Elliot's Punctuation

I noticed some interesting punctuation in Middlemarch. Exclamation marks and question marks appear after a phrase, not necessarily at the end of a sentence like they would today. For example, "Where then lays the spots of commoness? says a young lady enamoured of that careless grace."
Personally, I prefer that way of using exclamation marks and question marks, and I wonder why it was changed. If you write a sentence in which the first phrase is a question, but the second phrase is not, it can read a little odd. For example:

How could he have made such a disastrous decision, although he was suffering from depression at the time?

Maybe that is not a very good sentence anyway, but the question mark being at the end of the second clause seems wrong to me.