stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the
three words which have been used so often as the inspiring
trumpet-calls of men,--the words _God_, _Immortality_,
_Duty_,--pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable
was the _first_, how unbelievable the _second_, and yet how
peremptory and absolute the _third_. Never, perhaps, had sterner
accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing
law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance
turned toward me like a Sibyl's in the gloom; it was as though
she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of
promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable
fates.

To many, the relation which was the most important event in George
Eliot's life will seem one of those irretrievable errors which reduce
all talk of duty to a mockery. It is inevitable that this should be so,
and those who disregard a social law have little right to complain. Men
and women whom in every other respect it would be monstrous to call bad,
have taken this particular law into their own hands before now, and
committed themselves to conduct of which 'magnanimity owes no account to
prudence.' But if they had sense and knew what they were about, they
have braced themselves to endure the disapproval of a majority
fortunately more prudential than themselves. The world is busy, and its
instruments are clumsy. It cannot know all the facts; it has neither
time nor material for unravelling all the complexities of motive, or for
distinguishing mere libertinage from grave and deliberate moral
misjudgment; it is protecting itself as much as it is condemning the
offenders. On all this, then, we need have neither sophistry nor cant.
But those who seek something deeper than a verdict for the honest
working purpose of leaving cards and inviting to dinner, may feel, as