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Was there a motive at work under this strange reluctance of Arthur’s which had a sort of backstairs influence, not admitted to himself?  Our mental business is carried on much in the same way as the business of the State: a great deal of hard work is done by agents who are not acknowledged.  In a piece of machinery, too, I believe there is often a small unnoticeable wheel which has a great deal to do with the motion of the large obvious ones.  Possibly there was some such unrecognized agent secretly busy in Arthur’s mind at this moment — possibly it was the fear lest he might hereafter find the fact of having made a confession to the Rector a serious annoyance, in case he should not be able quite to carry out his good resolutions?  I dare not assert that it was not so.  The human soul is a very complex thing.

George Eliot, Adam Bede, Book First, chapter 16.

It’s been a while since I posted about my reading.  I finished Wolf Solent in the summer, I think, then read A.S. Byatt’s The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye and I followed that up with Diana Wynne Jones’s Howl’s Moving Castle, which was, in a word, fantastic.  I messed around after that, before finally settling on Eliot’s Adam Bede, which I’ve been “highlighting” — to use the Kindle term, though as with most long fiction I alternate between a print edition and the Kindle version — though I haven’t yet posted any of it.