She wanted some explanation of this hard, real life; the unhappy-looking father, seated at the dull breakfast-table; the childish, bewildered mother; the little sordid tasks that filled the hours, or the more oppressive emptiness of weary, joyless leisure; the need of some tender, demonstrative love; the cruel sense that Tom didn’t mind what she thought or felt, and that they were no longer playfellows together; the privation of all pleasant things that had come to her more than to others—­she wanted some key that would enable her to understand, and in understanding endure, the heavy weight that had fallen on her young heart.  If she had been taught “real learning and wisdom, such as great men knew,” she thought she should have held the secrets of life; if she had only books, that she might learn for herself what wise men knew!  Saints and martyrs had never interested Maggie so much as sages and poets.  She know little of saints and martyrs, and had gathered, as a general result of her teaching, that they were a temporary provision against the spread of Catholicism, and had all died at Smithfield.

Into the darkness of Maggie’s life a light suddenly comes in the shape of the immortal book of Thomas a Kempis.  Why that book; why along such a way should the light come?  The answer is, that George Eliot meant to teach certain ideas.  It is this fact which justifies her reader in taking these scenes of her novels, these words spoken in the interludes, as genuine reflections and transcripts of her own mind.  Maggie turns over a parcel of books brought her by Bob Jakin, to find little in them—­

but Thomas a Kempis.  The name had come across her in her reading, and she felt the satisfaction, which every one knows, of getting some ideas to attach to a name that strays solitary in the memory.  She took up the little old clumsy book with some curiosity; it had the corners turned down in many places, and some hand, now forever quiet, had made at certain passages strong pen-and-ink marks, long since browned by time.  Maggie turned from leaf to leaf, and read where the quiet hand pointed.  “Know that the love of thyself doth hurt thee more than anything in the world....  If thou seekest this or that, and wouldst be here or there to enjoy thy own will and pleasure, thou shalt never be quiet nor free from care; for in everything somewhat will be wanting, and in every place there will be some that will cross thee....  Both above and below, which way soever thou dost turn thee, everywhere thou shalt find the cross; and everywhere of necessity thou must have patience, if thou wilt have inward peace, and enjoy an everlasting crown....  If thou desire to mount unto this height, thou must set out courageously, and lay the axe to the root, that thou mayest pluck up and destroy that hidden inordinate inclination to thyself, and unto all private and earthly good.  On this sin, that a man inordinately loveth himself, almost all dependeth,