ought.

Sir James never ceased to regard Dorothea's second marriage as a
mistake; and indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in
Middlemarch, where she was spoken of to a younger generation as a fine
girl who married a sickly clergyman, old enough to be her father, and
in little more than a year after his death gave up her estate to marry
his cousin--young enough to have been his son, with no property, and
not well-born. Those who had not seen anything of Dorothea usually
observed that she could not have been "a nice woman," else she would
not have married either the one or the other.

Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally
beautiful. They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse
struggling under prosaic conditions. Among the many remarks passed on
her mistakes, it was never said in the neighborhood of Middlemarch that
such mistakes could not have happened if the society into which she was
born had not smiled on propositions of marriage from a sickly man to a
girl less than half his own age--on modes of education which make a
woman's knowledge another name for motley ignorance--on rules of
conduct which are in flat contradiction with its own loudly asserted
beliefs. While this is the social air in which mortals begin to
breathe, there will be collisions such as those in Dorothea's life,
where great feelings take the aspect of error, and great faith the
aspect of illusion. For there is no creature whose inward being is so
strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it. A new
Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual
life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in
daring all for the sake of a brother's burial; the medium in which
their ardent deeds took place is forever gone. But we insignificant
people with our daily words and acts, are preparing the lives of many
Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that
of the Dorothea whose story we know.

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were
not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Alexander
broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on
the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was
incalculably diffusive; for the growing go