Sentence No. 74 · 9 June 2026
Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know and avoid them
George Eliot, Middlemarch
George Eliot — Middlemarch (1871) · Read it at Project Gutenberg
What holds this sentence together
The conjunction "so that" signals a result clause — it always follows the cause and introduces the consequence. When you see "so that" as a phrase, place it after the main action ("did what their neighbors did"), never at the start.
How it appears in Sentle
On Sentle this sentence arrives in 8 pieces, shuffled, with the lines that lead up to it for context. A young woman's piety and unconventional habits have unsettled the local view of her as a prospective wife. The narrator sums up the prevailing attitude. 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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