularly offensive. If the family name never suffered except through Mrs. Glegg, Mrs. Pullet might lay her head on her pillow in perfect confidence.

“It’s not to be expected, I suppose,” observed Mrs. Glegg, by way of winding³ up the subject, “as I shall go to the mill again before Bessy comes to see me, or as I shall go and fall down o’ my knees to Mr. Tulliver, and ask his pardon for showing him favors; but I shall bear no malice⁴, and when Mr. Tulliver speaks civil to me, I’ll speak civil to him. Nobody has any call to tell me what’s becoming.”

Finding it unnecessary to plead for the Tullivers, it was natural that aunt Pullet should relax a little in her anxiety for them, and recur⁵ to the annoyance⁶ she had suffered yesterday from the offspring of that apparently⁷ ill-fated house. Mrs. Glegg heard a circumstantial narrative⁸, to which Mr. Pullet’s remarkable⁹ memory furnished some items; and while aunt Pullet pitied poor Bessy’s bad luck with her children, and expressed a half-formed project of paying for Maggie’s being sent to a distant boarding-school, which would not prevent her being so brown, but might tend to subdue¹⁰ some other

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