Middlemarch

by George Eliot

But selfish people always think their own discomfort of more importance than anything else in the world: I see enough of that every day.”

“Father!” said Mary in her deepest tone of remonstrance. “Take pocketfuls of love besides to them all at home,” was her last word before he closed the outer door on himself.

blooming, full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colourless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale, fantastic world that seemed to be vanishing from the daylight.

Was it only her friends who thought her marriage unfortunate? Or did she herself find it out to be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears in the merciful silence of the night? What

is an uneasy lot at best to be what we call highly taught and yet not to enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be liberated from a small, hungry, shivering self—never to be fully possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought,

he had seen Dorothea stretching her tender arm under her husband’s neck and looking at him with unspeakable sorrow. He did not know how much penitence there was in the sorrow.

For years after, Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by this involuntary appeal—this cry from soul to soul, without other consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same embroiled medium, the same troublous, fitfully illuminated life. But what could he say now except that he should see Mr. Casaubon again tomorrow?

Poor Rosamond lost her appetite and felt as forlorn as Ariadne—as a charming stage Ariadne left behind with all her boxes full of costumes and no hope of a coach.

That moment of naturalness was the crystallizing feather-touch; it shook flirtation into love.

In half an hour he left the house an engaged man, whose soul was not his own, but the woman’s to whom he had bound himself.

man was bound to know himself better than that and if he chose to grow grey, crunching bones in a cavern, he had no business to be luring a girl into his companionship.

He did not shrug his shoulders; and for want of that muscular outlet he thought the more irritably of beautiful lips kissing holy skulls and other emptinesses ecclesiastically enshrined. Also

The bow of a violin drawn near him cleverly would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him, and his point of view shifted as easily as his mood. Dorothea’s entrance was the freshness of morning.

When the commonplace “We must all die” transforms itself suddenly into the acute consciousness “I must die—and soon,” then death grapples us, and his fingers are cruel;

She was able enough to estimate him—she who waited on his glances with trembling and shut her best soul in prison, paying it only hidden visits, that she might be petty enough to please him. In such a crisis as this, some women begin to hate.

distrusted her affection, and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?

He felt sure that she had been suffering from the strain and conflict of self-repression and that she was likely now to feel herself only in another sort of pinfold than that from which she had been released.

“No,” said Dorothea, “I shall never forget you. I have never forgotten anyone whom I once knew. My life has never been crowded, and seems not likely to be so. And I have a great deal of space for memory at Lowick, haven’t I?”

never felt it a misfortune to have nothing till now,” he said. “But poverty may be as bad as leprosy if it divides us from what we most care for.”

did not know then that it was Love who had come to her briefly, as in a dream before awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings—that it was Love to whom she was sobbing her farewell as his image was banished by the blameless rigour of irresistible day. She only felt that there was something irrevocably amiss and lost in her lot, and her thoughts about the future were the more readily shapen into resolve.

What could he say, since what had got obstinately uppermost in his mind was the passionate love for her which he forbade himself to utter?

could not deny that a secret longing for the assurance that she loved him was at the root of all his words.

have never done you injustice. Please remember me,” said Dorothea, repressing a rising sob. “Why should you say that?” said Will with irritation. “As if I were not in danger of forgetting everything else.”

She could not look back at him. It was as if a crowd of indifferent objects had thrust them asunder and forced them along different paths, taking them farther and farther away from each other and making it useless to look back.

How could he dream of her defying the barrier that her husband had placed between them? How could she ever say to herself that she would defy it?

reality, however, she was intensely aware of Lydgate’s voice and movements; and her pretty, good-tempered air of unconsciousness was a studied negation by which she satisfied her inward opposition to him without compromise of propriety.

everything which saved him and Rosamond from that bare isolation in which they would be forced to recognize how little of a comfort they could be to each other.

She disliked this cautious weighing of consequences instead of an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy, which would conquer by their emotional force.

Explain my preference! I never had a preference for her, any more than I have a preference for breathing. No other woman exists by the side of her. I would rather touch her hand if it were dead than I would touch any other woman’s living.”

made her soul totter all the more with a sense that she had been walking in an unknown world which had just broken in upon her.

had chosen this fragile creature and had taken the burden of her life upon his arms. He must walk as he could, carrying that burden pitifully.

Then they turned their faces towards each other, with the memory of his last words in them, and they did not loose each other’s hands.

Her lips trembled, and so did his. It was never known which lips were the first to move towards the other lips, but they kissed tremblingly and then they moved apart. The rain was dashing against the window-panes as if an angry spirit were within it, and behind it was the great swoop of the wind; it was one of those moments in which both the busy and the idle pause with a certain awe.

Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the aspect of illusion.

But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on un-historic acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.