MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 74

"Mercifully grant that we may grow aged together."

--BOOK OF TOBIT: Marriage Prayer.

In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town

held a bad opinion of her husband. No feminine intimate might carry

her friendship so far as to make a plain statement to the wife of the

unpleasant fact known or believed about her husband; but when a woman

with her thoughts much at leisure got them suddenly employed on

something grievously disadvantageous to her neighbors, various moral

impulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utterance.

Candor was one. To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant,

to use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you

did not take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct,

or their position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for

its opinion. Then, again, there was the love of truth--a wide phrase,

but meaning in this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife

look happier than her husband's character warranted, or manifest

too much satisfaction in her lot--the poor thing should have some hint

given her that if she knew the truth she would have less complacency

in her bonnet, and in light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger

than all, there was the regard for a friend's moral improvement,

sometimes called her soul, which was likely to be benefited by remarks

tending to gloom, uttered with the accompaniment of pensive staring

at the furniture and a manner implying that the speaker would not tell

what was on her mind, from regard to the feelings of her hearer.

On the whole, one might say that an ardent charity was at work

setting the virtuous mind to make a neighbor unhappy for her good.

There were hardly any wives in Middlemarch whose matrimonial misfortunes

would in different ways be likely to call forth more of this moral

activity than Rosamond and her aunt Bulstrode. Mrs. Bulstrode

was not an object of dislike, and had never consciously injured any

human being. Men had always thought her a handsome comfortable woman,

and had reckoned it among the signs of Bulstrode's hypocrisy that he

had chosen a red-blooded Vincy, instead of a ghastly and melancholy

person suited to his low esteem for earthly pleasure. When the scandal

about her husband was disclosed they remarked of her--"Ah, poor woman!

She's as honest as the day--_she_ never suspected anything wrong

in him, you may depend on it." Women, who were intimate with her,

talked together much of "poor Harriet," imagined what her feelings

must be when she came to know everything, and conjectured how much