“‘Match!’ said Bartle; ‘ay, as vinegar matches one’s teeth. If a man says a word, his wife’ll match it with a contradiction; if he’s a mind for hot meat, his wife’ll match it with cold bacon; if he laughs, she’ll match him with whimpering. She’s such a match as the horsefly is to th’ horse: she’s got the right venom to sting him with—the right venom to sting him with.’
“‘What dost say to that?’ said Mr. Poyser, throwing himself back and looking merrily at his wife.
“‘Say!’ answered Mrs. Poyser, with dangerous fire kindling in her eye; ‘why, I say as some folks’ tongues are like the clocks as run on strikin’, not to tell you the time o’ the day, but because there’s summat wrong i’ their own inside.’ ...”
The plot, as in Scott’s Heart of Midlothian, turns on a case of seduction and child murder, and the contrast between Effie and Jeannie Deans has its parallel in the stronger contrast between Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris. Hetty looked as if she were “made of roses”; but she was, in Mrs. Poyser’s phrase, “no better nor a cherry wi’ a hard stone inside it.” Dinah’s human beauty of face and voice was the true reflection of her inward life which
“cast a beam on the outward shape,
The unpolluted temple of the mind,
And turned it by degrees to the soul’s essence.”
The crisis of the book comes in the prison, where Dinah wrestles for the soul of Hetty—a scene as passionate and moving as any in fiction. Dinah triumphs, not by her own might, but by the sheer power and beauty of the Christian faith and love which she embodies.