A Matter of Private Judgment

An excerpt from George Eliot's "The Mill on the Floss"  that caught this author's eye in the reading. 

Mr. Tulliver did not willingly write a letter, and found the relation between spoken and written language, briefly known as spelling, one of the most puzzling things in this puzzling world. Nevertheless, like all fervid writing, the task was done in less time than usual, and if the spelliing differed  from Mrs. Glegg's---why she belonged, like himself, to a generation with whom spelling was a matter of private judgment.