In another story we are introduced to some “pious Dissenting women, who took life patiently, and thought that salvation depended chiefly on predestination, and not at all on cleanliness.”[433] In a higher social class this innocence of the connection between effort and achievement leads to the fatuous complacency from which Gwendolen Harleth was aroused by the cruel shock of being told the truth about her musical abilities:[434] “She had moved in a society where everything, from low arithmetic to high art, is of the amateur kind politely supposed to fall short of perfection only because gentlemen and ladies are not obliged to do more than they like--otherwise they would probably give forth abler writings and show themselves more commanding artists than any the world is at present obliged to put up with.” Another busy circle had made two important discoveries: the superiority of the probable over the actual; and the advantage of a well-chosen nomenclature, whereby a taste for cruelty may be gratified by the simple device of calling it kindness. The first was made over the gossip about Bulstrode:[435] “Everybody liked better to conjecture how the thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the incompatible.” The second developed in a later phase of the same affair:[436] “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 candour never waited to be asked for its opinion.” It was because of this understanding of the limitless possibilities and universal prevalence of self-deception that Meredith was able to see the absurdity in egoism, which is the form of the malady induced by vanity. And this perception, as a modern critic observes, is the source of the contrast between two well-known egoists,--Sir Charles Grandison and Sir Willoughby Patterne:[437] “Both, superficially viewed, are the same type: a male paragon before whom a bevy of women burn incense. But O the difference! Grandison is serious to his author, while Meredith, in skinning Willoughby alive like another Marsyas, is once and for all making the worship of the ego hateful.” If one should ask, remembering the necessity for self-assertion in the exacting requirements of our human destiny, why so indispensable a thing as egoism should be ridiculous, Meredith has his answer ready:[438] “Nay, to be an exalted variety is to come under the calm curious eye of the comic spirit, and to be probed for what you are.” It is in “imposing figures” that the malign imps “love to uncover ridiculousness.” Moreover,--[439] “They dare not be chuckling while Egoism is valiant, while sober, while socially valuable, nationally serviceable. They wait.”