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 becomes conscientious. “His equivocation now turns venomously upon him with the full-grown fang of a discovered lie.” The past came back to make the present unendurable. “The terror of being judged sharpens the memory.” Once more “he saw himself the banker’s clerk, as clever in figures as he was fluent in speech, and fond of theological definition. He had striking experience in conviction and sense of pardon; spoke in prayer-meeting and on religious platforms. That was the time he would have chosen now to awake in and find the rest of dream. He remembered his first moments of shrinking. They were private and were filled with arguments—some of these taking the form of prayer.”