Dental expedition

You would have thought I was taking her to some kind of torture chamber; for some people, a trip to the dentist is that, if only due to the build-up of anxiety beforehand. "I thought at almost age 90, I wouldn't have to go any more," said my mother. Would that there were some way to guarantee that, but teeth don't endure without help.
There was a small volume of Eliot left as yet unread on the bedside table, Scenes of Clerical Life, her first published fiction. In the first piece, titled "The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton", here's some of that swell stuff I've enjoyed all summer: "Mr. Pilgrim generally spoke with an intermittent kind of splutter; indeed, one of his patients had observed that it was a pity such a clever man had a 'pediment' in his speech. But when he came to what he conceived the pith of his argument or the point of his joke, he mouthed out his words with slow emphasis; as a hen, when advertising her accouchement, passes at irregular intervals from pianissimo semi-quavers to fortissimo crotchets."