“My daughter, there is the bond of a higher love.  Marriage is not carnal only, made for selfish delight.  See what that thought leads you to!  It leads you to wander away in a false garb from all the obligations of your place and name.  That would not have been if you had learned that it is a sacramental vow, from which none but God can release you.  My daughter, your life is not as a grain of sand, to be blown by the winds; it is as flesh and blood, that dies if it be sundered.  Your husband is not a malefactor?”

    Romola flushed and started.  “Heaven forbid!  No; I accuse him of
    nothing.”

“I did not suppose he was a malefactor.  I meant that if he were a malefactor your place would be in the prison beside him.  My daughter, if the cross comes to you as a wife, you must carry it as a wife.  You may say, ‘I will forsake my husband,’ but you cannot cease to be a wife.”

    “Yet if—­oh, how could I bear—­” Romola had involuntarily begun to say
    something which she sought to banish from her mind again.

“Make your marriage sorrows an offering, too, my daughter:  an offering to the great work by which sin and sorrow are being made to cease.  The end is sure, and is already beginning.  Here in Florence it is beginning, and the eyes of faith behold it.  And it may be our blessedness to die for it:  to die daily by the crucifixion of our selfish will—­to die at last by laying our bodies on the altar.  My daughter, you are a child of Florence; fulfil the duties of that great inheritance.  Live for Florence—­for your own people, whom God is preparing to bless the earth.  Bear the anguish and the smart.  The iron is sharp—­I know, I know—­it rends the tender flesh.  The draught is bitterness on the lips.  But there is rapture in the cup—­there is the vision which makes all life below it dross forever.  Come, my daughter, come back to your place!” [Footnote:  Chapter XL.]

Again, when Dorothea goes to see Rosamond to intercede in Dr. Lydgate’s behalf with his wife, we have an expression of the sacredness of marriage, and the renunciation it demands of all that is opposed to its trust and helpfulness.  Dorothea says,—­

“Marriage is so unlike everything else.  There is something even awful in the nearness it brings.  Even if we loved some one else better than—­than those we were married to, it would be of no use”—­poor Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her language brokenly—­“I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving or getting any blessedness in that sort of love.  I know it may be very dear—­but it murders our marriage—­and then the marriage stays with us like a murder—­and everything else is gone.  And then our husband—­if he loved and trusted us, and we have not helped him, but made a curse in his life—­”

If Marian Evans rejected the sanctions which society has imposed on the love of man and woman in the legal