Sentence No. 100 · 5 July 2026
Love is natural; but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too.
George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
George Eliot — The Mill on the Floss (1860) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
Notice the semicolon: it splits the sentence into two halves that argue against each other — 'Love is natural' and 'but surely pity and faithfulness and memory are natural too.' The conjunction 'but' has to open the second half, while the repeated 'and' only links items inside that list; neither can start the sentence.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 6 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. A young woman, torn between love and duty, refuses to seek her own joy at others' expense. Putting it back in the author’s order is the puzzle — and the order is rarely arbitrary, which is what the note above is about.
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