But one knows a person with whom one has passed even that short time under the same roof far better than can ever be the result of a very much longer acquaintanceship during which one meets only in the ordinary intercourse of society. And the really intimate knowledge of her which I was thus enabled to obtain has left with me the abiding conviction that she was intellectually by far the most extraordinarily gifted person it has ever been my good fortune to meet. I do not insist much on the uniform and constant tender consideration for others, which was her habitual frame of mind, for I have known others of whom the same might have been said. It is true that it is easy for those in the enjoyment of that vigorous health, which renders mere living a pleasure, to be kindly; and that George Eliot was never betrayed by suffering, however protracted and severe, into the smallest manifestation of impatience or unkindly feeling. But neither is this trained excellence of charity matchless among women. What was truly, in my experience, matchless, was simply the power of her intelligence; the precision, the promptitude, the rapidity (though her manner was by no means rapid), the largeness of the field of knowledge, the compressed outcome of which she was at any moment ready to bring to bear on the topic in hand; the sureness and lucidity of her induction; the clearness of vision, to which muddle was as impossible and abhorrent as a vacuum is supposed to be to nature; and all this lighted up and gilded by an infinite sense of, and capacity for, humour,--this was what rendered her to me a marvel, and an object of inexhaustible study and admiration. To me, though I never passed half an hour in conversation with her without a renewed perception of the vastness of the distance which separated her intelligence from mine, she was a companion each minute of intercourse with whom was a delight. But I can easily understand that, despite her perfect readiness to place herself for the nonce on the intellectual level of those with whom she chanced to be brought in contact, her society may not have been agreeable to all. I remember a young lady--by no means a stupid or unintelligent one--telling me that being with George Eliot always gave her a pain in "her mental neck," just as an hour passed in a picture gallery did to her physical neck. She was fatigued by the constant attitude of looking up. But had she not been an intelligent girl, she need not have constantly looked up. It would be a great mistake to suppose that George Eliot's mental habits exacted such an attitude from those she conversed with.