"Under all this grim melancholy and narrowing concentration of desire, Mr Tulliver retained the feeling towards his 'little wench' which made her presence a need to him though it would not suffice to cheer him. She was still the desire of his eyes, but the sweet spring of fatherly love was now mingled with bitterness, like everything else. When Maggie laid down her work at night, it was her habit to get a low stool and sit by her father's knee, leaning her cheek against it. How she wished he would stroke her head, or give her some sign that he was soothed by the sense that he had a daughter who loved him! But now she got no answer to her little caresses, either from her father or from Tom - the two idols of her life. Tom was weary and abstracted in the short intervals when he was at home, and her father page 372 was bitterly preoccupied with the thought that the girl was growing up - was shooting up into a woman; and how was she to do well in life? She had a poor chance for marrying down in the world as they were. And he hated the thought of her marrying poorly, as her aunt Gritty had done: that would be a thing to make him turn in his grave - the little wench so pulled down by children and toil as her aunt Moss was. When uncultured minds, confined to a narrow range of personal experience, are under the pressure of continued misfortune, their inward life is apt to become a perpetually repeated round of sad and bitter thoughts: the same words, the same scenes are revolved over and over again, the same mood accompanies them -- the end of the year finds them as much what they were at the beginning as if they were machines set to a recurrent series of movements."

— Eliot, George (1819-1880)