Having been given a few trinkets by a feckless lover, and dreamt of being draped in more, hanging on the arm of the young Squire, Hetty now faces her trinket-free future with dismay. Â The humble but real pleasures of a life connected with a close community now seem boring and bleak.
‘… there lay the earrings and the locket – the signs of all her short happiness – the signs of the life-long dreariness that was to follow it.’
Source: George Eliot, Adam Bede (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 (1859)), p. 379
