Page:Eliot - Felix Holt, the Radical, vol. II, 1866.djvu/123

Rh sion, and were shining with some mildness on little Job, who had turned round towards her, propping his head against Felix.

"Well, why shouldn't I be motherly to the child, Miss Lyon?" said Mrs Holt, whose strong powers of argument required the file of an imagined contradiction, if there were no real one at hand. "I never was heard-hearted, and I never will be. It was Felix picked the child up and took to him, you may be sure, for there's nobody else master where he is; but I wasn't going to beat the orphin child and abuse him because of that, and him as straight as an arrow when he's stript, and me so fond of children, and only had one of my own to live. I'd three babies, Miss Lyon, but the blessed Lord only spared Felix, and him the masterfullest and the brownest of 'em all. But I did my duty by him, and I said, he'll have more schooling than his father, and he'll grow up a doctor, and marry a woman with money to furnish—as I was myself, spoons and everything—and I shall have the grandchildren to look up to me, and be drove out in the gig sometimes, like old Mrs Lukyn. And you see what it's all come to, Miss Lyon: here's Felix made a common man of himself, and says he'll never be married—which is the most unreasonable thing, and him never easy