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Quote 15. 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 possessed even by the most unwelcome wife of an only son, public opinion, which at St. Ogg's, as elsewhere, always knew what to think, would have judged in strict consistency with those results. Explanation and Analysis. The narrator points out the hypocrisy and intolerance of the St. Ogg’s community after Maggie returns from her botched elopement with Stephen Guest. Maggie’s crime, supposedly, was running off with a man who was engaged to her cousin Lucy—even though the whole thing was Stephen’s idea, and Maggie promptly demanded to be returned home. However, if Maggie had actually married Stephen, the narrator points out, the community would have accepted her warmly as the wife of the heir to the most prominent family in St. Ogg’s. In other words, even though the offense was the same, the punishment would have been very different. The problem, then, is that Maggie has returned unmarried. People in the town thus jump to the conclusion that she has slept with Stephen outside of marriage, making her a social outcast in the eyes of “public opinion” (since premarital sex for women was stigmatized). The narrator suggests that people in the town tend to judge easily and draw quick conclusions without evidence—since public opinion “always knew what to think.” In Maggie’s case, she is judged not necessarily for doing something morally wrong, but for violating the socially sanctioned norms and rules of behavior for women in this historical period.