
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.
 

                                  Chapter III

          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 honour 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 honour 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
