point is not one of mere egoism or personal dignity, when I request that any one who has a regard for me will cease to speak of me by my maiden name.'
In reality, however, the clue to her conduct is to be sought in the girlish impulsiveness of her affectionate nature, which seems so hard to connect with her accuracy and independence of thought. She speaks of Lewes having 'quite won my liking in spite of myself' a year before their flight, and her hurried letter to the Brays at the last moment shows that the momentous decision was the work of impulse. She had evidently found in him some one to cling to amid the dreary solitude of life in London lodgings, and Lewes took the responsibility of accepting her sacrifice.
In justice to Lewes it must be remembered that he could have had no idea of the transcendent nature of the woman whose life he was accepting. Mr. F. W. Myers tells a story of some impudent ass who wrote to George Eliot after Middlemarch condoling with her for being mated to a Casaubon. There would have been less incongruity if Lewes had been compared to Ladislaw, who was, one feels, almost equally unworthy of Dorothea. Lewes is gradually being rated at his true worth: a philosopher among journalists, a journalist among philosophers, he has left behind him
