Then,
perhaps, Ladislaw would have been her first husband instead of her
second, as he certainly was her first and only love. Such are the
chances and mischances in the lottery of matrimony.

Equally admirable is the diagnosis of Gwendolen Harleth's motives in
"drifting toward the tremendous decision," and finally landing in it.
"We became poor, and I was tempted." Marriage came to her as it comes to
many, as a temptation, and like the deadening drug or the maddening bowl,
to keep off the demon of remorse or the cloud of sorrow, like the forgery
or the robbery to save from want. "The brilliant position she had longed
for, the imagined freedom she would create for herself in
marriage"--these "had come to her hunger like food, with the taint of
sacrilege upon it," which she "snatched with terror." Grandcourt
"fulfilled his side of the bargain by giving her the rank and luxuries
she coveted." Matrimony as a bargain never had and never will have but
one result. "She had a root of conscience in her, and the process of
purgatory had begun for her on earth." Without the root of conscience it
would have been purgatory all the same. So much for resorting to
marriage for deliverance from poverty or old maidhood. Better be an old
maid than an old fool. But how are we to be guaranteed against "one of
those convulsive motiveless actions by which wretched men and women leap
from a temporary sorrow into a lifelong misery?" Rosamond Lydgate says,
"Marriage stays with us like a murder." Yes, if she could only have
found that out before instead of after her own marriage!

But "what greater thing," exclaims our novelist, "is there for two human
souls than to feel that they are joined for life, to strengthen each
other in all labor, to minister to each other in all pain, to be one with
each other in silent, unspeakable memories at the last parting?"

While a large proportion of her work in the analysis of motives is
confined to woman, she has done nothing more skilful or memorable than
the "unravelling" of Bulstrode's mental processes by which he "explained
the gratification of his desires into satisfactory agreement with his
beliefs." If there were no Dorothea in "Middlemarch" the character of
Bulstrode would give that novel a place by itself among the masterpieces
of fiction. The Bulstrode wound was never probed in fiction with more
scientific precision. The pious villain finally finds himself so near
discovery that he