Maggie bent her arm a little upward towards the large half-opened rose
  that had attracted her.  Who has not felt the beauty of a woman’s arm?
 —­the unspeakable suggestions of tenderness that lie in the dimpled
  elbow, and the varied gently-lessening curves down to the delicate
  wrist, with its tiniest, almost imperceptible nicks in the firm
  softness?

  A mad impulse seized on Stephen; he darted towards the arm and
  showered kisses on it, clasping the wrist.

  But the next moment Maggie snatched it from him, and glanced at him
  like a wounded war-goddess, quivering with rage and humiliation.

  “How dare you?” she spoke in a deeply-shaken, half-smothered voice: 
  “what right have I given you to insult me?”

  She darted from him into the adjoining room, and threw herself on the
  sofa panting and trembling.[1]

[1] iii. 156.

We should not have blamed the young lady if, like one of Mr. Trollope’s heroines, she had made her admirer feel not only “the beauty of a woman’s arm,” but its weight.  But, unwarned by the grossness of his behaviour on this occasion, she is represented as admitting Stephen to further intercourse; and, although she rescues herself at last, it is not until after having occasioned irreparable scandal.  A good-natured ordinary novelist might have found an easy solution for the difficulties of the case at an earlier stage by marrying Stephen to Maggie, and handing over Lucy (who is far too amiable to object to such a transfer) to her admiring cousin Tom; while Philip, left in celibacy, might either have been invested with a pathetic interest, or represented as justly punished for the offence of forestalling.  But George Eliot has higher aims than ordinary novelists, and to her the transfer which we have suggested would appear as a profanation.  Her characters, therefore, plunge into all manner of sacrifices of reputation and happiness; and it is not until Maggie and Tom have been drowned, and Philip’s whole life embittered, that we catch a final view of Mr. Stephen Guest visiting the grave of the brother and sister in company with the amiable wife, nee Lucy Deane.  If we are to accept the natural moral of this story, it shows how coarse and immoral a very fastidious and ultra-refined morality may become.

It is with reluctance that we go on to notice the religion of these books; but since religion appears so largely in them, we must not decline the task.  To us, at least, the theory of the writer’s “High-Church tendencies” could never have appeared plausible; for even in the “Scenes of Clerical Life” the chief religious personage is the “evangelical” curate Mr. Tryan, and whatever good there is in his parish is confined to the circle of his partisans and converts; while in “Adam Bede” the Methodess preacheress, Dinah Morris, is intended to shine with spotless and incomparable lustre.  Yet, although the highest characters, in a religious view, are drawn from “evangelicism” and Methodism, we find that neither of these systems is set forth as enough to secure the perfection of everybody who may choose to profess it....