Conversations in Ebury Street, Chapter 4

London: William Heineman, 1 January 1924, pages 67-84, 5,405 words

Conversations in Ebury Street is a nonlinear volume of nineteen chapters. Chapters 7-11 are essays in art criticism; chapter 19 is worldbuilding; the rest are essays in literary criticism. The chapters appear separately in the Aesthetics and Worlds pillars of George Moore Interactive. All are included in the ebook of Conversations in Ebury Street in the GMi Shop.

IV

MAID. Mr. Freeman, sir.

FREEMAN. I am afraid I am interrupting.

MOORE You are welcome to interrupt my reading. I am always willing to lay aside a book to talk.

FREEMAN. To anybody?

MOORE. I prefer a man of wit; but since I am confessing myself I will disclose all. I would lay aside the wisest book to talk to a stupid woman.

FREEMAN. Or man?

MOORE. Yes; or man, for I have lost my taste for reading, and there are few greater misfortunes. We cannot always be talking, we cannot always be at the theatre, we cannot always be listening to music or visiting exhibitions of pictures; and to lose one's taste for reading is really like losing one's taste for bread.

FREEMAN. But I find you reading.

MOORE. Reading with a purpose, which is a very different thing from reading for pleasure. I am reading one of George Eliot's novels.

FREEMAN. Reading George Eliot, and for a purpose! I should not have been surprised if I had found you reading Jane Austen or the Brontës, but Daniel Deronda!

MOORE. Silas Marner, the story I am reading, is less purposeful. Ah, if she had been less purposeful!

FREEMAN.  Yet in spite of her purposes, which are manifold, you find something to admire?

MOORE. The book has only just come from the library. I am in the first pages and am surprised to find that she has a better conception of what a story should be than most English writers. Her first book, Scenes from Clerical Life, had one story in it that has haunted me ever since.

FREEMAN. You do not intend to write something like it?

MOORE. My dear Mr. Freeman!

FREEMAN. Forgive me. You intend to write an essay about her?

MOORE. An essay I must write about somebody, for I am short of copy. You remember that I withdrew Impressions and Opinions from the list of books that Liveright is publishing in America.

FREEMAN. Yes, and almost regretted your decision. Mr. Arthur Symons, your first critic, speaks of Impressions and Opinions as your best book.

MOORE. Arthur Symons speaks out of vague memories. If he were to open the book again he would see at once that it lacked unity of subject and language.

FREEMAN. Pater's definition of style: unity of subject, language, and something else. I have forgotten.

MOORE. So have I. In the 'eighties I collected much that I had written for various newspapers, for it seemed enough to flaunt ideas on all subjects.

FREEMAN. So the new book which will replace Impressions and Opinions will be a unity?

MOORE. To have made my meaning clear I should have said that if we are artists we must spend our lives in a continual striving after perfection, though in so doing we lose something we have already won. You asked me if I am writing an essay. No; I am weary of essays, and I don't write them well; perhaps that's the reason why I am weary of them.

FREEMAN. And the name of the new book?

MOORE. Conversations in Ebury Street.

FREEMAN. Ah, I like the title. But why in Ebury Street? Why not simply Conversations? Too Landorian, and you would discriminate. Since Landor nobody has attempted conversations, and after the long interval it has come to you to revive a form in which criticism can be conducted more agreeably than in the essay.

MOORE.. My admiration for Landor is without limit; I place him above Shakespeare, and to imitate him would be honour enough for me. But it was not Landor that prompted me to go and do likewise; the form rose out of what I had to say quite naturally. I was tempted, I know not why, but I was tempted to examine the novels that had come down to us from Defoe one after the other, to compare them to our poetry and to find them deficient in seriousness. This I could not do in an essay; the constant change of subject would have been irksome: to me at least it would have been. Of course, I might not have thought of the dialogue if I had not known Landor; and perhaps Landor would not have thought of the dialogue if he had not read Plato.

FREEMAN. Who is your interlocutor in the present instance?

MOORE. You are, as the manuscript on the table tells:

MAID. Mr. Freeman, sir. FREEMAN. I am afraid I am interrupting —

FREEMAN. So you have begun the conversation?

MOORE.. Yes; I have sketched some pages.

FREEMAN. Pray read them to me.

MOORE. The sheets on the table are only a beginning. I am at the stage of feeling my way into the subject, and the conversation may have already taken a wrong turn.

FREEMAN. So we discuss George Eliot together?

MOORE. George Eliot and Mr. Thomas Hardy are con­trasted, or will be, in the dialogue that I am meditating.

FREEMAN. They are contrasted in the Confessions, and very violently.

MOORE. Has it come to be held as a crime to do else than to voice public opinion? to strike up with the little boy going down the street whistling gleefully in defiance of time and tune?

FREEMAN. Public opinion changes slowly, but it changes. Lord Byron and George Eliot are examples of how public opinion sees black where it once saw white, and to find an example in our own time we have only to remember Tennyson. No doubt public opinion will change regarding Thomas Hardy, but I doubt the wisdom of treating the public like a whistling boy —

MOORE. Ordering his breeches to be taken down and you to hoist him? Of course, if you don't like the subject I shall abandon it at once; but will you tell me why?

FREEMAN. It seems to me that I have already given a reason. But if you want another, here it is. You have just told me that you are willing always to lay aside a book to talk, a thing which you are doing now, forgetful that George Eliot is a voluminous writer, and of the length of Middlemarch, which I think you will find difficult to finish before the winter. And then there is Romola, another long book.

MOORE. A book that I read at a time when I considered seriously the claims of Lord Leighton to be a great painter.

FREEMAN. He supplied the illustrations.

MOORE.. And a better choice of an illustrator could not have been made. Both were workers in wax. Daniel Deronda I have never opened, and I shudder at the name of Felix Holt, a very leaden book that I stopped in the middle of long, long ago. You are quite right; I shall not be able to re-read all George Eliot. But that is not a reason why I should abandon my subject. I have read George Eliot, and if I send the book on the table back to the library at once I shall be able to speak to you out of my memories of her, which will be more agreeable than to read Feliz Holt and ask you to dinner to argue about a defunct literature in which neither of us is in the least interested. So true is this that I am beginning to regret having opened the book on the table; my mind is already taking a bias.

FREEMAN.  In her favour?

MOORE Somewhat. You were going to ask me?

FREEMAN. It was certainly in my mind to ask you if your memories of George Eliot are enough for the dialogue you propose to write.

MOORE. You have come from her writings later than I have. Be my examiner.

FREEMAN. Tell me about Silas Marner.

MOORE. Silas Marner is an old man, a miser, who discovers a foundling at his door, boy or girl, I have forgotten which. He must have heard the child cry and risen from his bed, for he found the child by the light of a lantern. I am sure of that; I remember the lantern. Or am I inventing?

FREEMAN. I see that you still keep some faint memory of the story.

MOORE. I can speak more precisely of some of the others.

FREEMAN. Of Middlemarch?

MOORE.. Of Middlemarch I remember the delight with which I read each volume, and there were six or eight in the edition that I came upon in my grandfather's library in Moore Hall when I was twelve or thirteen, mayhap fourteen. You may have caught sight of the portrait of an old gentleman on the wall of the lobby as you came upstairs — my grandfather, the historian who in his preface to his history of the French Revolution (I give the preface in Ave), speaks with delightful resignation and humility of his failure to obtain recognition.

FREEMAN. Whosoever sees the portrait cannot but be attracted. A more characteristic portrait I have never seen.

MOORE. The portrait may be accepted as a commentary on the little confession which his pen ran into without his knowing that he was telling his secret — wherefore an admirable confession. He stops short almost in the middle of a sentence, and I can see him in my thoughts staring at the lake, associating it in some dim way with his own loneliness.

FREEMAN. Was the manuscript lost?

MOORE. Nothing was saved.

FREEMAN. I am sorry I did not see Moore Hall before I wrote my book.

MOORE. For no reason, at least for none that we can discover, some places are fixed deeper in our memories than others and become with time more real than the realities we live among. My grandfather's library is one of these spiritual realities, and with what strange intensity do I see the old gentleman's portrait over the chimney­ piece, the wire-netted book-cases, the round table, the telescope, the view of the lake winding sadly mile after mile by low shores. And the hours that I spent reading Middlemarch can be recalled at will, and none more easily than the moment of disappointment when I returned the book to the shelves.

FREEMAN. Every man remembers his first intimations that life is not permanent. You read Middlemarch —

MOORE. My memories of Adam Bede are more explicit, and I can still hear the tone of the young squire's words when the parson tries to dissuade him — from what, I have forgotten; probably from walking out with Hetty; and I can recall how the story lost its humanity for me when the dairy-maid was taken by the police and tried for murder of her child, for the story of a crime is never a good story. Some years ago I read The Mill on the Floss, a well-modulated narrative, with the aunts of Maggie Tulliver, each in her house, and her habits, and Maggie Tulliver going to meet a cripple or a hunchback in a pine wood. A delightful, intellectual companionship this was, one that George Eliot's readers thought should continue and end in marriage; but George Eliot knew better than her readers how life is made, and she chose that Maggie's bodily instincts should be awakened by a commonplace young man, who takes her away somewhere in a boat or a barge; I have forgotten which, but remember very well my delight when the young man seized Maggie's bare arm and kissed it, a very natural act, one which a girl would expect who was eloping with a young man, and my stifled disappointment when Maggie returned home despite the young man's apologies, tears and promises of amendment.

FREEMAN. You remember the flood, with Maggie and Tom Tulliver in a boat?

MOORE. Yes, and I have nothing to say against the end; it's harmless, it's almost good. But I am thinking now of the passing of all this literature, as well built as the mill itself, for George Eliot constructed well and solidly; her prose is rich and well balanced. But these qualities were not enough to save her from the whirling, bubbling flood of Time; her books have gone down like the mill. Lighter things have floated; hers have sunk out of sight; and I would see a reason for the sudden overthrow of one who in her day was looked upon as almost Shakespeare's equal.

FREEMAN. You have known more old Victorians than I have, but I doubt--

MOORE. Doubt not, for I heard Professor Tyrrel, a great scholar, whose Latin and Greek verse was as perfect as such things can be, speak the words that you have just heard me speak: Almost Shakespeare's equal!

FREEMAN. Whereby we may deduce the moral that learning is insufficient.

MOORE. We may, indeed. But I would look into the soul and see why this woman's mind has passed into a dust hardly less anonymous than her body's.

FREEMAN. The bent of her mind was towards philosophy rather than imaginative literature.

MOORE. And it was George Henry Lewes who drew her attention to prose narrative as an outlet for her genius. Even genius is dependent on accident. The accident is always going by; talent misses it, but genius avails itself of it instantly, and George Eliot availed herself of her chance. But that is a side issue; we are seeking the reason why she should have passed into such sudden oblivion whilst others, the Brontës, should remain.

FREEMAN. You admit that her prose is rich and well balanced, and I agree with you. But there is no pleasure in it.

MOORE. You are quite right; there is very little pleasure in it. But why is there no pleasure in it?

FREEMAN. Something in her character, perhaps.

MOORE. Let us then seek her failure in her character. I know she met George Henry Lewes and that is about all I do know of her. Whence came she? Was she a townswoman or a countrywoman? Did she come from the north or the south or the east or the west? Whom did she know before she met Lewes? Was he her first lover, her second, her third? Tell me all you know about her.

FREEMAN. Her name was Marian Evans, and she came from Warwickshire.

MOORE. From the middle of England, like Shakespeare. Balzac, too, came from the middle of France.

FREEMAN. Her father was a land agent to Mr. Francis Newdigate, a Warwickshire squire.

MOORE. And she was sent to school. But to what school?

FREEMAN. That I can't tell you, but without doubt to some school in the neighbourhood, perhaps in Warwick. Do you know Warwick?

MOORE. Yes. In my boyhood Warwick was a lovely old English town full of gardens and gables, and associated with the Middle Ages — Warwick Castle, with a bad picture of a man in a cave shown to travelling folk, the very town in which there would be a fine, large, hand­some school for young ladies. Birmingham is over the border, but not more than twenty miles away, and she may have been educated in Birmingham.

FREEMAN. I can but tell you that at her mother's death she was recalled from school to look after her father's house. I have always heard that the change was welcomed by her, for even in her teens she resented direction in her studies. At Arbury Farm she applied herself to the French and Italian languages, and I think music was a hobby of hers.

MOORE. I shouldn't have suspected music from her writing. But Nature is ever capricious, Tell me more.

FREEMAN. At Arbury Farm she refused to go to church and nearly quarrelled with her father, and afterwards she began to write for the Westminster Review.

MOORE. I am beginning to understand. And after the publication of two or three articles the editor wrote asking her to call at the office when she came to London; and in London she made the acquaintance of John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer, the inevitable Harriet Martineau and the desirable George Henry. Can you give me the date when she left Arbury Farm?

FREEMAN. I will inquire the matter out in the library.

MOORE. I am beginning to understand. She came up to London to participate in the discovery that pleasure was a mistake, almost a vulgarity, and to hear the beautiful eighteenth century spoken of as the mischievous and shameful century. We have always been under the domination of France, spiritually, and having worshipped beauty must needs follow France into ugliness. I would tell you who began the new cult if I could; there must have been somebody before Courbet, who spoke about truth of effect and local colour. Be this as it may, he was committed to it, and Troyon still more so, and these were followed by Millet, who took it upon himself to explain the miserable lot of the peasant; and whosoever saw it, remembers L'Homme à la

Houe, a detestable object, but which so stirred the loose bowels of compassion that the very world was certain something must be done to relieve the monotony of the peasant's lot. Philanthropy and realism entered into art arm in arm; and it is believed that Rosa Bonheur never wore a crinoline, preferring to walk about in breeches and a blouse. She wore clogs and led a life more laborious than that of the cart-horses she painted. Rosa Bonheur — how well the name goes with her pictures! The syllables tramp just like the great grey cart-horse that the peasant rides into the middle of the fair. Rosa Bonheur — was there ever a more cynical name? She only just escaped Rose. Rose Bonheur­ — a woman in whose life a rose never flourished, and who repudiated happiness! Do tell me, and quickly, when Marian Evans changed her name to George Eliot.

FREEMAN. But you do not believe that the character of a human being is modified by a name, inherited or assumed? You said just now that Rosa Bonheur's name was in direct contradiction to her character.

MOORE. The name tramps like a cart-horse, and I cannot believe she would have painted the same pictures if her name had been plain Rose. But Rosa Bonheur is a side issue; we are speaking of George Eliot. Tell me when she changed the name of Marian Evans, a splendid name, and how well it goes with Arbury Farm! I can see myself in my imagination directing an envelope: Miss Marian Evans, Arbury Farm, Warwickshire. Can you tell me when she changed her name?

FREEMAN. I have no exact information. Have you an encyclopaedia?

MOORE. An encyclopaedia in this house! No.

FREEMAN. We may assume for the moment that her first book, the translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus, was published under the name of George Eliot.

MOORE Why should we assume that?

FREEMAN. I have told you that her father was much distressed by her refusal to go to church —

MOORE. Had I been her father, I should have said: Marian, I will allow you to omit church if in return you will choose some other name than George Eliot.

FREEMAN. What name would you suggest to her?

MOORE. Oliver Brunskill.

FREEMAN. There's not much beauty in that name.

MOORE. We mustn't seek beauty in names — character. Do you think my writings would have been the same if I had adopted Annie Grey as my pseudonym? George Henry Lewes, her guide and bugle-call (it was he who first suggested that she should tum her hand to fiction), should have said, when they were debating the pseudonym necessary for Scenes from Clerical Life: I do not urge you, Marian, to choose Annie Grey — indeed, I urge you not to choose it; and we can imagine Marian answering: But why, dear George, are you averse from the name George Eliot? It is so uncompromising.

FREEMAN. And what answer would you set down for George Henry Lewes?

MOORE. A name too faintly genteel for you, Marian. The phrase might have risen up in his mind as genteel as an omnibus, but he would not have spoken it, and continued: Hardly a man's name, hardly a woman's, without any sex on it. The word sex would have frightened Marian, and she would have answered that the name was chosen before she knew him as a suitable name to go on the title page of a translation of Strauss's Life of Jesus. But why continue it? George Henry would have interposed. Scenes from Clerical Life, by Marian Evans, to which Marian would have answered drily: I have to consider my father.

FREEMAN. I do not know if the translation was made at Arbury Farm or when she went to London.

MOORE. It can't be helped. In London she adopted the morality of her circle: morality without God, a fantastic theory if ever there was one. Even with God's help men and women stray into the primrose path; how then can we expect them to remain in the strait and narrow way if there be no promise of reward or punishment? an altogether impracticable morality, as is proved indeed by Marian herself, who went to live with a married man and wrote under his roof Scenes from Clerical Life and other admonitory works, thereby hanging herself out like a banner from the roof on which is inscribed the magic word: Excelsior!

FREEMAN.  Lewes was her single transgression from the moral law.

MOORE. Our information on the subject is too slight to warrant literary investigation, and further transgressions, could they be proved against her, would weaken my argument.

FREEMAN. You think then that the foundations of her style are to be discovered in Lewes?

MOORE. Not in Lewes's writing, but in the double life she was leading.

FREEMAN. You trace George Eliot's style to a conflict between theory and conduct, and I think you are on surer ground now than you were in that fantastic theory that the name we bring into the world or that we assume is accountable for all our acts and thoughts.

MOORE. Encouraged by your sympathy I will venture a little further into a theology which some will regard as casuistical, saying that if she had transgressed oftener her style would no longer be the same. You see, she may have gone to live with Lewes for doctrinal reasons (indeed, it almost looks as if she had), false reasons, of course. But if further transgressions could be urged against her we might assume that she was pursuing happiness, and happiness being in her mind would have found an outlet in her works. You see, my dear Mr. Freeman, a woman who transgresses frequently, escapes the Christian conscience, and we acquit her of the sin against the Holy Ghost, a sin that the Pagan and the Christian world look upon with equal detestation. I flatter myself that I stand shoulder to shoulder with Canterbury in all that concerns this sin, except its unforgivable nature.

FREEMAN. If a man or a woman cannot accept Christian doctrine you would advocate that he or she should lead a licentious life, escaping thereby from setting a bad example?

MOORE. I would not have you fall into the makeshift argument of the preacher, who would have us look upon Antiquity as a degrading past of which the least said the better.

FREEMAN. Antiquity affords the highest instances of morality.

MOORE. As I have said, Antiquity and Christianity hold one sin in equal detestation, and I think I am guilty of no paradox if I say that her style is the outcome of the moral conflict in which she found herself involved; but redeemed by Paganism or by Christianity (if there be redemption in the Christian creed for the soul guilty of the sin against the Holy Ghost), she might have written — well it's impossible to say how she might have written, but certainly more delightfully than she has written.

FREEMAN. You would distinguish between a moral man and a moralist, and I think you are right. And I would add that the moralist is seldom happy.

MOORE. If she had been a happy woman her happiness would have crept into her writings, as I have said, for what is in the mind finds its way on to the page, an almost needless amplification of your criticism that the moralist is seldom happy. Indeed, an essay might be written by some philosopher, poet, painter and critic, who would discern in Velasquez an icy spirit who saw no more in his fellows than subjects for portraits or pictures. The critic of whom I am thinking would cry, on turning from Velasquez to Rubens: A happy man! His paintings tell the tale. He meditated no doctrine, and to be free accepted Catholicism outwardly, thereby getting his freedom to wander among nymphs and satyrs without receiving reproofs from Spain, Among modern writers your enemy Stevenson —

FREEMAN. My enemy? No. If, as some people think, I have criticised Stevenson harshly it is because he seems to be taking a place in public estimation higher than he deserves, getting a great deal that was due to Pater. Moreover, the happiness that he expressed seems to me a very superficial kind of happiness; the cudgelling of a little donkey in the Cevennes!

MOORE. At once you bring in a morality which casts a gloom upon the radiant pages of Travels with a Donkey.

FREEMAN. He did not keep religion out of his writings; he remained a sour Protestant. He could not visit the monks without commenting, and adversely, on the mode of life they chose to adopt, and in the Inland Voyage be is also ready to advance the claims of Protestantism against those of Rome; and in his essay on Villon he never ceases to thank God that he was not himself like Villon. No; I think you would have done better to have left Stevenson out of this argument. Morris would have supplied you with a better example, for men fight and love and wander in his poems as they do in Homer.

MOORE. The visible world was enough for the Greek and the English poet, and all that you say in praise of Morris I will applaud, hat in hand. A greater poet than Stevenson, I grant you; still — Let us not wrangle, however, but agree that ancient literature was happier than modern. Homer’s fighting, though heavy-handed, is always light-hearted. The wanderings of Odysseus are untouched by melancholy, and Virgil, too, and Horace are free from this bane.

FREEMAN. Your chronicle runs too fast, for we have come to imperial Rome, overlooking Sicily.

MOORE. Yes: you are quite right. I had forgotten Sicily, and thank you for reminding me. How the very name of Theocritus brings up before our eyes sunny hill­ sides, with shepherds gathered under tamarisk trees, and for single ornament a torrent dashing over the face of the high rock. More real, more true are these than George Eliot's Norfolk hinds. The shepherds and shepherdesses have come down to us from more than two thousand years, gaining in every generation, it would seem, a new and more intense life. Battus is clearer to us now than he was, perhaps, to his creator, certainly more real than Tom Tulliver is to me, or his sister Maggie. And the incident of the thorn that Corydon plucked from Battus's foot under the ankle we would not exchange for the story of the flood.

FREEMAN. I would certainly not give up Amaryllis for Maggie Tulliver.

MOORE. All her walks with the cripple in the pine wood are not worth the verses in which we read that Battus goes to Amaryllis's cave to plead his love, saying that if she refuses him he will die at her feet. He says some lovely things to her: Lo, ten apples, I bring thee, plucked from that very place where thou didst bid me pluck them, and other, to-morrow I will bring thee. Ah, regard my heart's deep sorrow! ah, would I were that humming bee, and to thy cave might come dipping beneath the fern that hides thee, and the ivy leaves!

FREEMAN. In such words as these we reach immortality.

MOORE. Ah, lovely as thou art to look upon, ah heart of stone, ah dark-browed maiden, embrace me, thy true goatherd, that I may kiss thee, and even in empty kisses there is a sweet delight! In the simple words even in empty kisses there is a sweet delight, he reaches to the very heart of the sensual instinct. The unfortunate goatherd continues to plead, but for the moment I am at the end of my memories.

FREEMAN. Theocritus records not the answers of Amaryllis; not a word do we hear her speak. And in the next ldyl Battus and Corydon, two neatherds, meet, and after some random banter their talk turns on the death of Amaryllis.

MOORE. Ah, gracious, Amaryllis I Thee alone even in death will we ne'er forget. Dear to me as my goats wert thou, and thou art dead! Alas, too cruel a spirit hath my lot in his keeping. That is all we know of Amaryllis, and the scene of this great love grief is described in an anecdote — the plucking out of a thorn that has run into Battus's foot under the ankle. Battus's sighs for Amaryllis were the first, but they were not the last. The world has continued ever since to sigh for Amaryllis. Is it her name that has given her an immortality that has endured for more than two thousand years? and given immortality to a hind like Battus? for we like him when he says: I will sing no more, but dead will I lie where I fall, and here may the wolves devour me. This rough goatherd was a true lover. Why are these hinds and shepherdesses immortal, Mr. Freeman? Why are they real? Why are they enough? Because his ldyls tell of happy days and men and women who lead happy lives, following their flocks and their instincts. It would be hard to find an unhappy day in his pages, not even when two fishermen wake up in their broken hut with nothing before them but another toilsome day in search of food, two old men at the end of their lives who will soon be unable to put forth again. Theocritus brings into his story a dream. Tell me, says one old man, the vision of the night; nay, tell all to thy friend. And the fisherman tells of the dream in which he hooked a fish with golden scales, and the great difficulty he had to bring it on shore. You remember?

FREEMAN. Yes; and the answer to forget the dream and seek the fish of flesh, lest thou die of famine with all thy dreams of gold!

MOORE.. Even the genius of Wordsworth could not redeem him from the curse of morality, and had we to choose between The Leech-gatherer and the fisherman, we should choose the earlier story.

FREEMAN. You can usually give reasons for your preferences.

MOORE. Happy days are remembered always; moralities are doleful. I had a subject — But you were going to say?

FREEMAN. I was going to remind you of a story in verse by George Eliot of a girl who loved a king, and who for the king's sake refused to marry her lover; but the king, hearing of her broken faith, sent for her and kept her in his court till she began to perceive that he was only a man like another —

MOORE. And the Victorian returns the poor girl to her betrothed, attired in all the prejudices and conventions of 1860. How very admirable!

FREEMAN. You don't think that the intimacy of the king would have checked the girl's admiration of him and turned it back to its source, the young man she had discarded?

MOORE. Not unless the king had possessed himself of the girl's affections and wearied of them; then, of course, she might have picked up the thread she had dropped.

FREEMAN. Is not your view very cynical?

MOORE. George Eliot's view is the cynical: the robbing a girl of her illusions and the imposition instead of Christian conventions. Ah! here is Mabel bringing in the tea. You 'II stay and have a cup with me, won't you?