All people of broad, strong sense have an instinctive
repugnance to the men of maxims; because such people
early discern that the mysterious complexity of our
life is not to be embraced by maxims, and that to
lace ourselves up in formulas of that sort is to repress
all the divine promptings and inspirations that spring
from growing insight and sympathy. And the man
of maxims is the popular representative of the minds
that are guided in their moral judgment solely by
general rules, thinking that these will lead them to
justice by a ready-made patent method, without the
trouble of exerting patience, discrimination, impartiality,—without
any care to assure themselves whether they have the
insight that comes from a hardly earned estimate of
temptation, or from a life vivid and intense enough
to have created a wide fellow-feeling with all that
is human.
Showing That Old Acquaintances Are Capable of Surprising
Us
When Maggie was at home again, her mother brought
her news of an unexpected line of conduct in aunt
Glegg. As long as Maggie had not been heard of,
Mrs. Glegg had half closed her shutters and drawn down
her blinds. She felt assured that Maggie was drowned;
that was far more probable than that her niece and
legatee should have done anything to wound the family
honor in the tenderest point. When at last she
learned from Tom that Maggie had come home, and gathered
from him what was her explanation of her absence,
she burst forth in severe reproof of Tom for admitting
the worst of his sister until he was compelled.
If you were not to stand by your “kin”
as long as there was a shred of honor attributable
to them, pray what were you to stand by? Lightly
to admit conduct in one of your own family that would
force you to alter your will, had never been the way
of the Dodsons; and though Mrs. Glegg had always augured
ill of Maggie’s future at a time when other
people were perhaps less clear-sighted, yet fair play
was a jewel, and it was not for her own friends to
help to rob the girl of her fair fame, and to cast
her out from family shelter to the scorn of the outer
world, until she had become unequivocally a family
disgrace. The circumstances were unprecedented
in Mrs. Glegg’s experience; nothing of that
kind had happened among the Dodsons before; but it
was a case in which her hereditary rectitude and personal
strength of character found a common channel along
with her fundamental ideas of clanship, as they did
in her lifelong regard to equity in money matters.
She quarrelled with Mr. Glegg, whose kindness, flowing
entirely into compassion for Lucy, made him as hard
in his judgment of Maggie as Mr. Deane himself was;
and fuming against her sister Tulliver because she
did not at once come to her for advice and help, shut
herself up in her own room with Baxter’s “Saints’
Rest” from morning till night, denying herself
to all visitors, till Mr. Glegg brought from Mr. Deane
