Aside from Dickens, the only artist much interested in this stratum of human nature is the one who has given us Mrs. Tulliver and Mrs. Vincy and her daughter, but they are not real sources of trouble, except Rosamund, and her failure is more spiritual than material. Mrs. Tulliver, a plaintive, hopelessly literal soul, is distressed over her husband’s metaphoric speech about “a good wagoner with a mole on his face.” She resents feebly the dogmatizing of the majestic Mrs. Glegg, but would never go “to the length of quarreling with her any more than a water-fowl that puts out its leg in a deprecating manner can be said to quarrel with a boy who throws stones.” Under another metaphor she is an amiable fish, which, “after running her head against the same resisting medium for thirteen years, would go at it again today with undiluted alacrity.”[365] Out of her saddening experience Rosamund did emerge somewhat wiser, but with none of the higher wisdom which constitutes character. “She simply continued to be mild in her temper, inflexible in her judgment, disposed to admonish her husband, and also to frustrate him by stratagem.”[366] The other section of this class most fully recruited is made up of the foolish young men. It might look as though in the novelist’s world masculine folly were a malady incident to youth, while on the other hand, the feminine sort appeared late. For it happens that Lydia and Kitty Bennet have no real successors. There are indeed plenty of Hetty Sorrels, Lucy Deanes, Rosa Mackenzies, Amelia Sedleys, Dahlia Flemings; but their innocence and pathos protect them from satire. And the merely vapid and vain school girl is apparently too worthless a figure to be given a place on Victorian pages. So also seems the man whose mental growth has not kept pace with the years. Mr. Micawber may be taken as the exception that proves the rule. Sir Lukin Dunstane likewise shows that one may reach man’s estate and flourish therein on a small allotment of intelligence. He makes his best record in a gossipy little conversation with his wife, to whom he is giving an account of the Dacier-Asper wedding. Emmy had commented on the eloquence of his report:[367] “He murmured something in praise of the institution of marriage--when celebrated impressively, it seemed. “‘Tony calls the social world the “theater of appetites,” as we have it at present,’ she said; ‘and the world at a wedding is, one may reckon, in the second act in the hungry tragi-comedy.’ “‘Yes, there’s the breakfast,’ Sir Lukin assented. Mrs. Fryar-Gunnett was much more intelligible to him; in fact, quite so, as to her speech.”