Especially her friends in Coventry were annoyed at such a marriage, and
were not reconciled with her for a long time, and not until they saw that
she had acted with a conscientious purpose. She was excluded from society
by this act, and her marriage was interpreted as a gross violation of
social morality. To a sensitive nature, as hers assuredly was, and to one
who so much valued the confidence of her friends as she did, such exclusion
must have been a serious cross. She freely elected her own course in life,
however, and she never seems to have complained at the results it brought
her. That it saddened her mind seems probable, but there is no outward
evidence that she accepted her lot in a bitter or complaining spirit. No
one could have written of love and marriage in so high and pure a spirit as
everywhere appears in her books with whom passion was in any degree a
controlling influence. In _Adam Bede_ her own conception of wedded love is
expressed out of the innermost convictions and impulses of her own heart,
when she exclaims,--

What greater thing is there for two human souls, than to feel that they
are joined for life--to strengthen each other in all labor, to rest on
each other in all sorrow, to minister to each other in all pain, to be
one with each other in silent unspeakable memories at the moment of the
last parting.

In _Felix Holt_ there is a passage on this subject which must have come
directly from her own experience, and it gives us a true insight into the
spirit in which she accepted the distrust of friends and the coldness of
the world which her marriage brought her.

A supreme love, a motive that gives a sublime rhythm to a woman's life,
and exalts habit into partnership with the soul's highest needs, is not
to be had when and how she will: to know that high initiation, she must