`O, if I could but stop here!' said Maggie.`I have no heart to begin a strange life again.I should have no stay.I should feel like a lonely wanderer - cut off from the past.I have written to the lady who offered me a situation to excuse myself.If I remained here, I could perhaps atone in some way to Lucy - to others - I could convince them that I'm sorry.
And,' she added, with some of the old proud fire flashing out, `I will not go away because people say false things of me.They shall learn to retract them.If I must go away at last, because - because others wish it, I will not go now.'
`Well,' said Dr Kenn, after some consideration, `if you determine on that, Miss Tulliver, you may rely on all the influence my position gives me.I am bound to aid and countenance you, by the very duties of my office as a parish priest.I will add, that personally I have a deep interest in your peace of mind and welfare.'
`The only thing I want is some occupation that will enable me to get my bread and be independent,' said Maggie.`I shall not want much.I can go on lodging where I am.'
`I must think over the subject maturely,' said Dr Kenn, `And in a few days I shall be better able to ascertain the general feeling.I shall come to see you: I shall bear you constantly in mind.'
When Maggie had left him, Dr Kenn stood ruminating with his hands behind him, and his eyes fixed on the carpet, under a painful sense of doubt and difficulty.The tone of Stephen's letter, which he had read, and the actual relations of all the persons concerned, forced upon him powerfully the idea of an ultimate marriage between Stephen and Maggie as the least evil;and the impossibility of their proximity in St Ogg's on any other supposition, until after years of separation, threw an insurmountable prospective difficulty over Maggie's stay here.On the other hand, he entered with all the comprehension of a man who had known spiritual conflict and lived through years of devoted service to his fellow-men, into that state of Maggie's heart and conscience which made this consent to the marriage a desecration to her: her conscience must not be tampered with: the principle on which she had acted was a safer guide than any balancing of consequences.His experience told him that intervention was too dubious a responsibility to be lightly incurred: the possible issue either of an endeavour to restore the former relations with Lucy and Philip, or of counselling submission to this irruption of a new feeling was hidden in a darkness all the more impenetrable because each immediate step was clogged with evil.
The great problem of the shifting relation between passion and duty is clear to no man who is capable of apprehending it: the question, whether the moment has come in which a man has fallen below the possibility of a renunciation that will carry any efficacy, and must accept the sway of a passion against which he had struggled as a trespass, is one for which we have no master key that will fit all cases.The casuists have become a by-word of reproach; but their perverted spirit of minute discrimination was the shadow of a truth to which eyes and hearts are too often fatally sealed: the truth, that moral judgments must remain false and hollow, unless they are checked and enlightened by a perpetual reference to the special circumstances that mark the individual lot.
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.