Good evening. Welcome to the Just Sleep podcast. I'm Tasia, your host. Every week, I will read you

an old story to help you relax, put the stressful day behind you, and drift off to sleep.

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Tonight, I will be reading George Eliot's Middlemarch.

So lie down, close your eyes, and let me read you a story.

Chapter 1

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty, which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress.

Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she would wear sleeves not less bare of style

than those in which the Blessed

Virgin appeared to Italian painters. And her profile, as well as her stature and bearing,

seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion

gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the

Bible, or from one of her elder poets in a paragraph of today's newspaper.

She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister

Celia had more common sense.

Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings, and it was only to close observers that her dress

differed from her sisters and had a shade of cocketry in its arrangements. For Miss Brooks' plain

dressing was due to mixed conditions,

...