It was soon known throughout St. Ogg’s that Miss Tulliver was come back; she had not, then, eloped in order to be married to Mr. Stephen Guest — at all events, Mr. Stephen Guest had not married her; which came to the same thing, so far as her culpability² was concerned. We judge others according to results; how else? — not knowing the process by which results are arrived at. If Miss Tulliver, after a few months of well-chosen travel, had returned as Mrs. Stephen Guest, with a post-marital trousseau, and all the advantages possessed³ even by the most unwelcome wife of an only son, public opinion, which at St. Ogg’s, as else where, always knew what to think, would have judged in strict consistency⁴ with those results. Public opinion, in these cases, is always of the feminine gender⁵ — not the world, but the world’s wife; and she would have seen that two handsome young people — the gentleman of quite the first family in St. Ogg’s — having found themselves in a false position, had been led into a course which, to say the least of it, was highly injudicious, and productive of sad pain and disappointment, especially to that sweet young thing, Miss Deane. Mr. Stephen Guest had certainly not behaved well; but then, young men were liable to those sudden infatuated attachments⁶; and bad as it might seem in Mrs. Stephen Guest to admit the faintest advances from her cousin’s lover (indeed it had been said that she was actually engaged to young Wakem — old Wakem himself had mentioned it), still, she was very young — “and a deformed⁷ young man, you know! — and young Guest so very fascinating; and, they say, he positively⁸ worships her (to be sure, that can’t last!), and he ran away with her in the boat quite against her will, and what could she do? She couldn’t come back then; no one would have spoken to her; and how very well that maize-colored satinette becomes her

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