`Ah, there is a reason for your clinging to me, doubtless,' said Wakem, still bitterly, though Philip's last words had given him a pang - they had stirred a feeling which had been a habit for a quarter of a century.He threw himself into the chair again.
`I expected all this,' said Philip.`I know these scenes are often happening between father and son.If I were like other men of my age, I might answer your angry words by still angrier - we might part - I should marry the woman I love and have a chance of being as happy as the rest.But if it will be a satisfaction to you to annihilate the very object of everything you've done for me, you have an advantage over most fathers: you can completely deprive me of the only thing that would make my life worth having.'
Philip paused, but his father was silent.
`You know best what satisfaction you would secure beyond that of gratifying a ridiculous rancour worthy only of wandering savages.'
`Ridiculous rancour!' Wakem burst out.`What do you mean? Damn it! is a man to be horse-whipped by a boor and love him for it? Besides, there's that cold, proud devil of a son, who said a word to me I shall not forget when we had the settling.He would be as pleasant a mark for a bullet as I know - if he were worth the expense.'
`I don't mean your resentment towards them,' said Philip, who had his reasons for some sympathy with this view of Tom, `though a feeling of revenge is not worth much, that you should care to keep it.I mean your extending the enmity to a helpless girl, who was too much sense and goodness to share their narrow prejudices.She has never entered into the family quarrels.'
`What does that signify? We don't ask what a woman does - we ask whom she belongs to.It's altogether a degrading thing to you - to think of marrying old Tulliver's daughter.'
For the first time in the dialogue Philip lost some of his self control, and coloured with anger.
`Miss Tulliver,' he said, with bitter incisiveness, `has the only grounds of rank that anything but vulgar folly can suppose to belong to the middle class: she is thoroughly refined, and her friends, whatever else they may be, are respected for irreproachable honour and integrity.All St Ogg's, I fancy, would pronounce her to be more than my equal.'
Wakem darted a glance of fierce question at his son, but Philip was not looking at him, and with a certain penitent consciousness went on, in a few moments, as if in amplification of his last words:
`Find a single person in St Ogg's who will not tell you that a beautiful creature like her would be throwing herself away on a pitiable object like me.'
`Not she!' said Wakem, rising again, and forgetting everything else in a burst of resentful pride, half fatherly, half personal.`It would be a deuced fine match for her.It's all stuff about an accidental deformity, when a girl's really attached to a man.'
`But girls are not apt to get attached under those circumstances,' said Philip.
`Well, then,' said Wakem, rather brutally - trying to recover his previous position.`If she doesn't care for you, you might have spared yourself the trouble of talking to me about her - and you might have spared me the trouble of refusing my consent to what was never likely to happen.'
Wakem strode to the door, and, without looking round again, banged it after him.