It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much. - George Eliot

But then the need of being loved, the strongest need ... in poor Maggie's nature, began to wrestle with her pride and soon threw it.

She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it. Certainly such elements in the character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.

Blessed is the man who, having nothing to say, abstains from giving us wordy evidence of the fact.