Nemesis can seldom forge a sword for herself out of our consciences—­ out of the suffering we feel in the suffering we may have caused; there is rarely metal enough there to make an effective weapon.  Our moral sense learns the manners of good society, and smiles when others smile; but when some rude person gives rough names to our actions, she is apt to take part against us.

The Mill on the Floss reflects this thought.

    Retribution may come from any voice; the hardest, crudest most imbruted
    urchin at the street-corner can inflict it.

More effective still is that punishment which comes of our own inward sense of wrong-doing.  George Eliot makes Parson Irwine say that “the inward suffering is the worst form of Nemesis.”  This is well illustrated in the experience of Gwendolen, who, after the death of her husband at Geneva, is anxious to leave that place.

    For what place, though it were the flowery vale of Enna, may not the
    inward sense turn into a circle of punishment where the flowers are no
    better than a crop of flame-tongues burning the soles of our feet?

Even before this, Gwendolen had come to realize the dire effects of selfish conduct in that dread and bitterness of spirit which subdued her and mocked all her hopes and joys.

Passion is of the nature of seed, and finds nourishment within, tending to a predominance which determines all currents toward itself, and makes the whole life its tributary.  And the intensest form of hatred is that rooted in fear, which compels to silence and drives vehemence into a constructive vindictiveness, an imaginary annihilation of the deserted object, something like the hidden rites of vengeance with which the persecuted have made a dark vent for their rage, and soothed their suffering into dumbness.  Such hidden rites went on in the secrecy of Gwendolen’s mind, but not with soothing effect—­rather with the effect of a struggling terror.  Side by side with the dread of her husband had grown the self-dread which urged her to flee from the pursuing images wrought by her pent-up impulse.  The vision of her past wrong-doing, and what it had brought on her, came with a pale ghastly illumination over every imagined deed that was a rash effort at freedom, such as she had made in her marriage. [Footnote:  Chapter LIV.]

The way in which wrong-doing affects us to our hurt is suggested also in Romola, where its results upon the inward life are explicitly revealed.

Under every guilty secret there is hidden a brood of guilty wishes, whose unwholesome infecting life is cherished by the darkness.  The contaminating effect of deeds lies less in the commission than in the consequent adjustment of our desires—­the enlistment of our self-interest on the side of falsity; as, on the other hand, the purifying effect of public confession springs from the fact that