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+Middlemarch
+
+
+By
+
+George Eliot
+
+
+
+
+New York and Boston
+
+H. M. Caldwell Company Publishers
+
+
+
+
+To my dear Husband, George Henry Lewes, in this nineteenth year of our
+blessed union.
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+BOOK I
+
+CHAPTER I CHAPTER II CHAPTER III CHAPTER IV CHAPTER V CHAPTER VI
+CHAPTER VII CHAPTER VIII CHAPTER IX CHAPTER X CHAPTER XI CHAPTER XII
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+CHAPTER XIII CHAPTER XIV CHAPTER XV CHAPTER XVI CHAPTER XVII
+CHAPTER XVIII CHAPTER XIX CHAPTER XX CHAPTER XXI CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+CHAPTER XXIII CHAPTER XXIV CHAPTER XXV CHAPTER XXVI CHAPTER XXVII
+CHAPTER XXVIII CHAPTER XXIX CHAPTER XXX CHAPTER XXXI CHAPTER XXXII
+CHAPTER XXXIII
+
+
+BOOK IV
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV CHAPTER XXXV CHAPTER XXXVI CHAPTER XXXVII CHAPTER XXXVIII
+CHAPTER XXXIX CHAPTER XL CHAPTER XLI CHAPTER XLII
+
+
+BOOK V
+
+CHAPTER XLIII CHAPTER XLIV CHAPTER XLV CHAPTER XLVI CHAPTER XLVII
+CHAPTER XLVIII CHAPTER XLIX CHAPTER L CHAPTER LI CHAPTER LII
+CHAPTER LIII
+
+
+BOOK VI
+
+CHAPTER LIV CHAPTER LV CHAPTER LVI CHAPTER LVII CHAPTER LVIII
+CHAPTER LIX CHAPTER LX CHAPTER LXI CHAPTER LXII
+
+
+BOOK VII
+
+CHAPTER LXIII CHAPTER LXIV CHAPTER LXV CHAPTER LXVI CHAPTER LXVII
+CHAPTER LXVIII CHAPTER LXIX CHAPTER LXX CHAPTER LXXI
+
+
+BOOK VIII
+
+CHAPTER LXXII CHAPTER LXXIII CHAPTER LXXIV CHAPTER LXXV CHAPTER LXXVI
+CHAPTER LXXVII CHAPTER LXXVIII CHAPTER LXXIX CHAPTER LXXX CHAPTER LXXXI
+
+
+
+
+PRELUDE
+
+
+Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious
+mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt,
+at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with
+some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one
+morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek
+martyrdom in the country of the Moors?  Out they toddled from rugged
+Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human
+hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met
+them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great
+resolve.  That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning.  Theresa's
+passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed
+romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to
+her?  Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from
+within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which
+would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with
+the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self.  She found her epos in
+the reform of a religious order.
+
+That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not
+the last of her kind.  Many Theresas have been born who found for
+themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of
+far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of
+a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of
+opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and
+sank unwept into oblivion.  With dim lights and tangled circumstance
+they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but
+after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and
+formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent
+social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge
+for the ardently willing soul.  Their ardor alternated between a vague
+ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was
+disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.
+
+Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient
+indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures
+of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as
+the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might
+be treated with scientific certitude.  Meanwhile the indefiniteness
+remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one
+would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favorite
+love-stories in prose and verse.  Here and there a cygnet is reared
+uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the
+living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind.  Here and
+there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving
+heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are
+dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some
+long-recognizable deed.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I.
+
+MISS BROOKE.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I.
+
+    "Since I can do no good because a woman,
+     Reach constantly at something that is near it.
+          --The Maid's Tragedy:  BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.
+
+
+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 could 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 our
+elder poets,--in a paragraph of to-day'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 sister's, and had a shade of coquetry in its
+arrangements; for Miss Brooke's plain dressing was due to mixed
+conditions, in most of which her sister shared.  The pride of being
+ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke connections, though not
+exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably "good:" if you inquired
+backward for a generation or two, you would not find any yard-measuring
+or parcel-tying forefathers--anything lower than an admiral or a
+clergyman; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan
+gentleman who served under Cromwell, but afterwards conformed, and
+managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a
+respectable family estate.  Young women of such birth, living in a
+quiet country-house, and attending a village church hardly larger than
+a parlor, naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's
+daughter.  Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made
+show in dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was
+required for expenses more distinctive of rank.  Such reasons would
+have been enough to account for plain dress, quite apart from religious
+feeling; but in Miss Brooke's case, religion alone would have
+determined it; and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's
+sentiments, only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to
+accept momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation.  Dorothea
+knew many passages of Pascal's Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart;
+and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity,
+made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation for
+Bedlam.  She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual life
+involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp and
+artificial protrusions of drapery.  Her mind was theoretic, and yearned
+by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might
+frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule of conduct there;
+she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing
+whatever seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek martyrdom,
+to make retractations, and then to incur martyrdom after all in a
+quarter where she had not sought it.  Certainly such elements in the
+character of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her lot, and
+hinder it from being decided according to custom, by good looks,
+vanity, and merely canine affection.  With all this, she, the elder of
+the sisters, was not yet twenty, and they had both been educated, since
+they were about twelve years old and had lost their parents, on plans
+at once narrow and promiscuous, first in an English family and
+afterwards in a Swiss family at Lausanne, their bachelor uncle and
+guardian trying in this way to remedy the disadvantages of their
+orphaned condition.
+
+It was hardly a year since they had come to live at Tipton Grange with
+their uncle, a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous
+opinions, and uncertain vote.  He had travelled in his younger years,
+and was held in this part of the county to have contracted a too
+rambling habit of mind.  Mr. Brooke's conclusions were as difficult to
+predict as the weather: it was only safe to say that he would act with
+benevolent intentions, and that he would spend as little money as
+possible in carrying them out.  For the most glutinously indefinite
+minds enclose some hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax
+about all his own interests except the retention of his snuff-box,
+concerning which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch.
+
+In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in
+abeyance; but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults and
+virtues, turning sometimes into impatience of her uncle's talk or his
+way of "letting things be" on his estate, and making her long all the
+more for the time when she would be of age and have some command of
+money for generous schemes.  She was regarded as an heiress; for not
+only had the sisters seven hundred a-year each from their parents, but
+if Dorothea married and had a son, that son would inherit Mr. Brooke's
+estate, presumably worth about three thousand a-year--a rental which
+seemed wealth to provincial families, still discussing Mr. Peel's late
+conduct on the Catholic question, innocent of future gold-fields, and
+of that gorgeous plutocracy which has so nobly exalted the necessities
+of genteel life.
+
+And how should Dorothea not marry?--a girl so handsome and with such
+prospects?  Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes, and her
+insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a
+wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer, or even might lead
+her at last to refuse all offers.  A young lady of some birth and
+fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick
+laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the
+time of the Apostles--who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist,
+and of sitting up at night to read old theological books!  Such a wife
+might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the
+application of her income which would interfere with political economy
+and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would naturally think twice
+before he risked himself in such fellowship.  Women were expected to
+have weak opinions; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic
+life was, that opinions were not acted on.  Sane people did what their
+neighbors did, so that if any lunatics were at large, one might know
+and avoid them.
+
+The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers,
+was generally in favor of Celia, as being so amiable and
+innocent-looking, while Miss Brooke's large eyes seemed, like her
+religion, too unusual and striking.  Poor Dorothea! compared with her,
+the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much
+subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of
+blazonry or clock-face for it.
+
+Yet those who approached Dorothea, though prejudiced against her by
+this alarming hearsay, found that she had a charm unaccountably
+reconcilable with it.  Most men thought her bewitching when she was on
+horseback.  She loved the fresh air and the various aspects of the
+country, and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled pleasure she
+looked very little like a devotee.  Riding was an indulgence which she
+allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms; she felt that she
+enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always looked forward to
+renouncing it.
+
+She was open, ardent, and not in the least self-admiring; indeed, it
+was pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with
+attractions altogether superior to her own, and if any gentleman
+appeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that of
+seeing Mr. Brooke, she concluded that he must be in love with Celia:
+Sir James Chettam, for example, whom she constantly considered from
+Celia's point of view, inwardly debating whether it would be good for
+Celia to accept him.  That he should be regarded as a suitor to herself
+would have seemed to her a ridiculous irrelevance.  Dorothea, with all
+her eagerness to know the truths of life, retained very childlike ideas
+about marriage.  She felt sure that she would have accepted the
+judicious Hooker, if she had been born in time to save him from that
+wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his
+blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits
+it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome
+baronet, who said "Exactly" to her remarks even when she expressed
+uncertainty,--how could he affect her as a lover?  The really
+delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of
+father, and could teach you even Hebrew, if you wished it.
+
+These peculiarities of Dorothea's character caused Mr. Brooke to be all
+the more blamed in neighboring families for not securing some
+middle-aged lady as guide and companion to his nieces.  But he himself
+dreaded so much the sort of superior woman likely to be available for
+such a position, that he allowed himself to be dissuaded by Dorothea's
+objections, and was in this case brave enough to defy the world--that
+is to say, Mrs. Cadwallader the Rector's wife, and the small group of
+gentry with whom he visited in the northeast corner of Loamshire.  So
+Miss Brooke presided in her uncle's household, and did not at all
+dislike her new authority, with the homage that belonged to it.
+
+Sir James Chettam was going to dine at the Grange to-day with another
+gentleman whom the girls had never seen, and about whom Dorothea felt
+some venerating expectation.  This was the Reverend Edward Casaubon,
+noted in the county as a man of profound learning, understood for many
+years to be engaged on a great work concerning religious history; also
+as a man of wealth enough to give lustre to his piety, and having views
+of his own which were to be more clearly ascertained on the publication
+of his book.  His very name carried an impressiveness hardly to be
+measured without a precise chronology of scholarship.
+
+Early in the day Dorothea had returned from the infant school which she
+had set going in the village, and was taking her usual place in the
+pretty sitting-room which divided the bedrooms of the sisters, bent on
+finishing a plan for some buildings (a kind of work which she delighted
+in), when Celia, who had been watching her with a hesitating desire to
+propose something, said--
+
+"Dorothea, dear, if you don't mind--if you are not very busy--suppose
+we looked at mamma's jewels to-day, and divided them?  It is exactly
+six months to-day since uncle gave them to you, and you have not looked
+at them yet."
+
+Celia's face had the shadow of a pouting expression in it, the full
+presence of the pout being kept back by an habitual awe of Dorothea and
+principle; two associated facts which might show a mysterious
+electricity if you touched them incautiously.  To her relief,
+Dorothea's eyes were full of laughter as she looked up.
+
+"What a wonderful little almanac you are, Celia!  Is it six calendar or
+six lunar months?"
+
+"It is the last day of September now, and it was the first of April
+when uncle gave them to you.  You know, he said that he had forgotten
+them till then.  I believe you have never thought of them since you
+locked them up in the cabinet here."
+
+"Well, dear, we should never wear them, you know." Dorothea spoke in a
+full cordial tone, half caressing, half explanatory.  She had her
+pencil in her hand, and was making tiny side-plans on a margin.
+
+Celia colored, and looked very grave.  "I think, dear, we are wanting
+in respect to mamma's memory, to put them by and take no notice of
+them.  And," she added, after hesitating a little, with a rising sob of
+mortification, "necklaces are quite usual now; and Madame Poincon, who
+was stricter in some things even than you are, used to wear ornaments.
+And Christians generally--surely there are women in heaven now who wore
+jewels." Celia was conscious of some mental strength when she really
+applied herself to argument.
+
+"You would like to wear them?" exclaimed Dorothea, an air of astonished
+discovery animating her whole person with a dramatic action which she
+had caught from that very Madame Poincon who wore the ornaments.  "Of
+course, then, let us have them out.  Why did you not tell me before?
+But the keys, the keys!" She pressed her hands against the sides of her
+head and seemed to despair of her memory.
+
+"They are here," said Celia, with whom this explanation had been long
+meditated and prearranged.
+
+"Pray open the large drawer of the cabinet and get out the jewel-box."
+
+The casket was soon open before them, and the various jewels spread
+out, making a bright parterre on the table.  It was no great
+collection, but a few of the ornaments were really of remarkable
+beauty, the finest that was obvious at first being a necklace of purple
+amethysts set in exquisite gold work, and a pearl cross with five
+brilliants in it.  Dorothea immediately took up the necklace and
+fastened it round her sister's neck, where it fitted almost as closely
+as a bracelet; but the circle suited the Henrietta-Maria style of
+Celia's head and neck, and she could see that it did, in the pier-glass
+opposite.
+
+"There, Celia! you can wear that with your Indian muslin.  But this
+cross you must wear with your dark dresses."
+
+Celia was trying not to smile with pleasure.  "O Dodo, you must keep
+the cross yourself."
+
+"No, no, dear, no," said Dorothea, putting up her hand with careless
+deprecation.
+
+"Yes, indeed you must; it would suit you--in your black dress, now,"
+said Celia, insistingly.  "You _might_ wear that."
+
+"Not for the world, not for the world.  A cross is the last thing I
+would wear as a trinket." Dorothea shuddered slightly.
+
+"Then you will think it wicked in me to wear it," said Celia, uneasily.
+
+"No, dear, no," said Dorothea, stroking her sister's cheek.  "Souls
+have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another."
+
+"But you might like to keep it for mamma's sake."
+
+"No, I have other things of mamma's--her sandal-wood box which I am so
+fond of--plenty of things.  In fact, they are all yours, dear.  We need
+discuss them no longer.  There--take away your property."
+
+Celia felt a little hurt.  There was a strong assumption of superiority
+in this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond flesh of
+an unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.
+
+"But how can I wear ornaments if you, who are the elder sister, will
+never wear them?"
+
+"Nay, Celia, that is too much to ask, that I should wear trinkets to
+keep you in countenance.  If I were to put on such a necklace as that,
+I should feel as if I had been pirouetting.  The world would go round
+with me, and I should not know how to walk."
+
+Celia had unclasped the necklace and drawn it off.  "It would be a
+little tight for your neck; something to lie down and hang would suit
+you better," she said, with some satisfaction.  The complete unfitness
+of the necklace from all points of view for Dorothea, made Celia
+happier in taking it.  She was opening some ring-boxes, which disclosed
+a fine emerald with diamonds, and just then the sun passing beyond a
+cloud sent a bright gleam over the table.
+
+"How very beautiful these gems are!" said Dorothea, under a new current
+of feeling, as sudden as the gleam.  "It is strange how deeply colors
+seem to penetrate one, like scent.  I suppose that is the reason why
+gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John.  They
+look like fragments of heaven.  I think that emerald is more beautiful
+than any of them."
+
+"And there is a bracelet to match it," said Celia.  "We did not notice
+this at first."
+
+"They are lovely," said Dorothea, slipping the ring and bracelet on her
+finely turned finger and wrist, and holding them towards the window on
+a level with her eyes.  All the while her thought was trying to justify
+her delight in the colors by merging them in her mystic religious joy.
+
+"You _would_ like those, Dorothea," said Celia, rather falteringly,
+beginning to think with wonder that her sister showed some weakness,
+and also that emeralds would suit her own complexion even better than
+purple amethysts.  "You must keep that ring and bracelet--if nothing
+else.  But see, these agates are very pretty and quiet."
+
+"Yes!  I will keep these--this ring and bracelet," said Dorothea.
+Then, letting her hand fall on the table, she said in another
+tone--"Yet what miserable men find such things, and work at them, and
+sell them!" She paused again, and Celia thought that her sister was
+going to renounce the ornaments, as in consistency she ought to do.
+
+"Yes, dear, I will keep these," said Dorothea, decidedly.  "But take
+all the rest away, and the casket."
+
+She took up her pencil without removing the jewels, and still looking
+at them.  She thought of often having them by her, to feed her eye at
+these little fountains of pure color.
+
+"Shall you wear them in company?" said Celia, who was watching her with
+real curiosity as to what she would do.
+
+Dorothea glanced quickly at her sister.  Across all her imaginative
+adornment of those whom she loved, there darted now and then a keen
+discernment, which was not without a scorching quality.  If Miss Brooke
+ever attained perfect meekness, it would not be for lack of inward fire.
+
+"Perhaps," she said, rather haughtily.  "I cannot tell to what level I
+may sink."
+
+Celia blushed, and was unhappy: she saw that she had offended her
+sister, and dared not say even anything pretty about the gift of the
+ornaments which she put back into the box and carried away.  Dorothea
+too was unhappy, as she went on with her plan-drawing, questioning the
+purity of her own feeling and speech in the scene which had ended with
+that little explosion.
+
+Celia's consciousness told her that she had not been at all in the
+wrong: it was quite natural and justifiable that she should have asked
+that question, and she repeated to herself that Dorothea was
+inconsistent: either she should have taken her full share of the
+jewels, or, after what she had said, she should have renounced them
+altogether.
+
+"I am sure--at least, I trust," thought Celia, "that the wearing of a
+necklace will not interfere with my prayers.  And I do not see that I
+should be bound by Dorothea's opinions now we are going into society,
+though of course she herself ought to be bound by them.  But Dorothea
+is not always consistent."
+
+Thus Celia, mutely bending over her tapestry, until she heard her
+sister calling her.
+
+"Here, Kitty, come and look at my plan; I shall think I am a great
+architect, if I have not got incompatible stairs and fireplaces."
+
+As Celia bent over the paper, Dorothea put her cheek against her
+sister's arm caressingly.  Celia understood the action.  Dorothea saw
+that she had been in the wrong, and Celia pardoned her.  Since they
+could remember, there had been a mixture of criticism and awe in the
+attitude of Celia's mind towards her elder sister.  The younger had
+always worn a yoke; but is there any yoked creature without its private
+opinions?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II.
+
+    "'Dime; no ves aquel caballero que hacia nosotros viene
+    sobre un caballo rucio rodado que trae puesto en la cabeza
+    un yelmo de oro?' 'Lo que veo y columbro,' respondio Sancho,
+    'no es sino un hombre sobre un as no pardo como el mio, que
+    trae sobre la cabeza una cosa que relumbra.' 'Pues ese es el
+    yelmo de Mambrino,' dijo Don Quijote."--CERVANTES.
+
+    "'Seest thou not yon cavalier who cometh toward us on a
+    dapple-gray steed, and weareth a golden helmet?' 'What I
+    see,' answered Sancho, 'is nothing but a man on a gray ass
+    like my own, who carries something shiny on his head.' 'Just
+    so,' answered Don Quixote: 'and that resplendent object is
+    the helmet of Mambrino.'"
+
+
+"Sir Humphry Davy?" said Mr. Brooke, over the soup, in his easy smiling
+way, taking up Sir James Chettam's remark that he was studying Davy's
+Agricultural Chemistry.  "Well, now, Sir Humphry Davy; I dined with him
+years ago at Cartwright's, and Wordsworth was there too--the poet
+Wordsworth, you know.  Now there was something singular.  I was at
+Cambridge when Wordsworth was there, and I never met him--and I dined
+with him twenty years afterwards at Cartwright's. There's an oddity in
+things, now.  But Davy was there: he was a poet too.  Or, as I may say,
+Wordsworth was poet one, and Davy was poet two.  That was true in every
+sense, you know."
+
+Dorothea felt a little more uneasy than usual.  In the beginning of
+dinner, the party being small and the room still, these motes from the
+mass of a magistrate's mind fell too noticeably.  She wondered how a
+man like Mr. Casaubon would support such triviality.  His manners, she
+thought, were very dignified; the set of his iron-gray hair and his
+deep eye-sockets made him resemble the portrait of Locke.  He had the
+spare form and the pale complexion which became a student; as different
+as possible from the blooming Englishman of the red-whiskered type
+represented by Sir James Chettam.
+
+"I am reading the Agricultural Chemistry," said this excellent baronet,
+"because I am going to take one of the farms into my own hands, and see
+if something cannot be done in setting a good pattern of farming among
+my tenants.  Do you approve of that, Miss Brooke?"
+
+"A great mistake, Chettam," interposed Mr. Brooke, "going into
+electrifying your land and that kind of thing, and making a parlor of
+your cow-house. It won't do.  I went into science a great deal myself
+at one time; but I saw it would not do.  It leads to everything; you
+can let nothing alone.  No, no--see that your tenants don't sell their
+straw, and that kind of thing; and give them draining-tiles, you know.
+But your fancy farming will not do--the most expensive sort of whistle
+you can buy: you may as well keep a pack of hounds."
+
+"Surely," said Dorothea, "it is better to spend money in finding out
+how men can make the most of the land which supports them all, than in
+keeping dogs and horses only to gallop over it.  It is not a sin to
+make yourself poor in performing experiments for the good of all."
+
+She spoke with more energy than is expected of so young a lady, but Sir
+James had appealed to her.  He was accustomed to do so, and she had
+often thought that she could urge him to many good actions when he was
+her brother-in-law.
+
+Mr. Casaubon turned his eyes very markedly on Dorothea while she was
+speaking, and seemed to observe her newly.
+
+"Young ladies don't understand political economy, you know," said Mr.
+Brooke, smiling towards Mr. Casaubon.  "I remember when we were all
+reading Adam Smith.  _There_ is a book, now.  I took in all the new
+ideas at one time--human perfectibility, now.  But some say, history
+moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have argued it
+myself.  The fact is, human reason may carry you a little too far--over
+the hedge, in fact.  It carried me a good way at one time; but I saw it
+would not do.  I pulled up; I pulled up in time.  But not too hard.  I
+have always been in favor of a little theory: we must have Thought;
+else we shall be landed back in the dark ages.  But talking of books,
+there is Southey's 'Peninsular War.' I am reading that of a morning.
+You know Southey?"
+
+"No" said Mr. Casaubon, not keeping pace with Mr. Brooke's impetuous
+reason, and thinking of the book only.  "I have little leisure for such
+literature just now.  I have been using up my eyesight on old
+characters lately; the fact is, I want a reader for my evenings; but I
+am fastidious in voices, and I cannot endure listening to an imperfect
+reader.  It is a misfortune, in some senses: I feed too much on the
+inward sources; I live too much with the dead.  My mind is something
+like the ghost of an ancient, wandering about the world and trying
+mentally to construct it as it used to be, in spite of ruin and
+confusing changes.  But I find it necessary to use the utmost caution
+about my eyesight."
+
+This was the first time that Mr. Casaubon had spoken at any length.  He
+delivered himself with precision, as if he had been called upon to make
+a public statement; and the balanced sing-song neatness of his speech,
+occasionally corresponded to by a movement of his head, was the more
+conspicuous from its contrast with good Mr. Brooke's scrappy
+slovenliness.  Dorothea said to herself that Mr. Casaubon was the most
+interesting man she had ever seen, not excepting even Monsieur Liret,
+the Vaudois clergyman who had given conferences on the history of the
+Waldenses.  To reconstruct a past world, doubtless with a view to the
+highest purposes of truth--what a work to be in any way present at, to
+assist in, though only as a lamp-holder!  This elevating thought lifted
+her above her annoyance at being twitted with her ignorance of
+political economy, that never-explained science which was thrust as an
+extinguisher over all her lights.
+
+"But you are fond of riding, Miss Brooke," Sir James presently took an
+opportunity of saying.  "I should have thought you would enter a little
+into the pleasures of hunting.  I wish you would let me send over a
+chestnut horse for you to try.  It has been trained for a lady.  I saw
+you on Saturday cantering over the hill on a nag not worthy of you.  My
+groom shall bring Corydon for you every day, if you will only mention
+the time."
+
+"Thank you, you are very good.  I mean to give up riding.  I shall not
+ride any more," said Dorothea, urged to this brusque resolution by a
+little annoyance that Sir James would be soliciting her attention when
+she wanted to give it all to Mr. Casaubon.
+
+"No, that is too hard," said Sir James, in a tone of reproach that
+showed strong interest.  "Your sister is given to self-mortification,
+is she not?" he continued, turning to Celia, who sat at his right hand.
+
+"I think she is," said Celia, feeling afraid lest she should say
+something that would not please her sister, and blushing as prettily as
+possible above her necklace.  "She likes giving up."
+
+"If that were true, Celia, my giving-up would be self-indulgence, not
+self-mortification. But there may be good reasons for choosing not to
+do what is very agreeable," said Dorothea.
+
+Mr. Brooke was speaking at the same time, but it was evident that Mr.
+Casaubon was observing Dorothea, and she was aware of it.
+
+"Exactly," said Sir James.  "You give up from some high, generous
+motive."
+
+"No, indeed, not exactly.  I did not say that of myself," answered
+Dorothea, reddening.  Unlike Celia, she rarely blushed, and only from
+high delight or anger.  At this moment she felt angry with the perverse
+Sir James.  Why did he not pay attention to Celia, and leave her to
+listen to Mr. Casaubon?--if that learned man would only talk, instead
+of allowing himself to be talked to by Mr. Brooke, who was just then
+informing him that the Reformation either meant something or it did
+not, that he himself was a Protestant to the core, but that Catholicism
+was a fact; and as to refusing an acre of your ground for a Romanist
+chapel, all men needed the bridle of religion, which, properly
+speaking, was the dread of a Hereafter.
+
+"I made a great study of theology at one time," said Mr. Brooke, as if
+to explain the insight just manifested.  "I know something of all
+schools.  I knew Wilberforce in his best days.  Do you know
+Wilberforce?"
+
+Mr. Casaubon said, "No."
+
+"Well, Wilberforce was perhaps not enough of a thinker; but if I went
+into Parliament, as I have been asked to do, I should sit on the
+independent bench, as Wilberforce did, and work at philanthropy."
+
+Mr. Casaubon bowed, and observed that it was a wide field.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Brooke, with an easy smile, "but I have documents.  I
+began a long while ago to collect documents.  They want arranging, but
+when a question has struck me, I have written to somebody and got an
+answer.  I have documents at my back.  But now, how do you arrange your
+documents?"
+
+"In pigeon-holes partly," said Mr. Casaubon, with rather a startled air
+of effort.
+
+"Ah, pigeon-holes will not do.  I have tried pigeon-holes, but
+everything gets mixed in pigeon-holes: I never know whether a paper is
+in A or Z."
+
+"I wish you would let me sort your papers for you, uncle," said
+Dorothea.  "I would letter them all, and then make a list of subjects
+under each letter."
+
+Mr. Casaubon gravely smiled approval, and said to Mr. Brooke, "You have
+an excellent secretary at hand, you perceive."
+
+"No, no," said Mr. Brooke, shaking his head; "I cannot let young ladies
+meddle with my documents.  Young ladies are too flighty."
+
+Dorothea felt hurt.  Mr. Casaubon would think that her uncle had some
+special reason for delivering this opinion, whereas the remark lay in
+his mind as lightly as the broken wing of an insect among all the other
+fragments there, and a chance current had sent it alighting on _her_.
+
+When the two girls were in the drawing-room alone, Celia said--
+
+"How very ugly Mr. Casaubon is!"
+
+"Celia!  He is one of the most distinguished-looking men I ever saw.
+He is remarkably like the portrait of Locke.  He has the same deep
+eye-sockets."
+
+"Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on them?"
+
+"Oh, I dare say! when people of a certain sort looked at him," said
+Dorothea, walking away a little.
+
+"Mr. Casaubon is so sallow."
+
+"All the better.  I suppose you admire a man with the complexion of a
+cochon de lait."
+
+"Dodo!" exclaimed Celia, looking after her in surprise.  "I never heard
+you make such a comparison before."
+
+"Why should I make it before the occasion came?  It is a good
+comparison: the match is perfect."
+
+Miss Brooke was clearly forgetting herself, and Celia thought so.
+
+"I wonder you show temper, Dorothea."
+
+"It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as
+if they were merely animals with a toilet, and never see the great soul
+in a man's face."
+
+"Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul?" Celia was not without a touch of naive
+malice.
+
+"Yes, I believe he has," said Dorothea, with the full voice of
+decision.  "Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet on
+Biblical Cosmology."
+
+"He talks very little," said Celia
+
+"There is no one for him to talk to."
+
+Celia thought privately, "Dorothea quite despises Sir James Chettam; I
+believe she would not accept him." Celia felt that this was a pity.
+She had never been deceived as to the object of the baronet's interest.
+Sometimes, indeed, she had reflected that Dodo would perhaps not make a
+husband happy who had not her way of looking at things; and stifled in
+the depths of her heart was the feeling that her sister was too
+religious for family comfort.  Notions and scruples were like spilt
+needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.
+
+When Miss Brooke was at the tea-table, Sir James came to sit down by
+her, not having felt her mode of answering him at all offensive.  Why
+should he?  He thought it probable that Miss Brooke liked him, and
+manners must be very marked indeed before they cease to be interpreted
+by preconceptions either confident or distrustful.  She was thoroughly
+charming to him, but of course he theorized a little about his
+attachment.  He was made of excellent human dough, and had the rare
+merit of knowing that his talents, even if let loose, would not set the
+smallest stream in the county on fire: hence he liked the prospect of a
+wife to whom he could say, "What shall we do?" about this or that; who
+could help her husband out with reasons, and would also have the
+property qualification for doing so.  As to the excessive religiousness
+alleged against Miss Brooke, he had a very indefinite notion of what it
+consisted in, and thought that it would die out with marriage.  In
+short, he felt himself to be in love in the right place, and was ready
+to endure a great deal of predominance, which, after all, a man could
+always put down when he liked.  Sir James had no idea that he should
+ever like to put down the predominance of this handsome girl, in whose
+cleverness he delighted.  Why not?  A man's mind--what there is of
+it--has always the advantage of being masculine,--as the smallest
+birch-tree is of a higher kind than the most soaring palm,--and even
+his ignorance is of a sounder quality.  Sir James might not have
+originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest
+personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.
+
+"Let me hope that you will rescind that resolution about the horse,
+Miss Brooke," said the persevering admirer.  "I assure you, riding is
+the most healthy of exercises."
+
+"I am aware of it," said Dorothea, coldly.  "I think it would do Celia
+good--if she would take to it."
+
+"But you are such a perfect horsewoman."
+
+"Excuse me; I have had very little practice, and I should be easily
+thrown."
+
+"Then that is a reason for more practice.  Every lady ought to be a
+perfect horsewoman, that she may accompany her husband."
+
+"You see how widely we differ, Sir James.  I have made up my mind that
+I ought not to be a perfect horsewoman, and so I should never
+correspond to your pattern of a lady." Dorothea looked straight before
+her, and spoke with cold brusquerie, very much with the air of a
+handsome boy, in amusing contrast with the solicitous amiability of her
+admirer.
+
+"I should like to know your reasons for this cruel resolution.  It is
+not possible that you should think horsemanship wrong."
+
+"It is quite possible that I should think it wrong for me."
+
+"Oh, why?" said Sir James, in a tender tone of remonstrance.
+
+Mr. Casaubon had come up to the table, teacup in hand, and was
+listening.
+
+"We must not inquire too curiously into motives," he interposed, in his
+measured way.  "Miss Brooke knows that they are apt to become feeble in
+the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air.  We must keep
+the germinating grain away from the light."
+
+Dorothea colored with pleasure, and looked up gratefully to the
+speaker.  Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life,
+and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could
+illuminate principle with the widest knowledge a man whose learning
+almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!
+
+Dorothea's inferences may seem large; but really life could never have
+gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusions,
+which has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization.
+Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of
+pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?
+
+"Certainly," said good Sir James.  "Miss Brooke shall not be urged to
+tell reasons she would rather be silent upon.  I am sure her reasons
+would do her honor."
+
+He was not in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea had
+looked up at Mr. Casaubon: it never occurred to him that a girl to whom
+he was meditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried bookworm
+towards fifty, except, indeed, in a religious sort of way, as for a
+clergyman of some distinction.
+
+However, since Miss Brooke had become engaged in a conversation with
+Mr. Casaubon about the Vaudois clergy, Sir James betook himself to
+Celia, and talked to her about her sister; spoke of a house in town,
+and asked whether Miss Brooke disliked London.  Away from her sister,
+Celia talked quite easily, and Sir James said to himself that the
+second Miss Brooke was certainly very agreeable as well as pretty,
+though not, as some people pretended, more clever and sensible than the
+elder sister.  He felt that he had chosen the one who was in all
+respects the superior; and a man naturally likes to look forward to
+having the best.  He would be the very Mawworm of bachelors who
+pretended not to expect it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III.
+
+    "Say, goddess, what ensued, when Raphael,
+     The affable archangel . . .
+                                           Eve
+     The story heard attentive, and was filled
+     With admiration, and deep muse, to hear
+     Of things so high and strange."
+                               --Paradise Lost, B. vii.
+
+
+If it had really occurred to Mr. Casaubon to think of Miss Brooke as a
+suitable wife for him, the reasons that might induce her to accept him
+were already planted in her mind, and by the evening of the next day
+the reasons had budded and bloomed.  For they had had a long
+conversation in the morning, while Celia, who did not like the company
+of Mr. Casaubon's moles and sallowness, had escaped to the vicarage to
+play with the curate's ill-shod but merry children.
+
+Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of
+Mr. Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine
+extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own
+experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great
+work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent.  For he had been as
+instructive as Milton's "affable archangel;" and with something of the
+archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what
+indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness,
+justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr.
+Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical
+fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally
+revealed.  Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm
+footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became
+intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of
+correspondences.  But to gather in this great harvest of truth was no
+light or speedy work.  His notes already made a formidable range of
+volumes, but the crowning task would be to condense these voluminous
+still-accumulating results and bring them, like the earlier vintage of
+Hippocratic books, to fit a little shelf.  In explaining this to
+Dorothea, Mr. Casaubon expressed himself nearly as he would have done
+to a fellow-student, for he had not two styles of talking at command:
+it is true that when he used a Greek or Latin phrase he always gave the
+English with scrupulous care, but he would probably have done this in
+any case.  A learned provincial clergyman is accustomed to think of his
+acquaintances as of "lords, knyghtes, and other noble and worthi men,
+that conne Latyn but lytille."
+
+Dorothea was altogether captivated by the wide embrace of this
+conception.  Here was something beyond the shallows of ladies' school
+literature: here was a living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile
+complete knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modern Augustine who
+united the glories of doctor and saint.
+
+The sanctity seemed no less clearly marked than the learning, for when
+Dorothea was impelled to open her mind on certain themes which she
+could speak of to no one whom she had before seen at Tipton, especially
+on the secondary importance of ecclesiastical forms and articles of
+belief compared with that spiritual religion, that submergence of self
+in communion with Divine perfection which seemed to her to be expressed
+in the best Christian books of widely distant ages, she found in Mr.
+Casaubon a listener who understood her at once, who could assure her of
+his own agreement with that view when duly tempered with wise
+conformity, and could mention historical examples before unknown to her.
+
+"He thinks with me," said Dorothea to herself, "or rather, he thinks a
+whole world of which my thought is but a poor twopenny mirror.  And his
+feelings too, his whole experience--what a lake compared with my little
+pool!"
+
+Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly
+than other young ladies of her age.  Signs are small measurable things,
+but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent
+nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a
+sky, and colored by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of
+knowledge.  They are not always too grossly deceived; for Sinbad
+himself may have fallen by good-luck on a true description, and wrong
+reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a
+long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we
+now and then arrive just where we ought to be.  Because Miss Brooke was
+hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was
+unworthy of it.
+
+He stayed a little longer than he had intended, on a slight pressure of
+invitation from Mr. Brooke, who offered no bait except his own
+documents on machine-breaking and rick-burning. Mr. Casaubon was called
+into the library to look at these in a heap, while his host picked up
+first one and then the other to read aloud from in a skipping and
+uncertain way, passing from one unfinished passage to another with a
+"Yes, now, but here!" and finally pushing them all aside to open the
+journal of his youthful Continental travels.
+
+"Look here--here is all about Greece.  Rhamnus, the ruins of
+Rhamnus--you are a great Grecian, now.  I don't know whether you have
+given much study to the topography.  I spent no end of time in making
+out these things--Helicon, now.  Here, now!--'We started the next
+morning for Parnassus, the double-peaked Parnassus.' All this volume is
+about Greece, you know," Mr. Brooke wound up, rubbing his thumb
+transversely along the edges of the leaves as he held the book forward.
+
+Mr. Casaubon made a dignified though somewhat sad audience; bowed in
+the right place, and avoided looking at anything documentary as far as
+possible, without showing disregard or impatience; mindful that this
+desultoriness was associated with the institutions of the country, and
+that the man who took him on this severe mental scamper was not only an
+amiable host, but a landholder and custos rotulorum. Was his endurance
+aided also by the reflection that Mr. Brooke was the uncle of Dorothea?
+
+Certainly he seemed more and more bent on making her talk to him, on
+drawing her out, as Celia remarked to herself; and in looking at her
+his face was often lit up by a smile like pale wintry sunshine.  Before
+he left the next morning, while taking a pleasant walk with Miss Brooke
+along the gravelled terrace, he had mentioned to her that he felt the
+disadvantage of loneliness, the need of that cheerful companionship
+with which the presence of youth can lighten or vary the serious toils
+of maturity.  And he delivered this statement with as much careful
+precision as if he had been a diplomatic envoy whose words would be
+attended with results.  Indeed, Mr. Casaubon was not used to expect
+that he should have to repeat or revise his communications of a
+practical or personal kind.  The inclinations which he had deliberately
+stated on the 2d of October he would think it enough to refer to by the
+mention of that date; judging by the standard of his own memory, which
+was a volume where a vide supra could serve instead of repetitions, and
+not the ordinary long-used blotting-book which only tells of forgotten
+writing.  But in this case Mr. Casaubon's confidence was not likely to
+be falsified, for Dorothea heard and retained what he said with the
+eager interest of a fresh young nature to which every variety in
+experience is an epoch.
+
+It was three o'clock in the beautiful breezy autumn day when Mr.
+Casaubon drove off to his Rectory at Lowick, only five miles from
+Tipton; and Dorothea, who had on her bonnet and shawl, hurried along
+the shrubbery and across the park that she might wander through the
+bordering wood with no other visible companionship than that of Monk,
+the Great St. Bernard dog, who always took care of the young ladies in
+their walks.  There had risen before her the girl's vision of a
+possible future for herself to which she looked forward with trembling
+hope, and she wanted to wander on in that visionary future without
+interruption.  She walked briskly in the brisk air, the color rose in
+her cheeks, and her straw bonnet (which our contemporaries might look
+at with conjectural curiosity as at an obsolete form of basket) fell a
+little backward.  She would perhaps be hardly characterized enough if
+it were omitted that she wore her brown hair flatly braided and coiled
+behind so as to expose the outline of her head in a daring manner at a
+time when public feeling required the meagreness of nature to be
+dissimulated by tall barricades of frizzed curls and bows, never
+surpassed by any great race except the Feejeean.  This was a trait of
+Miss Brooke's asceticism.  But there was nothing of an ascetic's
+expression in her bright full eyes, as she looked before her, not
+consciously seeing, but absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the
+solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between
+the far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other.
+
+All people, young or old (that is, all people in those ante-reform
+times), would have thought her an interesting object if they had
+referred the glow in her eyes and cheeks to the newly awakened ordinary
+images of young love: the illusions of Chloe about Strephon have been
+sufficiently consecrated in poetry, as the pathetic loveliness of all
+spontaneous trust ought to be.  Miss Pippin adoring young Pumpkin, and
+dreaming along endless vistas of unwearying companionship, was a little
+drama which never tired our fathers and mothers, and had been put into
+all costumes.  Let but Pumpkin have a figure which would sustain the
+disadvantages of the shortwaisted swallow-tail, and everybody felt it
+not only natural but necessary to the perfection of womanhood, that a
+sweet girl should be at once convinced of his virtue, his exceptional
+ability, and above all, his perfect sincerity.  But perhaps no persons
+then living--certainly none in the neighborhood of Tipton--would have
+had a sympathetic understanding for the dreams of a girl whose notions
+about marriage took their color entirely from an exalted enthusiasm
+about the ends of life, an enthusiasm which was lit chiefly by its own
+fire, and included neither the niceties of the trousseau, the pattern
+of plate, nor even the honors and sweet joys of the blooming matron.
+
+It had now entered Dorothea's mind that Mr. Casaubon might wish to make
+her his wife, and the idea that he would do so touched her with a sort
+of reverential gratitude.  How good of him--nay, it would be almost as
+if a winged messenger had suddenly stood beside her path and held out
+his hand towards her!  For a long while she had been oppressed by the
+indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over
+all her desire to make her life greatly effective.  What could she do,
+what ought she to do?--she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet
+with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to be satisfied
+by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a
+discursive mouse.  With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she
+might have thought that a Christian young lady of fortune should find
+her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the humbler
+clergy, the perusal of "Female Scripture Characters," unfolding the
+private experience of Sara under the Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under
+the New, and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own
+boudoir--with a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if
+less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously
+inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted.  From such
+contentment poor Dorothea was shut out.  The intensity of her religious
+disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one
+aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually
+consequent: and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow
+teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a
+labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no
+whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration
+and inconsistency.  The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to
+justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended
+admission of rules which were never acted on.  Into this soul-hunger as
+yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her
+was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own
+ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide
+who would take her along the grandest path.
+
+"I should learn everything then," she said to herself, still walking
+quickly along the bridle road through the wood.  "It would be my duty
+to study that I might help him the better in his great works.  There
+would be nothing trivial about our lives.  Every-day things with us
+would mean the greatest things.  It would be like marrying Pascal.  I
+should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen
+it by.  And then I should know what to do, when I got older: I should
+see how it was possible to lead a grand life here--now--in England.  I
+don't feel sure about doing good in any way now: everything seems like
+going on a mission to a people whose language I don't know;--unless it
+were building good cottages--there can be no doubt about that.  Oh, I
+hope I should be able to get the people well housed in Lowick!  I will
+draw plenty of plans while I have time."
+
+Dorothea checked herself suddenly with self-rebuke for the presumptuous
+way in which she was reckoning on uncertain events, but she was spared
+any inward effort to change the direction of her thoughts by the
+appearance of a cantering horseman round a turning of the road.  The
+well-groomed chestnut horse and two beautiful setters could leave no
+doubt that the rider was Sir James Chettam.  He discerned Dorothea,
+jumped off his horse at once, and, having delivered it to his groom,
+advanced towards her with something white on his arm, at which the two
+setters were barking in an excited manner.
+
+"How delightful to meet you, Miss Brooke," he said, raising his hat and
+showing his sleekly waving blond hair.  "It has hastened the pleasure I
+was looking forward to."
+
+Miss Brooke was annoyed at the interruption.  This amiable baronet,
+really a suitable husband for Celia, exaggerated the necessity of
+making himself agreeable to the elder sister.  Even a prospective
+brother-in-law may be an oppression if he will always be presupposing
+too good an understanding with you, and agreeing with you even when you
+contradict him.  The thought that he had made the mistake of paying his
+addresses to herself could not take shape: all her mental activity was
+used up in persuasions of another kind.  But he was positively
+obtrusive at this moment, and his dimpled hands were quite
+disagreeable.  Her roused temper made her color deeply, as she returned
+his greeting with some haughtiness.
+
+Sir James interpreted the heightened color in the way most gratifying
+to himself, and thought he never saw Miss Brooke looking so handsome.
+
+"I have brought a little petitioner," he said, "or rather, I have
+brought him to see if he will be approved before his petition is
+offered." He showed the white object under his arm, which was a tiny
+Maltese puppy, one of nature's most naive toys.
+
+"It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely as
+pets," said Dorothea, whose opinion was forming itself that very moment
+(as opinions will) under the heat of irritation.
+
+"Oh, why?" said Sir James, as they walked forward.
+
+"I believe all the petting that is given them does not make them happy.
+They are too helpless: their lives are too frail.  A weasel or a mouse
+that gets its own living is more interesting.  I like to think that the
+animals about us have souls something like our own, and either carry on
+their own little affairs or can be companions to us, like Monk here.
+Those creatures are parasitic."
+
+"I am so glad I know that you do not like them," said good Sir James.
+"I should never keep them for myself, but ladies usually are fond of
+these Maltese dogs.  Here, John, take this dog, will you?"
+
+The objectionable puppy, whose nose and eyes were equally black and
+expressive, was thus got rid of, since Miss Brooke decided that it had
+better not have been born.  But she felt it necessary to explain.
+
+"You must not judge of Celia's feeling from mine.  I think she likes
+these small pets.  She had a tiny terrier once, which she was very fond
+of.  It made me unhappy, because I was afraid of treading on it.  I am
+rather short-sighted."
+
+"You have your own opinion about everything, Miss Brooke, and it is
+always a good opinion."
+
+What answer was possible to such stupid complimenting?
+
+"Do you know, I envy you that," Sir James said, as they continued
+walking at the rather brisk pace set by Dorothea.
+
+"I don't quite understand what you mean."
+
+"Your power of forming an opinion.  I can form an opinion of persons.
+I know when I like people.  But about other matters, do you know, I
+have often a difficulty in deciding.  One hears very sensible things
+said on opposite sides."
+
+"Or that seem sensible.  Perhaps we don't always discriminate between
+sense and nonsense."
+
+Dorothea felt that she was rather rude.
+
+"Exactly," said Sir James.  "But you seem to have the power of
+discrimination."
+
+"On the contrary, I am often unable to decide.  But that is from
+ignorance.  The right conclusion is there all the same, though I am
+unable to see it."
+
+"I think there are few who would see it more readily.  Do you know,
+Lovegood was telling me yesterday that you had the best notion in the
+world of a plan for cottages--quite wonderful for a young lady, he
+thought.  You had a real _genus_, to use his expression.  He said you
+wanted Mr. Brooke to build a new set of cottages, but he seemed to
+think it hardly probable that your uncle would consent.  Do you know,
+that is one of the things I wish to do--I mean, on my own estate.  I
+should be so glad to carry out that plan of yours, if you would let me
+see it.  Of course, it is sinking money; that is why people object to
+it.  Laborers can never pay rent to make it answer.  But, after all, it
+is worth doing."
+
+"Worth doing! yes, indeed," said Dorothea, energetically, forgetting
+her previous small vexations.  "I think we deserve to be beaten out of
+our beautiful houses with a scourge of small cords--all of us who let
+tenants live in such sties as we see round us.  Life in cottages might
+be happier than ours, if they were real houses fit for human beings
+from whom we expect duties and affections."
+
+"Will you show me your plan?"
+
+"Yes, certainly.  I dare say it is very faulty.  But I have been
+examining all the plans for cottages in Loudon's book, and picked out
+what seem the best things.  Oh what a happiness it would be to set the
+pattern about here!  I think instead of Lazarus at the gate, we should
+put the pigsty cottages outside the park-gate."
+
+Dorothea was in the best temper now.  Sir James, as brother in-law,
+building model cottages on his estate, and then, perhaps, others being
+built at Lowick, and more and more elsewhere in imitation--it would be
+as if the spirit of Oberlin had passed over the parishes to make the
+life of poverty beautiful!
+
+Sir James saw all the plans, and took one away to consult upon with
+Lovegood.  He also took away a complacent sense that he was making
+great progress in Miss Brooke's good opinion.  The Maltese puppy was
+not offered to Celia; an omission which Dorothea afterwards thought of
+with surprise; but she blamed herself for it.  She had been engrossing
+Sir James.  After all, it was a relief that there was no puppy to tread
+upon.
+
+Celia was present while the plans were being examined, and observed Sir
+James's illusion.  "He thinks that Dodo cares about him, and she only
+cares about her plans.  Yet I am not certain that she would refuse him
+if she thought he would let her manage everything and carry out all her
+notions.  And how very uncomfortable Sir James would be!  I cannot bear
+notions."
+
+It was Celia's private luxury to indulge in this dislike.  She dared
+not confess it to her sister in any direct statement, for that would be
+laying herself open to a demonstration that she was somehow or other at
+war with all goodness.  But on safe opportunities, she had an indirect
+mode of making her negative wisdom tell upon Dorothea, and calling her
+down from her rhapsodic mood by reminding her that people were staring,
+not listening.  Celia was not impulsive: what she had to say could
+wait, and came from her always with the same quiet staccato evenness.
+When people talked with energy and emphasis she watched their faces and
+features merely.  She never could understand how well-bred persons
+consented to sing and open their mouths in the ridiculous manner
+requisite for that vocal exercise.
+
+It was not many days before Mr. Casaubon paid a morning visit, on which
+he was invited again for the following week to dine and stay the night.
+Thus Dorothea had three more conversations with him, and was convinced
+that her first impressions had been just.  He was all she had at first
+imagined him to be: almost everything he had said seemed like a
+specimen from a mine, or the inscription on the door of a museum which
+might open on the treasures of past ages; and this trust in his mental
+wealth was all the deeper and more effective on her inclination because
+it was now obvious that his visits were made for her sake.  This
+accomplished man condescended to think of a young girl, and take the
+pains to talk to her, not with absurd compliment, but with an appeal to
+her understanding, and sometimes with instructive correction.  What
+delightful companionship!  Mr. Casaubon seemed even unconscious that
+trivialities existed, and never handed round that small-talk of heavy
+men which is as acceptable as stale bride-cake brought forth with an
+odor of cupboard.  He talked of what he was interested in, or else he
+was silent and bowed with sad civility.  To Dorothea this was adorable
+genuineness, and religious abstinence from that artificiality which
+uses up the soul in the efforts of pretence.  For she looked as
+reverently at Mr. Casaubon's religious elevation above herself as she
+did at his intellect and learning.  He assented to her expressions of
+devout feeling, and usually with an appropriate quotation; he allowed
+himself to say that he had gone through some spiritual conflicts in his
+youth; in short, Dorothea saw that here she might reckon on
+understanding, sympathy, and guidance.  On one--only one--of her
+favorite themes she was disappointed.  Mr. Casaubon apparently did not
+care about building cottages, and diverted the talk to the extremely
+narrow accommodation which was to be had in the dwellings of the
+ancient Egyptians, as if to check a too high standard.  After he was
+gone, Dorothea dwelt with some agitation on this indifference of his;
+and her mind was much exercised with arguments drawn from the varying
+conditions of climate which modify human needs, and from the admitted
+wickedness of pagan despots.  Should she not urge these arguments on
+Mr. Casaubon when he came again?  But further reflection told her that
+she was presumptuous in demanding his attention to such a subject; he
+would not disapprove of her occupying herself with it in leisure
+moments, as other women expected to occupy themselves with their dress
+and embroidery--would not forbid it when--Dorothea felt rather ashamed
+as she detected herself in these speculations.  But her uncle had been
+invited to go to Lowick to stay a couple of days: was it reasonable to
+suppose that Mr. Casaubon delighted in Mr. Brooke's society for its own
+sake, either with or without documents?
+
+Meanwhile that little disappointment made her delight the more in Sir
+James Chettam's readiness to set on foot the desired improvements.  He
+came much oftener than Mr. Casaubon, and Dorothea ceased to find him
+disagreeable since he showed himself so entirely in earnest; for he had
+already entered with much practical ability into Lovegood's estimates,
+and was charmingly docile.  She proposed to build a couple of cottages,
+and transfer two families from their old cabins, which could then be
+pulled down, so that new ones could be built on the old sites.  Sir
+James said "Exactly," and she bore the word remarkably well.
+
+Certainly these men who had so few spontaneous ideas might be very
+useful members of society under good feminine direction, if they were
+fortunate in choosing their sisters-in-law!  It is difficult to say
+whether there was or was not a little wilfulness in her continuing
+blind to the possibility that another sort of choice was in question in
+relation to her.  But her life was just now full of hope and action:
+she was not only thinking of her plans, but getting down learned books
+from the library and reading many things hastily (that she might be a
+little less ignorant in talking to Mr. Casaubon), all the while being
+visited with conscientious questionings whether she were not exalting
+these poor doings above measure and contemplating them with that
+self-satisfaction which was the last doom of ignorance and folly.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV.
+
+    1st Gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
+    2d Gent.  Ay, truly: but I think it is the world
+                 That brings the iron.
+
+
+"Sir James seems determined to do everything you wish," said Celia, as
+they were driving home from an inspection of the new building-site.
+
+"He is a good creature, and more sensible than any one would imagine,"
+said Dorothea, inconsiderately.
+
+"You mean that he appears silly."
+
+"No, no," said Dorothea, recollecting herself, and laying her hand on
+her sister's a moment, "but he does not talk equally well on all
+subjects."
+
+"I should think none but disagreeable people do," said Celia, in her
+usual purring way.  "They must be very dreadful to live with.  Only
+think! at breakfast, and always."
+
+Dorothea laughed.  "O Kitty, you are a wonderful creature!" She pinched
+Celia's chin, being in the mood now to think her very winning and
+lovely--fit hereafter to be an eternal cherub, and if it were not
+doctrinally wrong to say so, hardly more in need of salvation than a
+squirrel.  "Of course people need not be always talking well.  Only one
+tells the quality of their minds when they try to talk well."
+
+"You mean that Sir James tries and fails."
+
+"I was speaking generally.  Why do you catechise me about Sir James?
+It is not the object of his life to please me."
+
+"Now, Dodo, can you really believe that?"
+
+"Certainly. He thinks of me as a future sister--that is all." Dorothea
+had never hinted this before, waiting, from a certain shyness on such
+subjects which was mutual between the sisters, until it should be
+introduced by some decisive event.  Celia blushed, but said at once--
+
+"Pray do not make that mistake any longer, Dodo.  When Tantripp was
+brushing my hair the other day, she said that Sir James's man knew from
+Mrs. Cadwallader's maid that Sir James was to marry the eldest Miss
+Brooke."
+
+"How can you let Tantripp talk such gossip to you, Celia?" said
+Dorothea, indignantly, not the less angry because details asleep in her
+memory were now awakened to confirm the unwelcome revelation.  "You
+must have asked her questions.  It is degrading."
+
+"I see no harm at all in Tantripp's talking to me.  It is better to
+hear what people say.  You see what mistakes you make by taking up
+notions.  I am quite sure that Sir James means to make you an offer;
+and he believes that you will accept him, especially since you have
+been so pleased with him about the plans.  And uncle too--I know he
+expects it.  Every one can see that Sir James is very much in love with
+you."
+
+The revulsion was so strong and painful in Dorothea's mind that the
+tears welled up and flowed abundantly.  All her dear plans were
+embittered, and she thought with disgust of Sir James's conceiving that
+she recognized him as her lover.  There was vexation too on account of
+Celia.
+
+"How could he expect it?" she burst forth in her most impetuous manner.
+"I have never agreed with him about anything but the cottages: I was
+barely polite to him before."
+
+"But you have been so pleased with him since then; he has begun to feel
+quite sure that you are fond of him."
+
+"Fond of him, Celia!  How can you choose such odious expressions?" said
+Dorothea, passionately.
+
+"Dear me, Dorothea, I suppose it would be right for you to be fond of a
+man whom you accepted for a husband."
+
+"It is offensive to me to say that Sir James could think I was fond of
+him.  Besides, it is not the right word for the feeling I must have
+towards the man I would accept as a husband."
+
+"Well, I am sorry for Sir James.  I thought it right to tell you,
+because you went on as you always do, never looking just where you are,
+and treading in the wrong place.  You always see what nobody else sees;
+it is impossible to satisfy you; yet you never see what is quite plain.
+That's your way, Dodo." Something certainly gave Celia unusual courage;
+and she was not sparing the sister of whom she was occasionally in awe.
+Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the Cat may be passing on us
+beings of wider speculation?
+
+"It is very painful," said Dorothea, feeling scourged.  "I can have no
+more to do with the cottages.  I must be uncivil to him.  I must tell
+him I will have nothing to do with them.  It is very painful." Her eyes
+filled again with tears.
+
+"Wait a little.  Think about it.  You know he is going away for a day
+or two to see his sister.  There will be nobody besides Lovegood."
+Celia could not help relenting.  "Poor Dodo," she went on, in an
+amiable staccato.  "It is very hard: it is your favorite _fad_ to draw
+plans."
+
+"_Fad_ to draw plans!  Do you think I only care about my
+fellow-creatures' houses in that childish way?  I may well make
+mistakes.  How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among
+people with such petty thoughts?"
+
+No more was said; Dorothea was too much jarred to recover her temper
+and behave so as to show that she admitted any error in herself.  She
+was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the
+purblind conscience of the society around her: and Celia was no longer
+the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white
+nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the "Pilgrim's
+Progress." The _fad_ of drawing plans!  What was life worth--what great
+faith was possible when the whole effect of one's actions could be
+withered up into such parched rubbish as that?  When she got out of the
+carriage, her cheeks were pale and her eyelids red.  She was an image
+of sorrow, and her uncle who met her in the hall would have been
+alarmed, if Celia had not been close to her looking so pretty and
+composed, that he at once concluded Dorothea's tears to have their
+origin in her excessive religiousness.  He had returned, during their
+absence, from a journey to the county town, about a petition for the
+pardon of some criminal.
+
+"Well, my dears," he said, kindly, as they went up to kiss him, "I hope
+nothing disagreeable has happened while I have been away."
+
+"No, uncle," said Celia, "we have been to Freshitt to look at the
+cottages.  We thought you would have been at home to lunch."
+
+"I came by Lowick to lunch--you didn't know I came by Lowick.  And I
+have brought a couple of pamphlets for you, Dorothea--in the library,
+you know; they lie on the table in the library."
+
+It seemed as if an electric stream went through Dorothea, thrilling her
+from despair into expectation.  They were pamphlets about the early
+Church.  The oppression of Celia, Tantripp, and Sir James was shaken
+off, and she walked straight to the library.  Celia went up-stairs. Mr.
+Brooke was detained by a message, but when he re-entered the library,
+he found Dorothea seated and already deep in one of the pamphlets which
+had some marginal manuscript of Mr. Casaubon's,--taking it in as
+eagerly as she might have taken in the scent of a fresh bouquet after a
+dry, hot, dreary walk.
+
+She was getting away from Tipton and Freshitt, and her own sad
+liability to tread in the wrong places on her way to the New Jerusalem.
+
+Mr. Brooke sat down in his arm-chair, stretched his legs towards the
+wood-fire, which had fallen into a wondrous mass of glowing dice
+between the dogs, and rubbed his hands gently, looking very mildly
+towards Dorothea, but with a neutral leisurely air, as if he had
+nothing particular to say.  Dorothea closed her pamphlet, as soon as
+she was aware of her uncle's presence, and rose as if to go.  Usually
+she would have been interested about her uncle's merciful errand on
+behalf of the criminal, but her late agitation had made her
+absent-minded.
+
+"I came back by Lowick, you know," said Mr. Brooke, not as if with any
+intention to arrest her departure, but apparently from his usual
+tendency to say what he had said before.  This fundamental principle of
+human speech was markedly exhibited in Mr. Brooke.  "I lunched there
+and saw Casaubon's library, and that kind of thing.  There's a sharp
+air, driving.  Won't you sit down, my dear?  You look cold."
+
+Dorothea felt quite inclined to accept the invitation.  Some times,
+when her uncle's easy way of taking things did not happen to be
+exasperating, it was rather soothing.  She threw off her mantle and
+bonnet, and sat down opposite to him, enjoying the glow, but lifting up
+her beautiful hands for a screen.  They were not thin hands, or small
+hands; but powerful, feminine, maternal hands.  She seemed to be
+holding them up in propitiation for her passionate desire to know and
+to think, which in the unfriendly mediums of Tipton and Freshitt had
+issued in crying and red eyelids.
+
+She bethought herself now of the condemned criminal.  "What news have
+you brought about the sheep-stealer, uncle?"
+
+"What, poor Bunch?--well, it seems we can't get him off--he is to be
+hanged."
+
+Dorothea's brow took an expression of reprobation and pity.
+
+"Hanged, you know," said Mr. Brooke, with a quiet nod.  "Poor Romilly!
+he would have helped us.  I knew Romilly.  Casaubon didn't know
+Romilly.  He is a little buried in books, you know, Casaubon is."
+
+"When a man has great studies and is writing a great work, he must of
+course give up seeing much of the world.  How can he go about making
+acquaintances?"
+
+"That's true.  But a man mopes, you know.  I have always been a
+bachelor too, but I have that sort of disposition that I never moped;
+it was my way to go about everywhere and take in everything.  I never
+moped: but I can see that Casaubon does, you know.  He wants a
+companion--a companion, you know."
+
+"It would be a great honor to any one to be his companion," said
+Dorothea, energetically.
+
+"You like him, eh?" said Mr. Brooke, without showing any surprise, or
+other emotion.  "Well, now, I've known Casaubon ten years, ever since
+he came to Lowick.  But I never got anything out of him--any ideas, you
+know.  However, he is a tiptop man and may be a bishop--that kind of
+thing, you know, if Peel stays in.  And he has a very high opinion of
+you, my dear."
+
+Dorothea could not speak.
+
+"The fact is, he has a very high opinion indeed of you.  And he speaks
+uncommonly well--does Casaubon.  He has deferred to me, you not being
+of age.  In short, I have promised to speak to you, though I told him I
+thought there was not much chance.  I was bound to tell him that.  I
+said, my niece is very young, and that kind of thing.  But I didn't
+think it necessary to go into everything.  However, the long and the
+short of it is, that he has asked my permission to make you an offer of
+marriage--of marriage, you know," said Mr. Brooke, with his explanatory
+nod.  "I thought it better to tell you, my dear."
+
+No one could have detected any anxiety in Mr. Brooke's manner, but he
+did really wish to know something of his niece's mind, that, if there
+were any need for advice, he might give it in time.  What feeling he,
+as a magistrate who had taken in so many ideas, could make room for,
+was unmixedly kind.  Since Dorothea did not speak immediately, he
+repeated, "I thought it better to tell you, my dear."
+
+"Thank you, uncle," said Dorothea, in a clear unwavering tone.  "I am
+very grateful to Mr. Casaubon.  If he makes me an offer, I shall accept
+him.  I admire and honor him more than any man I ever saw."
+
+Mr. Brooke paused a little, and then said in a lingering low tone, "Ah?
+. . .  Well!  He is a good match in some respects.  But now, Chettam is
+a good match.  And our land lies together.  I shall never interfere
+against your wishes, my dear.  People should have their own way in
+marriage, and that sort of thing--up to a certain point, you know.  I
+have always said that, up to a certain point.  I wish you to marry
+well; and I have good reason to believe that Chettam wishes to marry
+you.  I mention it, you know."
+
+"It is impossible that I should ever marry Sir James Chettam," said
+Dorothea.  "If he thinks of marrying me, he has made a great mistake."
+
+"That is it, you see.  One never knows.  I should have thought Chettam
+was just the sort of man a woman would like, now."
+
+"Pray do not mention him in that light again, uncle," said Dorothea,
+feeling some of her late irritation revive.
+
+Mr. Brooke wondered, and felt that women were an inexhaustible subject
+of study, since even he at his age was not in a perfect state of
+scientific prediction about them.  Here was a fellow like Chettam with
+no chance at all.
+
+"Well, but Casaubon, now.  There is no hurry--I mean for you.  It's
+true, every year will tell upon him.  He is over five-and-forty, you
+know.  I should say a good seven-and-twenty years older than you.  To
+be sure,--if you like learning and standing, and that sort of thing, we
+can't have everything.  And his income is good--he has a handsome
+property independent of the Church--his income is good.  Still he is
+not young, and I must not conceal from you, my dear, that I think his
+health is not over-strong. I know nothing else against him."
+
+"I should not wish to have a husband very near my own age," said
+Dorothea, with grave decision.  "I should wish to have a husband who
+was above me in judgment and in all knowledge."
+
+Mr. Brooke repeated his subdued, "Ah?--I thought you had more of your
+own opinion than most girls.  I thought you liked your own
+opinion--liked it, you know."
+
+"I cannot imagine myself living without some opinions, but I should
+wish to have good reasons for them, and a wise man could help me to see
+which opinions had the best foundation, and would help me to live
+according to them."
+
+"Very true.  You couldn't put the thing better--couldn't put it better,
+beforehand, you know.  But there are oddities in things," continued Mr.
+Brooke, whose conscience was really roused to do the best he could for
+his niece on this occasion.  "Life isn't cast in a mould--not cut out
+by rule and line, and that sort of thing.  I never married myself, and
+it will be the better for you and yours.  The fact is, I never loved
+any one well enough to put myself into a noose for them.  It _is_ a
+noose, you know.  Temper, now.  There is temper.  And a husband likes
+to be master."
+
+"I know that I must expect trials, uncle.  Marriage is a state of
+higher duties.  I never thought of it as mere personal ease," said poor
+Dorothea.
+
+"Well, you are not fond of show, a great establishment, balls, dinners,
+that kind of thing.  I can see that Casaubon's ways might suit you
+better than Chettam's. And you shall do as you like, my dear.  I would
+not hinder Casaubon; I said so at once; for there is no knowing how
+anything may turn out.  You have not the same tastes as every young
+lady; and a clergyman and scholar--who may be a bishop--that kind of
+thing--may suit you better than Chettam.  Chettam is a good fellow, a
+good sound-hearted fellow, you know; but he doesn't go much into ideas.
+I did, when I was his age.  But Casaubon's eyes, now.  I think he has
+hurt them a little with too much reading."
+
+"I should be all the happier, uncle, the more room there was for me to
+help him," said Dorothea, ardently.
+
+"You have quite made up your mind, I see.  Well, my dear, the fact is,
+I have a letter for you in my pocket." Mr. Brooke handed the letter to
+Dorothea, but as she rose to go away, he added, "There is not too much
+hurry, my dear.  Think about it, you know."
+
+When Dorothea had left him, he reflected that he had certainly spoken
+strongly: he had put the risks of marriage before her in a striking
+manner.  It was his duty to do so.  But as to pretending to be wise for
+young people,--no uncle, however much he had travelled in his youth,
+absorbed the new ideas, and dined with celebrities now deceased, could
+pretend to judge what sort of marriage would turn out well for a young
+girl who preferred Casaubon to Chettam.  In short, woman was a problem
+which, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly
+less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V.
+
+    "Hard students are commonly troubled with gowts, catarrhs,
+    rheums, cachexia, bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and collick,
+    crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and
+    all such diseases as come by over-much sitting: they are
+    most part lean, dry, ill-colored . . . and all through
+    immoderate pains and extraordinary studies. If you will not
+    believe the truth of this, look upon great Tostatus and
+    Thomas Aquainas' works; and tell me whether those men took
+    pains."--BURTON'S Anatomy of Melancholy, P. I, s. 2.
+
+
+This was Mr. Casaubon's letter.
+
+
+MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,--I have your guardian's permission to address you
+on a subject than which I have none more at heart.  I am not, I trust,
+mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of
+date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen
+contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with
+you.  For in the first hour of meeting you, I had an impression of your
+eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need (connected, I
+may say, with such activity of the affections as even the
+preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could not
+uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding opportunity for
+observation has given the impression an added depth by convincing me
+more emphatically of that fitness which I had preconceived, and thus
+evoking more decisively those affections to which I have but now
+referred.  Our conversations have, I think, made sufficiently clear to
+you the tenor of my life and purposes: a tenor unsuited, I am aware, to
+the commoner order of minds.  But I have discerned in you an elevation
+of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I had hitherto not
+conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with
+those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to confer
+distinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mental
+qualities above indicated.  It was, I confess, beyond my hope to meet
+with this rare combination of elements both solid and attractive,
+adapted to supply aid in graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant
+hours; and but for the event of my introduction to you (which, let me
+again say, I trust not to be superficially coincident with
+foreshadowing needs, but providentially related thereto as stages
+towards the completion of a life's plan), I should presumably have gone
+on to the last without any attempt to lighten my solitariness by a
+matrimonial union.
+
+Such, my dear Miss Brooke, is the accurate statement of my feelings;
+and I rely on your kind indulgence in venturing now to ask you how far
+your own are of a nature to confirm my happy presentiment.  To be
+accepted by you as your husband and the earthly guardian of your
+welfare, I should regard as the highest of providential gifts.  In
+return I can at least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted, and the
+faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the sequel, has
+no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them, you will find
+records such as might justly cause you either bitterness or shame.  I
+await the expression of your sentiments with an anxiety which it would
+be the part of wisdom (were it possible) to divert by a more arduous
+labor than usual.  But in this order of experience I am still young,
+and in looking forward to an unfavorable possibility I cannot but feel
+that resignation to solitude will be more difficult after the temporary
+illumination of hope.
+
+        In any case, I shall remain,
+                Yours with sincere devotion,
+                        EDWARD CASAUBON.
+
+
+Dorothea trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on her
+knees, buried her face, and sobbed.  She could not pray: under the rush
+of solemn emotion in which thoughts became vague and images floated
+uncertainly, she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of
+reclining, in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her
+own.  She remained in that attitude till it was time to dress for
+dinner.
+
+How could it occur to her to examine the letter, to look at it
+critically as a profession of love?  Her whole soul was possessed by
+the fact that a fuller life was opening before her: she was a neophyte
+about to enter on a higher grade of initiation.  She was going to have
+room for the energies which stirred uneasily under the dimness and
+pressure of her own ignorance and the petty peremptoriness of the
+world's habits.
+
+Now she would be able to devote herself to large yet definite duties;
+now she would be allowed to live continually in the light of a mind
+that she could reverence.  This hope was not unmixed with the glow of
+proud delight--the joyous maiden surprise that she was chosen by the
+man whom her admiration had chosen.  All Dorothea's passion was
+transfused through a mind struggling towards an ideal life; the
+radiance of her transfigured girlhood fell on the first object that
+came within its level.  The impetus with which inclination became
+resolution was heightened by those little events of the day which had
+roused her discontent with the actual conditions of her life.
+
+After dinner, when Celia was playing an "air, with variations," a small
+kind of tinkling which symbolized the aesthetic part of the young
+ladies' education, Dorothea went up to her room to answer Mr.
+Casaubon's letter.  Why should she defer the answer?  She wrote it over
+three times, not because she wished to change the wording, but because
+her hand was unusually uncertain, and she could not bear that Mr.
+Casaubon should think her handwriting bad and illegible.  She piqued
+herself on writing a hand in which each letter was distinguishable
+without any large range of conjecture, and she meant to make much use
+of this accomplishment, to save Mr. Casaubon's eyes.  Three times she
+wrote.
+
+MY DEAR MR. CASAUBON,--I am very grateful to you for loving me, and
+thinking me worthy to be your wife.  I can look forward to no better
+happiness than that which would be one with yours.  If I said more, it
+would only be the same thing written out at greater length, for I
+cannot now dwell on any other thought than that I may be through life
+
+                Yours devotedly,
+                        DOROTHEA BROOKE.
+
+
+Later in the evening she followed her uncle into the library to give
+him the letter, that he might send it in the morning.  He was
+surprised, but his surprise only issued in a few moments' silence,
+during which he pushed about various objects on his writing-table, and
+finally stood with his back to the fire, his glasses on his nose,
+looking at the address of Dorothea's letter.
+
+"Have you thought enough about this, my dear?" he said at last.
+
+"There was no need to think long, uncle.  I know of nothing to make me
+vacillate.  If I changed my mind, it must be because of something
+important and entirely new to me."
+
+"Ah!--then you have accepted him?  Then Chettam has no chance?  Has
+Chettam offended you--offended you, you know?  What is it you don't
+like in Chettam?"
+
+"There is nothing that I like in him," said Dorothea, rather
+impetuously.
+
+Mr. Brooke threw his head and shoulders backward as if some one had
+thrown a light missile at him.  Dorothea immediately felt some
+self-rebuke, and said--
+
+"I mean in the light of a husband.  He is very kind, I think--really
+very good about the cottages.  A well-meaning man."
+
+"But you must have a scholar, and that sort of thing?  Well, it lies a
+little in our family.  I had it myself--that love of knowledge, and
+going into everything--a little too much--it took me too far; though
+that sort of thing doesn't often run in the female-line; or it runs
+underground like the rivers in Greece, you know--it comes out in the
+sons.  Clever sons, clever mothers.  I went a good deal into that, at
+one time.  However, my dear, I have always said that people should do
+as they like in these things, up to a certain point.  I couldn't, as
+your guardian, have consented to a bad match.  But Casaubon stands
+well: his position is good.  I am afraid Chettam will be hurt, though,
+and Mrs. Cadwallader will blame me."
+
+That evening, of course, Celia knew nothing of what had happened.  She
+attributed Dorothea's abstracted manner, and the evidence of further
+crying since they had got home, to the temper she had been in about Sir
+James Chettam and the buildings, and was careful not to give further
+offence: having once said what she wanted to say, Celia had no
+disposition to recur to disagreeable subjects.  It had been her nature
+when a child never to quarrel with any one--only to observe with wonder
+that they quarrelled with her, and looked like turkey-cocks; whereupon
+she was ready to play at cat's cradle with them whenever they recovered
+themselves.  And as to Dorothea, it had always been her way to find
+something wrong in her sister's words, though Celia inwardly protested
+that she always said just how things were, and nothing else: she never
+did and never could put words together out of her own head.  But the
+best of Dodo was, that she did not keep angry for long together.  Now,
+though they had hardly spoken to each other all the evening, yet when
+Celia put by her work, intending to go to bed, a proceeding in which
+she was always much the earlier, Dorothea, who was seated on a low
+stool, unable to occupy herself except in meditation, said, with the
+musical intonation which in moments of deep but quiet feeling made her
+speech like a fine bit of recitative--
+
+"Celia, dear, come and kiss me," holding her arms open as she spoke.
+
+Celia knelt down to get the right level and gave her little butterfly
+kiss, while Dorothea encircled her with gentle arms and pressed her
+lips gravely on each cheek in turn.
+
+"Don't sit up, Dodo, you are so pale to-night: go to bed soon," said
+Celia, in a comfortable way, without any touch of pathos.
+
+"No, dear, I am very, very happy," said Dorothea, fervently.
+
+"So much the better," thought Celia.  "But how strangely Dodo goes from
+one extreme to the other."
+
+The next day, at luncheon, the butler, handing something to Mr. Brooke,
+said, "Jonas is come back, sir, and has brought this letter."
+
+Mr. Brooke read the letter, and then, nodding toward Dorothea, said,
+"Casaubon, my dear: he will be here to dinner; he didn't wait to write
+more--didn't wait, you know."
+
+It could not seem remarkable to Celia that a dinner guest should be
+announced to her sister beforehand, but, her eyes following the same
+direction as her uncle's, she was struck with the peculiar effect of
+the announcement on Dorothea.  It seemed as if something like the
+reflection of a white sunlit wing had passed across her features,
+ending in one of her rare blushes.  For the first time it entered into
+Celia's mind that there might be something more between Mr. Casaubon
+and her sister than his delight in bookish talk and her delight in
+listening.  Hitherto she had classed the admiration for this "ugly" and
+learned acquaintance with the admiration for Monsieur Liret at
+Lausanne, also ugly and learned.  Dorothea had never been tired of
+listening to old Monsieur Liret when Celia's feet were as cold as
+possible, and when it had really become dreadful to see the skin of his
+bald head moving about.  Why then should her enthusiasm not extend to
+Mr. Casaubon simply in the same way as to Monsieur Liret?  And it
+seemed probable that all learned men had a sort of schoolmaster's view
+of young people.
+
+But now Celia was really startled at the suspicion which had darted
+into her mind.  She was seldom taken by surprise in this way, her
+marvellous quickness in observing a certain order of signs generally
+preparing her to expect such outward events as she had an interest in.
+Not that she now imagined Mr. Casaubon to be already an accepted lover:
+she had only begun to feel disgust at the possibility that anything in
+Dorothea's mind could tend towards such an issue.  Here was something
+really to vex her about Dodo: it was all very well not to accept Sir
+James Chettam, but the idea of marrying Mr. Casaubon!  Celia felt a
+sort of shame mingled with a sense of the ludicrous.  But perhaps Dodo,
+if she were really bordering on such an extravagance, might be turned
+away from it: experience had often shown that her impressibility might
+be calculated on.  The day was damp, and they were not going to walk
+out, so they both went up to their sitting-room; and there Celia
+observed that Dorothea, instead of settling down with her usual
+diligent interest to some occupation, simply leaned her elbow on an
+open book and looked out of the window at the great cedar silvered with
+the damp.  She herself had taken up the making of a toy for the
+curate's children, and was not going to enter on any subject too
+precipitately.
+
+Dorothea was in fact thinking that it was desirable for Celia to know
+of the momentous change in Mr. Casaubon's position since he had last
+been in the house: it did not seem fair to leave her in ignorance of
+what would necessarily affect her attitude towards him; but it was
+impossible not to shrink from telling her.  Dorothea accused herself of
+some meanness in this timidity: it was always odious to her to have any
+small fears or contrivances about her actions, but at this moment she
+was seeking the highest aid possible that she might not dread the
+corrosiveness of Celia's pretty carnally minded prose.  Her reverie was
+broken, and the difficulty of decision banished, by Celia's small and
+rather guttural voice speaking in its usual tone, of a remark aside or
+a "by the bye."
+
+"Is any one else coming to dine besides Mr. Casaubon?"
+
+"Not that I know of."
+
+"I hope there is some one else.  Then I shall not hear him eat his soup
+so."
+
+"What is there remarkable about his soup-eating?"
+
+"Really, Dodo, can't you hear how he scrapes his spoon?  And he always
+blinks before he speaks.  I don't know whether Locke blinked, but I'm
+sure I am sorry for those who sat opposite to him if he did."
+
+"Celia," said Dorothea, with emphatic gravity, "pray don't make any
+more observations of that kind."
+
+"Why not?  They are quite true," returned Celia, who had her reasons
+for persevering, though she was beginning to be a little afraid.
+
+"Many things are true which only the commonest minds observe."
+
+"Then I think the commonest minds must be rather useful.  I think it is
+a pity Mr. Casaubon's mother had not a commoner mind: she might have
+taught him better." Celia was inwardly frightened, and ready to run
+away, now she had hurled this light javelin.
+
+Dorothea's feelings had gathered to an avalanche, and there could be no
+further preparation.
+
+"It is right to tell you, Celia, that I am engaged to marry Mr.
+Casaubon."
+
+Perhaps Celia had never turned so pale before.  The paper man she was
+making would have had his leg injured, but for her habitual care of
+whatever she held in her hands.  She laid the fragile figure down at
+once, and sat perfectly still for a few moments.  When she spoke there
+was a tear gathering.
+
+"Oh, Dodo, I hope you will be happy." Her sisterly tenderness could not
+but surmount other feelings at this moment, and her fears were the
+fears of affection.
+
+Dorothea was still hurt and agitated.
+
+"It is quite decided, then?" said Celia, in an awed under tone.  "And
+uncle knows?"
+
+"I have accepted Mr. Casaubon's offer.  My uncle brought me the letter
+that contained it; he knew about it beforehand."
+
+"I beg your pardon, if I have said anything to hurt you, Dodo," said
+Celia, with a slight sob.  She never could have thought that she should
+feel as she did.  There was something funereal in the whole affair, and
+Mr. Casaubon seemed to be the officiating clergyman, about whom it
+would be indecent to make remarks.
+
+"Never mind, Kitty, do not grieve.  We should never admire the same
+people.  I often offend in something of the same way; I am apt to speak
+too strongly of those who don't please me."
+
+In spite of this magnanimity Dorothea was still smarting: perhaps as
+much from Celia's subdued astonishment as from her small criticisms.
+Of course all the world round Tipton would be out of sympathy with this
+marriage.  Dorothea knew of no one who thought as she did about life
+and its best objects.
+
+Nevertheless before the evening was at an end she was very happy.  In
+an hour's tete-a-tete with Mr. Casaubon she talked to him with more
+freedom than she had ever felt before, even pouring out her joy at the
+thought of devoting herself to him, and of learning how she might best
+share and further all his great ends.  Mr. Casaubon was touched with an
+unknown delight (what man would not have been?) at this childlike
+unrestrained ardor: he was not surprised (what lover would have been?)
+that he should be the object of it.
+
+"My dear young lady--Miss Brooke--Dorothea!" he said, pressing her hand
+between his hands, "this is a happiness greater than I had ever
+imagined to be in reserve for me.  That I should ever meet with a mind
+and person so rich in the mingled graces which could render marriage
+desirable, was far indeed from my conception.  You have all--nay, more
+than all--those qualities which I have ever regarded as the
+characteristic excellences of womanhood.  The great charm of your sex
+is its capability of an ardent self-sacrificing affection, and herein
+we see its fitness to round and complete the existence of our own.
+Hitherto I have known few pleasures save of the severer kind: my
+satisfactions have been those of the solitary student.  I have been
+little disposed to gather flowers that would wither in my hand, but now
+I shall pluck them with eagerness, to place them in your bosom."
+
+No speech could have been more thoroughly honest in its intention: the
+frigid rhetoric at the end was as sincere as the bark of a dog, or the
+cawing of an amorous rook.  Would it not be rash to conclude that there
+was no passion behind those sonnets to Delia which strike us as the
+thin music of a mandolin?
+
+Dorothea's faith supplied all that Mr. Casaubon's words seemed to leave
+unsaid: what believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity?  The
+text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put
+into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.
+
+"I am very ignorant--you will quite wonder at my ignorance," said
+Dorothea.  "I have so many thoughts that may be quite mistaken; and now
+I shall be able to tell them all to you, and ask you about them.  But,"
+she added, with rapid imagination of Mr. Casaubon's probable feeling,
+"I will not trouble you too much; only when you are inclined to listen
+to me.  You must often be weary with the pursuit of subjects in your
+own track.  I shall gain enough if you will take me with you there."
+
+"How should I be able now to persevere in any path without your
+companionship?" said Mr. Casaubon, kissing her candid brow, and feeling
+that heaven had vouchsafed him a blessing in every way suited to his
+peculiar wants.  He was being unconsciously wrought upon by the charms
+of a nature which was entirely without hidden calculations either for
+immediate effects or for remoter ends.  It was this which made Dorothea
+so childlike, and, according to some judges, so stupid, with all her
+reputed cleverness; as, for example, in the present case of throwing
+herself, metaphorically speaking, at Mr. Casaubon's feet, and kissing
+his unfashionable shoe-ties as if he were a Protestant Pope.  She was
+not in the least teaching Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough
+for her, but merely asking herself anxiously how she could be good
+enough for Mr. Casaubon.  Before he left the next day it had been
+decided that the marriage should take place within six weeks.  Why not?
+Mr. Casaubon's house was ready.  It was not a parsonage, but a
+considerable mansion, with much land attached to it.  The parsonage was
+inhabited by the curate, who did all the duty except preaching the
+morning sermon.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI.
+
+    My lady's tongue is like the meadow blades,
+    That cut you stroking them with idle hand.
+    Nice cutting is her function: she divides
+    With spiritual edge the millet-seed,
+    And makes intangible savings.
+
+
+As Mr. Casaubon's carriage was passing out of the gateway, it arrested
+the entrance of a pony phaeton driven by a lady with a servant seated
+behind.  It was doubtful whether the recognition had been mutual, for
+Mr. Casaubon was looking absently before him; but the lady was
+quick-eyed, and threw a nod and a "How do you do?" in the nick of time.
+In spite of her shabby bonnet and very old Indian shawl, it was plain
+that the lodge-keeper regarded her as an important personage, from the
+low curtsy which was dropped on the entrance of the small phaeton.
+
+"Well, Mrs. Fitchett, how are your fowls laying now?" said the
+high-colored, dark-eyed lady, with the clearest chiselled utterance.
+
+"Pretty well for laying, madam, but they've ta'en to eating their eggs:
+I've no peace o' mind with 'em at all."
+
+"Oh, the cannibals!  Better sell them cheap at once.  What will you
+sell them a couple?  One can't eat fowls of a bad character at a high
+price."
+
+"Well, madam, half-a-crown: I couldn't let 'em go, not under."
+
+"Half-a-crown, these times!  Come now--for the Rector's chicken-broth
+on a Sunday.  He has consumed all ours that I can spare.  You are half
+paid with the sermon, Mrs. Fitchett, remember that.  Take a pair of
+tumbler-pigeons for them--little beauties.  You must come and see them.
+You have no tumblers among your pigeons."
+
+"Well, madam, Master Fitchett shall go and see 'em after work.  He's
+very hot on new sorts; to oblige you."
+
+"Oblige me!  It will be the best bargain he ever made.  A pair of
+church pigeons for a couple of wicked Spanish fowls that eat their own
+eggs!  Don't you and Fitchett boast too much, that is all!"
+
+The phaeton was driven onwards with the last words, leaving Mrs.
+Fitchett laughing and shaking her head slowly, with an interjectional
+"Sure_ly_, sure_ly_!"--from which it might be inferred that she would
+have found the country-side somewhat duller if the Rector's lady had
+been less free-spoken and less of a skinflint.  Indeed, both the
+farmers and laborers in the parishes of Freshitt and Tipton would have
+felt a sad lack of conversation but for the stories about what Mrs.
+Cadwallader said and did: a lady of immeasurably high birth, descended,
+as it were, from unknown earls, dim as the crowd of heroic shades--who
+pleaded poverty, pared down prices, and cut jokes in the most
+companionable manner, though with a turn of tongue that let you know
+who she was.  Such a lady gave a neighborliness to both rank and
+religion, and mitigated the bitterness of uncommuted tithe.  A much
+more exemplary character with an infusion of sour dignity would not
+have furthered their comprehension of the Thirty-nine Articles, and
+would have been less socially uniting.
+
+Mr. Brooke, seeing Mrs. Cadwallader's merits from a different point of
+view, winced a little when her name was announced in the library, where
+he was sitting alone.
+
+"I see you have had our Lowick Cicero here," she said, seating herself
+comfortably, throwing back her wraps, and showing a thin but well-built
+figure.  "I suspect you and he are brewing some bad polities, else you
+would not be seeing so much of the lively man.  I shall inform against
+you: remember you are both suspicious characters since you took Peel's
+side about the Catholic Bill.  I shall tell everybody that you are
+going to put up for Middlemarch on the Whig side when old Pinkerton
+resigns, and that Casaubon is going to help you in an underhand manner:
+going to bribe the voters with pamphlets, and throw open the
+public-houses to distribute them.  Come, confess!"
+
+"Nothing of the sort," said Mr. Brooke, smiling and rubbing his
+eye-glasses, but really blushing a little at the impeachment.
+"Casaubon and I don't talk politics much.  He doesn't care much about
+the philanthropic side of things; punishments, and that kind of thing.
+He only cares about Church questions.  That is not my line of action,
+you know."
+
+"Ra-a-ther too much, my friend.  I have heard of your doings.  Who was
+it that sold his bit of land to the Papists at Middlemarch?  I believe
+you bought it on purpose.  You are a perfect Guy Faux.  See if you are
+not burnt in effigy this 5th of November coming.  Humphrey would not
+come to quarrel with you about it, so I am come."
+
+"Very good.  I was prepared to be persecuted for not persecuting--not
+persecuting, you know."
+
+"There you go!  That is a piece of clap-trap you have got ready for the
+hustings.  Now, _do not_ let them lure you to the hustings, my dear Mr.
+Brooke.  A man always makes a fool of himself, speechifying: there's no
+excuse but being on the right side, so that you can ask a blessing on
+your humming and hawing.  You will lose yourself, I forewarn you.  You
+will make a Saturday pie of all parties' opinions, and be pelted by
+everybody."
+
+"That is what I expect, you know," said Mr. Brooke, not wishing to
+betray how little he enjoyed this prophetic sketch--"what I expect as
+an independent man.  As to the Whigs, a man who goes with the thinkers
+is not likely to be hooked on by any party.  He may go with them up to
+a certain point--up to a certain point, you know.  But that is what you
+ladies never understand."
+
+"Where your certain point is?  No. I should like to be told how a man
+can have any certain point when he belongs to no party--leading a
+roving life, and never letting his friends know his address.  'Nobody
+knows where Brooke will be--there's no counting on Brooke'--that is
+what people say of you, to be quite frank.  Now, do turn respectable.
+How will you like going to Sessions with everybody looking shy on you,
+and you with a bad conscience and an empty pocket?"
+
+"I don't pretend to argue with a lady on politics," said Mr. Brooke,
+with an air of smiling indifference, but feeling rather unpleasantly
+conscious that this attack of Mrs. Cadwallader's had opened the
+defensive campaign to which certain rash steps had exposed him.  "Your
+sex are not thinkers, you know--varium et mutabile semper--that kind of
+thing.  You don't know Virgil.  I knew"--Mr. Brooke reflected in time
+that he had not had the personal acquaintance of the Augustan poet--"I
+was going to say, poor Stoddart, you know.  That was what _he_ said.
+You ladies are always against an independent attitude--a man's caring
+for nothing but truth, and that sort of thing.  And there is no part of
+the county where opinion is narrower than it is here--I don't mean to
+throw stones, you know, but somebody is wanted to take the independent
+line; and if I don't take it, who will?"
+
+"Who?  Why, any upstart who has got neither blood nor position.  People
+of standing should consume their independent nonsense at home, not hawk
+it about.  And you! who are going to marry your niece, as good as your
+daughter, to one of our best men.  Sir James would be cruelly annoyed:
+it will be too hard on him if you turn round now and make yourself a
+Whig sign-board."
+
+Mr. Brooke again winced inwardly, for Dorothea's engagement had no
+sooner been decided, than he had thought of Mrs. Cadwallader's
+prospective taunts.  It might have been easy for ignorant observers to
+say, "Quarrel with Mrs. Cadwallader;" but where is a country gentleman
+to go who quarrels with his oldest neighbors?  Who could taste the fine
+flavor in the name of Brooke if it were delivered casually, like wine
+without a seal?  Certainly a man can only be cosmopolitan up to a
+certain point.
+
+"I hope Chettam and I shall always be good friends; but I am sorry to
+say there is no prospect of his marrying my niece," said Mr. Brooke,
+much relieved to see through the window that Celia was coming in.
+
+"Why not?" said Mrs. Cadwallader, with a sharp note of surprise.  "It
+is hardly a fortnight since you and I were talking about it."
+
+"My niece has chosen another suitor--has chosen him, you know.  I have
+had nothing to do with it.  I should have preferred Chettam; and I
+should have said Chettam was the man any girl would have chosen.  But
+there is no accounting for these things.  Your sex is capricious, you
+know."
+
+"Why, whom do you mean to say that you are going to let her marry?"
+Mrs. Cadwallader's mind was rapidly surveying the possibilities of
+choice for Dorothea.
+
+But here Celia entered, blooming from a walk in the garden, and the
+greeting with her delivered Mr. Brooke from the necessity of answering
+immediately.  He got up hastily, and saying, "By the way, I must speak
+to Wright about the horses," shuffled quickly out of the room.
+
+"My dear child, what is this?--this about your sister's engagement?"
+said Mrs. Cadwallader.
+
+"She is engaged to marry Mr. Casaubon," said Celia, resorting, as
+usual, to the simplest statement of fact, and enjoying this opportunity
+of speaking to the Rector's wife alone.
+
+"This is frightful.  How long has it been going on?"
+
+"I only knew of it yesterday.  They are to be married in six weeks."
+
+"Well, my dear, I wish you joy of your brother-in-law."
+
+"I am so sorry for Dorothea."
+
+"Sorry!  It is her doing, I suppose."
+
+"Yes; she says Mr. Casaubon has a great soul."
+
+"With all my heart."
+
+"Oh, Mrs. Cadwallader, I don't think it can be nice to marry a man with
+a great soul."
+
+"Well, my dear, take warning.  You know the look of one now; when the
+next comes and wants to marry you, don't you accept him."
+
+"I'm sure I never should."
+
+"No; one such in a family is enough.  So your sister never cared about
+Sir James Chettam?  What would you have said to _him_ for a
+brother-in-law?"
+
+"I should have liked that very much.  I am sure he would have been a
+good husband.  Only," Celia added, with a slight blush (she sometimes
+seemed to blush as she breathed), "I don't think he would have suited
+Dorothea."
+
+"Not high-flown enough?"
+
+"Dodo is very strict.  She thinks so much about everything, and is so
+particular about what one says.  Sir James never seemed to please her."
+
+"She must have encouraged him, I am sure.  That is not very creditable."
+
+"Please don't be angry with Dodo; she does not see things.  She thought
+so much about the cottages, and she was rude to Sir James sometimes;
+but he is so kind, he never noticed it."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Cadwallader, putting on her shawl, and rising, as if
+in haste, "I must go straight to Sir James and break this to him.  He
+will have brought his mother back by this time, and I must call.  Your
+uncle will never tell him.  We are all disappointed, my dear.  Young
+people should think of their families in marrying.  I set a bad
+example--married a poor clergyman, and made myself a pitiable object
+among the De Bracys--obliged to get my coals by stratagem, and pray to
+heaven for my salad oil.  However, Casaubon has money enough; I must do
+him that justice.  As to his blood, I suppose the family quarterings
+are three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant.  By the bye,
+before I go, my dear, I must speak to your Mrs. Carter about pastry.  I
+want to send my young cook to learn of her.  Poor people with four
+children, like us, you know, can't afford to keep a good cook.  I have
+no doubt Mrs. Carter will oblige me.  Sir James's cook is a perfect
+dragon."
+
+In less than an hour, Mrs. Cadwallader had circumvented Mrs. Carter and
+driven to Freshitt Hall, which was not far from her own parsonage, her
+husband being resident in Freshitt and keeping a curate in Tipton.
+
+Sir James Chettam had returned from the short journey which had kept
+him absent for a couple of days, and had changed his dress, intending
+to ride over to Tipton Grange.  His horse was standing at the door when
+Mrs. Cadwallader drove up, and he immediately appeared there himself,
+whip in hand.  Lady Chettam had not yet returned, but Mrs.
+Cadwallader's errand could not be despatched in the presence of grooms,
+so she asked to be taken into the conservatory close by, to look at the
+new plants; and on coming to a contemplative stand, she said--
+
+"I have a great shock for you; I hope you are not so far gone in love
+as you pretended to be."
+
+It was of no use protesting, against Mrs. Cadwallader's way of putting
+things.  But Sir James's countenance changed a little.  He felt a vague
+alarm.
+
+"I do believe Brooke is going to expose himself after all.  I accused
+him of meaning to stand for Middlemarch on the Liberal side, and he
+looked silly and never denied it--talked about the independent line,
+and the usual nonsense."
+
+"Is that all?" said Sir James, much relieved.
+
+"Why," rejoined Mrs. Cadwallader, with a sharper note, "you don't mean
+to say that you would like him to turn public man in that way--making a
+sort of political Cheap Jack of himself?"
+
+"He might be dissuaded, I should think.  He would not like the expense."
+
+"That is what I told him.  He is vulnerable to reason there--always a
+few grains of common-sense in an ounce of miserliness.  Miserliness is
+a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to
+dip on.  And there must be a little crack in the Brooke family, else we
+should not see what we are to see."
+
+"What?  Brooke standing for Middlemarch?"
+
+"Worse than that.  I really feel a little responsible.  I always told
+you Miss Brooke would be such a fine match.  I knew there was a great
+deal of nonsense in her--a flighty sort of Methodistical stuff.  But
+these things wear out of girls.  However, I am taken by surprise for
+once."
+
+"What do you mean, Mrs. Cadwallader?" said Sir James.  His fear lest
+Miss Brooke should have run away to join the Moravian Brethren, or some
+preposterous sect unknown to good society, was a little allayed by the
+knowledge that Mrs. Cadwallader always made the worst of things.  "What
+has happened to Miss Brooke?  Pray speak out."
+
+"Very well.  She is engaged to be married." Mrs. Cadwallader paused a
+few moments, observing the deeply hurt expression in her friend's face,
+which he was trying to conceal by a nervous smile, while he whipped his
+boot; but she soon added, "Engaged to Casaubon."
+
+Sir James let his whip fall and stooped to pick it up.  Perhaps his
+face had never before gathered so much concentrated disgust as when he
+turned to Mrs. Cadwallader and repeated, "Casaubon?"
+
+"Even so.  You know my errand now."
+
+"Good God!  It is horrible!  He is no better than a mummy!" (The point
+of view has to be allowed for, as that of a blooming and disappointed
+rival.)
+
+"She says, he is a great soul.--A great bladder for dried peas to
+rattle in!" said Mrs. Cadwallader.
+
+"What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?" said Sir James.
+"He has one foot in the grave."
+
+"He means to draw it out again, I suppose."
+
+"Brooke ought not to allow it: he should insist on its being put off
+till she is of age.  She would think better of it then.  What is a
+guardian for?"
+
+"As if you could ever squeeze a resolution out of Brooke!"
+
+"Cadwallader might talk to him."
+
+"Not he!  Humphrey finds everybody charming. I never can get him to
+abuse Casaubon.  He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell
+him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman; what can one do with a
+husband who attends so little to the decencies?  I hide it as well as I
+can by abusing everybody myself.  Come, come, cheer up!  you are well
+rid of Miss Brooke, a girl who would have been requiring you to see the
+stars by daylight.  Between ourselves, little Celia is worth two of
+her, and likely after all to be the better match.  For this marriage to
+Casaubon is as good as going to a nunnery."
+
+"Oh, on my own account--it is for Miss Brooke's sake I think her
+friends should try to use their influence."
+
+"Well, Humphrey doesn't know yet.  But when I tell him, you may depend
+on it he will say, 'Why not?  Casaubon is a good fellow--and
+young--young enough.' These charitable people never know vinegar from
+wine till they have swallowed it and got the colic.  However, if I were
+a man I should prefer Celia, especially when Dorothea was gone.  The
+truth is, you have been courting one and have won the other.  I can see
+that she admires you almost as much as a man expects to be admired.  If
+it were any one but me who said so, you might think it exaggeration.
+Good-by!"
+
+Sir James handed Mrs. Cadwallader to the phaeton, and then jumped on
+his horse.  He was not going to renounce his ride because of his
+friend's unpleasant news--only to ride the faster in some other
+direction than that of Tipton Grange.
+
+Now, why on earth should Mrs. Cadwallader have been at all busy about
+Miss Brooke's marriage; and why, when one match that she liked to think
+she had a hand in was frustrated, should she have straightway contrived
+the preliminaries of another?  Was there any ingenious plot, any
+hide-and-seek course of action, which might be detected by a careful
+telescopic watch?  Not at all: a telescope might have swept the
+parishes of Tipton and Freshitt, the whole area visited by Mrs.
+Cadwallader in her phaeton, without witnessing any interview that could
+excite suspicion, or any scene from which she did not return with the
+same unperturbed keenness of eye and the same high natural color.  In
+fact, if that convenient vehicle had existed in the days of the Seven
+Sages, one of them would doubtless have remarked, that you can know
+little of women by following them about in their pony-phaetons. Even
+with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making
+interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a
+weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity
+into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so
+many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain
+tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the
+swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom.  In this way,
+metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader's
+match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be
+called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she
+needed.  Her life was rurally simple, quite free from secrets either
+foul, dangerous, or otherwise important, and not consciously affected
+by the great affairs of the world.  All the more did the affairs of the
+great world interest her, when communicated in the letters of high-born
+relations: the way in which fascinating younger sons had gone to the
+dogs by marrying their mistresses; the fine old-blooded idiocy of young
+Lord Tapir, and the furious gouty humors of old Lord Megatherium; the
+exact crossing of genealogies which had brought a coronet into a new
+branch and widened the relations of scandal,--these were topics of
+which she retained details with the utmost accuracy, and reproduced
+them in an excellent pickle of epigrams, which she herself enjoyed the
+more because she believed as unquestionably in birth and no-birth as
+she did in game and vermin.  She would never have disowned any one on
+the ground of poverty: a De Bracy reduced to take his dinner in a basin
+would have seemed to her an example of pathos worth exaggerating, and I
+fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified her.  But her
+feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: they
+had probably made all their money out of high retail prices, and Mrs.
+Cadwallader detested high prices for everything that was not paid in
+kind at the Rectory: such people were no part of God's design in making
+the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears.  A town
+where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy,
+which could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the
+universe.  Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader
+inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views, and be
+quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have
+the honor to coexist with hers.
+
+With such a mind, active as phosphorus, biting everything that came
+near into the form that suited it, how could Mrs. Cadwallader feel that
+the Miss Brookes and their matrimonial prospects were alien to her?
+especially as it had been the habit of years for her to scold Mr.
+Brooke with the friendliest frankness, and let him know in confidence
+that she thought him a poor creature.  From the first arrival of the
+young ladies in Tipton she had prearranged Dorothea's marriage with Sir
+James, and if it had taken place would have been quite sure that it was
+her doing: that it should not take place after she had preconceived it,
+caused her an irritation which every thinker will sympathize with.  She
+was the diplomatist of Tipton and Freshitt, and for anything to happen
+in spite of her was an offensive irregularity.  As to freaks like this
+of Miss Brooke's, Mrs. Cadwallader had no patience with them, and now
+saw that her opinion of this girl had been infected with some of her
+husband's weak charitableness: those Methodistical whims, that air of
+being more religious than the rector and curate together, came from a
+deeper and more constitutional disease than she had been willing to
+believe.
+
+"However," said Mrs. Cadwallader, first to herself and afterwards to
+her husband, "I throw her over: there was a chance, if she had married
+Sir James, of her becoming a sane, sensible woman.  He would never have
+contradicted her, and when a woman is not contradicted, she has no
+motive for obstinacy in her absurdities.  But now I wish her joy of her
+hair shirt."
+
+It followed that Mrs. Cadwallader must decide on another match for Sir
+James, and having made up her mind that it was to be the younger Miss
+Brooke, there could not have been a more skilful move towards the
+success of her plan than her hint to the baronet that he had made an
+impression on Celia's heart.  For he was not one of those gentlemen who
+languish after the unattainable Sappho's apple that laughs from the
+topmost bough--the charms which
+
+        "Smile like the knot of cowslips on the cliff,
+         Not to be come at by the willing hand."
+
+He had no sonnets to write, and it could not strike him agreeably that
+he was not an object of preference to the woman whom he had preferred.
+Already the knowledge that Dorothea had chosen Mr. Casaubon had bruised
+his attachment and relaxed its hold.  Although Sir James was a
+sportsman, he had some other feelings towards women than towards grouse
+and foxes, and did not regard his future wife in the light of prey,
+valuable chiefly for the excitements of the chase.  Neither was he so
+well acquainted with the habits of primitive races as to feel that an
+ideal combat for her, tomahawk in hand, so to speak, was necessary to
+the historical continuity of the marriage-tie. On the contrary, having
+the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and
+disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful
+nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun
+little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers.
+
+Thus it happened, that after Sir James had ridden rather fast for half
+an hour in a direction away from Tipton Grange, he slackened his pace,
+and at last turned into a road which would lead him back by a shorter
+cut.  Various feelings wrought in him the determination after all to go
+to the Grange to-day as if nothing new had happened.  He could not help
+rejoicing that he had never made the offer and been rejected; mere
+friendly politeness required that he should call to see Dorothea about
+the cottages, and now happily Mrs. Cadwallader had prepared him to
+offer his congratulations, if necessary, without showing too much
+awkwardness.  He really did not like it: giving up Dorothea was very
+painful to him; but there was something in the resolve to make this
+visit forthwith and conquer all show of feeling, which was a sort of
+file-biting and counter-irritant. And without his distinctly
+recognizing the impulse, there certainly was present in him the sense
+that Celia would be there, and that he should pay her more attention
+than he had done before.
+
+We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between
+breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale
+about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride
+helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide
+our own hurts--not to hurt others.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII.
+
+    "Piacer e popone
+     Vuol la sua stagione."
+            --Italian Proverb.
+
+
+Mr. Casaubon, as might be expected, spent a great deal of his time at
+the Grange in these weeks, and the hindrance which courtship occasioned
+to the progress of his great work--the Key to all
+Mythologies--naturally made him look forward the more eagerly to the
+happy termination of courtship.  But he had deliberately incurred the
+hindrance, having made up his mind that it was now time for him to
+adorn his life with the graces of female companionship, to irradiate
+the gloom which fatigue was apt to hang over the intervals of studious
+labor with the play of female fancy, and to secure in this, his
+culminating age, the solace of female tendance for his declining years.
+Hence he determined to abandon himself to the stream of feeling, and
+perhaps was surprised to find what an exceedingly shallow rill it was.
+As in droughty regions baptism by immersion could only be performed
+symbolically, Mr. Casaubon found that sprinkling was the utmost
+approach to a plunge which his stream would afford him; and he
+concluded that the poets had much exaggerated the force of masculine
+passion.  Nevertheless, he observed with pleasure that Miss Brooke
+showed an ardent submissive affection which promised to fulfil his most
+agreeable previsions of marriage.  It had once or twice crossed his
+mind that possibly there was some deficiency in Dorothea to account for
+the moderation of his abandonment; but he was unable to discern the
+deficiency, or to figure to himself a woman who would have pleased him
+better; so that there was clearly no reason to fall back upon but the
+exaggerations of human tradition.
+
+"Could I not be preparing myself now to be more useful?" said Dorothea
+to him, one morning, early in the time of courtship; "could I not learn
+to read Latin and Greek aloud to you, as Milton's daughters did to
+their father, without understanding what they read?"
+
+"I fear that would be wearisome to you," said Mr. Casaubon, smiling;
+"and, indeed, if I remember rightly, the young women you have mentioned
+regarded that exercise in unknown tongues as a ground for rebellion
+against the poet."
+
+"Yes; but in the first place they were very naughty girls, else they
+would have been proud to minister to such a father; and in the second
+place they might have studied privately and taught themselves to
+understand what they read, and then it would have been interesting.  I
+hope you don't expect me to be naughty and stupid?"
+
+"I expect you to be all that an exquisite young lady can be in every
+possible relation of life.  Certainly it might be a great advantage if
+you were able to copy the Greek character, and to that end it were well
+to begin with a little reading."
+
+Dorothea seized this as a precious permission.  She would not have
+asked Mr. Casaubon at once to teach her the languages, dreading of all
+things to be tiresome instead of helpful; but it was not entirely out
+of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and
+Greek.  Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a
+standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly.  As it
+was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her
+own ignorance: how could she be confident that one-roomed cottages were
+not for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics appeared to
+conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal for the glory?
+Perhaps even Hebrew might be necessary--at least the alphabet and a few
+roots--in order to arrive at the core of things, and judge soundly on
+the social duties of the Christian.  And she had not reached that point
+of renunciation at which she would have been satisfied with having a
+wise husband: she wished, poor child, to be wise herself.  Miss Brooke
+was certainly very naive with all her alleged cleverness.  Celia, whose
+mind had never been thought too powerful, saw the emptiness of other
+people's pretensions much more readily.  To have in general but little
+feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any
+particular occasion.
+
+However, Mr. Casaubon consented to listen and teach for an hour
+together, like a schoolmaster of little boys, or rather like a lover,
+to whom a mistress's elementary ignorance and difficulties have a
+touching fitness.  Few scholars would have disliked teaching the
+alphabet under such circumstances.  But Dorothea herself was a little
+shocked and discouraged at her own stupidity, and the answers she got
+to some timid questions about the value of the Greek accents gave her a
+painful suspicion that here indeed there might be secrets not capable
+of explanation to a woman's reason.
+
+Mr. Brooke had no doubt on that point, and expressed himself with his
+usual strength upon it one day that he came into the library while the
+reading was going forward.
+
+"Well, but now, Casaubon, such deep studies, classics, mathematics,
+that kind of thing, are too taxing for a woman--too taxing, you know."
+
+"Dorothea is learning to read the characters simply," said Mr.
+Casaubon, evading the question.  "She had the very considerate thought
+of saving my eyes."
+
+"Ah, well, without understanding, you know--that may not be so bad.
+But there is a lightness about the feminine mind--a touch and
+go--music, the fine arts, that kind of thing--they should study those
+up to a certain point, women should; but in a light way, you know.  A
+woman should be able to sit down and play you or sing you a good old
+English tune.  That is what I like; though I have heard most
+things--been at the opera in Vienna: Gluck, Mozart, everything of that
+sort.  But I'm a conservative in music--it's not like ideas, you know.
+I stick to the good old tunes."
+
+"Mr. Casaubon is not fond of the piano, and I am very glad he is not,"
+said Dorothea, whose slight regard for domestic music and feminine fine
+art must be forgiven her, considering the small tinkling and smearing
+in which they chiefly consisted at that dark period.  She smiled and
+looked up at her betrothed with grateful eyes.  If he had always been
+asking her to play the "Last Rose of Summer," she would have required
+much resignation.  "He says there is only an old harpsichord at Lowick,
+and it is covered with books."
+
+"Ah, there you are behind Celia, my dear.  Celia, now, plays very
+prettily, and is always ready to play.  However, since Casaubon does
+not like it, you are all right.  But it's a pity you should not have
+little recreations of that sort, Casaubon: the bow always strung--that
+kind of thing, you know--will not do."
+
+"I never could look on it in the light of a recreation to have my ears
+teased with measured noises," said Mr. Casaubon.  "A tune much iterated
+has the ridiculous effect of making the words in my mind perform a sort
+of minuet to keep time--an effect hardly tolerable, I imagine, after
+boyhood.  As to the grander forms of music, worthy to accompany solemn
+celebrations, and even to serve as an educating influence according to
+the ancient conception, I say nothing, for with these we are not
+immediately concerned."
+
+"No; but music of that sort I should enjoy," said Dorothea.  "When we
+were coming home from Lausanne my uncle took us to hear the great organ
+at Freiberg, and it made me sob."
+
+"That kind of thing is not healthy, my dear," said Mr. Brooke.
+"Casaubon, she will be in your hands now: you must teach my niece to
+take things more quietly, eh, Dorothea?"
+
+He ended with a smile, not wishing to hurt his niece, but really
+thinking that it was perhaps better for her to be early married to so
+sober a fellow as Casaubon, since she would not hear of Chettam.
+
+"It is wonderful, though," he said to himself as he shuffled out of the
+room--"it is wonderful that she should have liked him.  However, the
+match is good.  I should have been travelling out of my brief to have
+hindered it, let Mrs. Cadwallader say what she will.  He is pretty
+certain to be a bishop, is Casaubon.  That was a very seasonable
+pamphlet of his on the Catholic Question:--a deanery at least.  They
+owe him a deanery."
+
+And here I must vindicate a claim to philosophical reflectiveness, by
+remarking that Mr. Brooke on this occasion little thought of the
+Radical speech which, at a later period, he was led to make on the
+incomes of the bishops.  What elegant historian would neglect a
+striking opportunity for pointing out that his heroes did not foresee
+the history of the world, or even their own actions?--For example, that
+Henry of Navarre, when a Protestant baby, little thought of being a
+Catholic monarch; or that Alfred the Great, when he measured his
+laborious nights with burning candles, had no idea of future gentlemen
+measuring their idle days with watches.  Here is a mine of truth,
+which, however vigorously it may be worked, is likely to outlast our
+coal.
+
+But of Mr. Brooke I make a further remark perhaps less warranted by
+precedent--namely, that if he had foreknown his speech, it might not
+have made any great difference.  To think with pleasure of his niece's
+husband having a large ecclesiastical income was one thing--to make a
+Liberal speech was another thing; and it is a narrow mind which cannot
+look at a subject from various points of view.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII.
+
+    "Oh, rescue her!  I am her brother now,
+     And you her father.  Every gentle maid
+     Should have a guardian in each gentleman."
+
+
+It was wonderful to Sir James Chettam how well he continued to like
+going to the Grange after he had once encountered the difficulty of
+seeing Dorothea for the first time in the light of a woman who was
+engaged to another man.  Of course the forked lightning seemed to pass
+through him when he first approached her, and he remained conscious
+throughout the interview of hiding uneasiness; but, good as he was, it
+must be owned that his uneasiness was less than it would have been if
+he had thought his rival a brilliant and desirable match.  He had no
+sense of being eclipsed by Mr. Casaubon; he was only shocked that
+Dorothea was under a melancholy illusion, and his mortification lost
+some of its bitterness by being mingled with compassion.
+
+Nevertheless, while Sir James said to himself that he had completely
+resigned her, since with the perversity of a Desdemona she had not
+affected a proposed match that was clearly suitable and according to
+nature; he could not yet be quite passive under the idea of her
+engagement to Mr. Casaubon.  On the day when he first saw them together
+in the light of his present knowledge, it seemed to him that he had not
+taken the affair seriously enough.  Brooke was really culpable; he
+ought to have hindered it.  Who could speak to him?  Something might be
+done perhaps even now, at least to defer the marriage.  On his way home
+he turned into the Rectory and asked for Mr. Cadwallader.  Happily, the
+Rector was at home, and his visitor was shown into the study, where all
+the fishing tackle hung.  But he himself was in a little room
+adjoining, at work with his turning apparatus, and he called to the
+baronet to join him there.  The two were better friends than any other
+landholder and clergyman in the county--a significant fact which was in
+agreement with the amiable expression of their faces.
+
+Mr. Cadwallader was a large man, with full lips and a sweet smile; very
+plain and rough in his exterior, but with that solid imperturbable ease
+and good-humor which is infectious, and like great grassy hills in the
+sunshine, quiets even an irritated egoism, and makes it rather ashamed
+of itself.  "Well, how are you?" he said, showing a hand not quite fit
+to be grasped.  "Sorry I missed you before.  Is there anything
+particular?  You look vexed."
+
+Sir James's brow had a little crease in it, a little depression of the
+eyebrow, which he seemed purposely to exaggerate as he answered.
+
+"It is only this conduct of Brooke's. I really think somebody should
+speak to him."
+
+"What? meaning to stand?" said Mr. Cadwallader, going on with the
+arrangement of the reels which he had just been turning.  "I hardly
+think he means it.  But where's the harm, if he likes it?  Any one who
+objects to Whiggery should be glad when the Whigs don't put up the
+strongest fellow.  They won't overturn the Constitution with our friend
+Brooke's head for a battering ram."
+
+"Oh, I don't mean that," said Sir James, who, after putting down his
+hat and throwing himself into a chair, had begun to nurse his leg and
+examine the sole of his boot with much bitterness.  "I mean this
+marriage.  I mean his letting that blooming young girl marry Casaubon."
+
+"What is the matter with Casaubon?  I see no harm in him--if the girl
+likes him."
+
+"She is too young to know what she likes.  Her guardian ought to
+interfere.  He ought not to allow the thing to be done in this headlong
+manner.  I wonder a man like you, Cadwallader--a man with daughters,
+can look at the affair with indifference: and with such a heart as
+yours!  Do think seriously about it."
+
+"I am not joking; I am as serious as possible," said the Rector, with a
+provoking little inward laugh.  "You are as bad as Elinor.  She has
+been wanting me to go and lecture Brooke; and I have reminded her that
+her friends had a very poor opinion of the match she made when she
+married me."
+
+"But look at Casaubon," said Sir James, indignantly.  "He must be
+fifty, and I don't believe he could ever have been much more than the
+shadow of a man.  Look at his legs!"
+
+"Confound you handsome young fellows! you think of having it all your
+own way in the world.  You don't under stand women.  They don't admire
+you half so much as you admire yourselves.  Elinor used to tell her
+sisters that she married me for my ugliness--it was so various and
+amusing that it had quite conquered her prudence."
+
+"You! it was easy enough for a woman to love you.  But this is no
+question of beauty.  I don't _like_ Casaubon." This was Sir James's
+strongest way of implying that he thought ill of a man's character.
+
+"Why? what do you know against him?" said the Rector laying down his
+reels, and putting his thumbs into his armholes with an air of
+attention.
+
+Sir James paused.  He did not usually find it easy to give his reasons:
+it seemed to him strange that people should not know them without being
+told, since he only felt what was reasonable.  At last he said--
+
+"Now, Cadwallader, has he got any heart?"
+
+"Well, yes.  I don't mean of the melting sort, but a sound kernel,
+_that_ you may be sure of.  He is very good to his poor relations:
+pensions several of the women, and is educating a young fellow at a
+good deal of expense.  Casaubon acts up to his sense of justice.  His
+mother's sister made a bad match--a Pole, I think--lost herself--at any
+rate was disowned by her family.  If it had not been for that, Casaubon
+would not have had so much money by half.  I believe he went himself to
+find out his cousins, and see what he could do for them.  Every man
+would not ring so well as that, if you tried his metal.  _You_ would,
+Chettam; but not every man."
+
+"I don't know," said Sir James, coloring.  "I am not so sure of
+myself." He paused a moment, and then added, "That was a right thing
+for Casaubon to do.  But a man may wish to do what is right, and yet be
+a sort of parchment code.  A woman may not be happy with him.  And I
+think when a girl is so young as Miss Brooke is, her friends ought to
+interfere a little to hinder her from doing anything foolish.  You
+laugh, because you fancy I have some feeling on my own account.  But
+upon my honor, it is not that.  I should feel just the same if I were
+Miss Brooke's brother or uncle."
+
+"Well, but what should you do?"
+
+"I should say that the marriage must not be decided on until she was of
+age.  And depend upon it, in that case, it would never come off.  I
+wish you saw it as I do--I wish you would talk to Brooke about it."
+
+Sir James rose as he was finishing his sentence, for he saw Mrs.
+Cadwallader entering from the study.  She held by the hand her youngest
+girl, about five years old, who immediately ran to papa, and was made
+comfortable on his knee.
+
+"I hear what you are talking about," said the wife.  "But you will make
+no impression on Humphrey.  As long as the fish rise to his bait,
+everybody is what he ought to be.  Bless you, Casaubon has got a
+trout-stream, and does not care about fishing in it himself: could
+there be a better fellow?"
+
+"Well, there is something in that," said the Rector, with his quiet,
+inward laugh.  "It is a very good quality in a man to have a
+trout-stream."
+
+"But seriously," said Sir James, whose vexation had not yet spent
+itself, "don't you think the Rector might do some good by speaking?"
+
+"Oh, I told you beforehand what he would say," answered Mrs.
+Cadwallader, lifting up her eyebrows.  "I have done what I could: I
+wash my hands of the marriage."
+
+"In the first place," said the Rector, looking rather grave, "it would
+be nonsensical to expect that I could convince Brooke, and make him act
+accordingly.  Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into
+any mould, but he won't keep shape."
+
+"He might keep shape long enough to defer the marriage," said Sir James.
+
+"But, my dear Chettam, why should I use my influence to Casaubon's
+disadvantage, unless I were much surer than I am that I should be
+acting for the advantage of Miss Brooke?  I know no harm of Casaubon.
+I don't care about his Xisuthrus and Fee-fo-fum and the rest; but then
+he doesn't care about my fishing-tackle. As to the line he took on the
+Catholic Question, that was unexpected; but he has always been civil to
+me, and I don't see why I should spoil his sport.  For anything I can
+tell, Miss Brooke may be happier with him than she would be with any
+other man."
+
+"Humphrey!  I have no patience with you.  You know you would rather
+dine under the hedge than with Casaubon alone.  You have nothing to say
+to each other."
+
+"What has that to do with Miss Brooke's marrying him?  She does not do
+it for my amusement."
+
+"He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James.
+
+"No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all
+semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.
+
+"Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying," said Sir
+James, with a disgust which he held warranted by the sound feeling of
+an English layman.
+
+"Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains.  They
+say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of 'Hop o' my
+Thumb,' and he has been making abstracts ever since.  Ugh!  And that is
+the man Humphrey goes on saying that a woman may be happy with."
+
+"Well, he is what Miss Brooke likes," said the Rector.  "I don't
+profess to understand every young lady's taste."
+
+"But if she were your own daughter?" said Sir James.
+
+"That would be a different affair.  She is _not_ my daughter, and I
+don't feel called upon to interfere.  Casaubon is as good as most of
+us.  He is a scholarly clergyman, and creditable to the cloth.  Some
+Radical fellow speechifying at Middlemarch said Casaubon was the
+learned straw-chopping incumbent, and Freke was the brick-and-mortar
+incumbent, and I was the angling incumbent.  And upon my word, I don't
+see that one is worse or better than the other." The Rector ended with
+his silent laugh.  He always saw the joke of any satire against
+himself.  His conscience was large and easy, like the rest of him: it
+did only what it could do without any trouble.
+
+Clearly, there would be no interference with Miss Brooke's marriage
+through Mr. Cadwallader; and Sir James felt with some sadness that she
+was to have perfect liberty of misjudgment.  It was a sign of his good
+disposition that he did not slacken at all in his intention of carrying
+out Dorothea's design of the cottages.  Doubtless this persistence was
+the best course for his own dignity: but pride only helps us to be
+generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
+She was now enough aware of Sir James's position with regard to her, to
+appreciate the rectitude of his perseverance in a landlord's duty, to
+which he had at first been urged by a lover's complaisance, and her
+pleasure in it was great enough to count for something even in her
+present happiness.  Perhaps she gave to Sir James Chettam's cottages
+all the interest she could spare from Mr. Casaubon, or rather from the
+symphony of hopeful dreams, admiring trust, and passionate self
+devotion which that learned gentleman had set playing in her soul.
+Hence it happened that in the good baronet's succeeding visits, while
+he was beginning to pay small attentions to Celia, he found himself
+talking with more and more pleasure to Dorothea.  She was perfectly
+unconstrained and without irritation towards him now, and he was
+gradually discovering the delight there is in frank kindness and
+companionship between a man and a woman who have no passion to hide or
+confess.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX.
+
+    1st Gent. An ancient land in ancient oracles
+                 Is called "law-thirsty": all the struggle there
+                 Was after order and a perfect rule.
+                 Pray, where lie such lands now? . . .
+    2d Gent.  Why, where they lay of old--in human souls.
+
+
+Mr. Casaubon's behavior about settlements was highly satisfactory to
+Mr. Brooke, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along,
+shortening the weeks of courtship.  The betrothed bride must see her
+future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have made
+there.  A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an
+appetite for submission afterwards.  And certainly, the mistakes that
+we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly
+raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.
+
+On a gray but dry November morning Dorothea drove to Lowick in company
+with her uncle and Celia.  Mr. Casaubon's home was the manor-house.
+Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church,
+with the old parsonage opposite.  In the beginning of his career, Mr.
+Casaubon had only held the living, but the death of his brother had put
+him in possession of the manor also.  It had a small park, with a fine
+old oak here and there, and an avenue of limes towards the southwest
+front, with a sunk fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from
+the drawing-room windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope
+of greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures,
+which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun.  This was
+the happy side of the house, for the south and east looked rather
+melancholy even under the brightest morning.  The grounds here were
+more confined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance, and
+large clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews, had risen high, not ten
+yards from the windows.  The building, of greenish stone, was in the
+old English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking:
+the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows,
+and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home.  In
+this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves
+falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without
+sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr.
+Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown
+into relief by that background.
+
+"Oh dear!" Celia said to herself, "I am sure Freshitt Hall would have
+been pleasanter than this." She thought of the white freestone, the
+pillared portico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir James smiling
+above them like a prince issuing from his enchantment in a rose-bush,
+with a handkerchief swiftly metamorphosed from the most delicately
+odorous petals--Sir James, who talked so agreeably, always about things
+which had common-sense in them, and not about learning!  Celia had
+those light young feminine tastes which grave and weatherworn gentlemen
+sometimes prefer in a wife; but happily Mr. Casaubon's bias had been
+different, for he would have had no chance with Celia.
+
+Dorothea, on the contrary, found the house and grounds all that she
+could wish: the dark book-shelves in the long library, the carpets and
+curtains with colors subdued by time, the curious old maps and
+bird's-eye views on the walls of the corridor, with here and there an
+old vase below, had no oppression for her, and seemed more cheerful
+than the easts and pictures at the Grange, which her uncle had long ago
+brought home from his travels--they being probably among the ideas he
+had taken in at one time.  To poor Dorothea these severe classical
+nudities and smirking Renaissance-Correggiosities were painfully
+inexplicable, staring into the midst of her Puritanic conceptions: she
+had never been taught how she could bring them into any sort of
+relevance with her life.  But the owners of Lowick apparently had not
+been travellers, and Mr. Casaubon's studies of the past were not
+carried on by means of such aids.
+
+Dorothea walked about the house with delightful emotion.  Everything
+seemed hallowed to her: this was to be the home of her wifehood, and
+she looked up with eyes full of confidence to Mr. Casaubon when he drew
+her attention specially to some actual arrangement and asked her if she
+would like an alteration.  All appeals to her taste she met gratefully,
+but saw nothing to alter.  His efforts at exact courtesy and formal
+tenderness had no defect for her.  She filled up all blanks with
+unmanifested perfections, interpreting him as she interpreted the works
+of Providence, and accounting for seeming discords by her own deafness
+to the higher harmonies.  And there are many blanks left in the weeks
+of courtship which a loving faith fills with happy assurance.
+
+"Now, my dear Dorothea, I wish you to favor me by pointing out which
+room you would like to have as your boudoir," said Mr. Casaubon,
+showing that his views of the womanly nature were sufficiently large to
+include that requirement.
+
+"It is very kind of you to think of that," said Dorothea, "but I assure
+you I would rather have all those matters decided for me.  I shall be
+much happier to take everything as it is--just as you have been used to
+have it, or as you will yourself choose it to be.  I have no motive for
+wishing anything else."
+
+"Oh, Dodo," said Celia, "will you not have the bow-windowed room
+up-stairs?"
+
+Mr. Casaubon led the way thither.  The bow-window looked down the
+avenue of limes; the furniture was all of a faded blue, and there were
+miniatures of ladies and gentlemen with powdered hair hanging in a
+group.  A piece of tapestry over a door also showed a blue-green world
+with a pale stag in it.  The chairs and tables were thin-legged and
+easy to upset.  It was a room where one might fancy the ghost of a
+tight-laced lady revisiting the scene of her embroidery.  A light
+bookcase contained duodecimo volumes of polite literature in calf,
+completing the furniture.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Brooke, "this would be a pretty room with some new
+hangings, sofas, and that sort of thing.  A little bare now."
+
+"No, uncle," said Dorothea, eagerly.  "Pray do not speak of altering
+anything.  There are so many other things in the world that want
+altering--I like to take these things as they are.  And you like them
+as they are, don't you?" she added, looking at Mr. Casaubon.  "Perhaps
+this was your mother's room when she was young."
+
+"It was," he said, with his slow bend of the head.
+
+"This is your mother," said Dorothea, who had turned to examine the
+group of miniatures.  "It is like the tiny one you brought me; only, I
+should think, a better portrait.  And this one opposite, who is this?"
+
+"Her elder sister.  They were, like you and your sister, the only two
+children of their parents, who hang above them, you see."
+
+"The sister is pretty," said Celia, implying that she thought less
+favorably of Mr. Casaubon's mother.  It was a new opening to Celia's
+imagination, that he came of a family who had all been young in their
+time--the ladies wearing necklaces.
+
+"It is a peculiar face," said Dorothea, looking closely.  "Those deep
+gray eyes rather near together--and the delicate irregular nose with a
+sort of ripple in it--and all the powdered curls hanging backward.
+Altogether it seems to me peculiar rather than pretty.  There is not
+even a family likeness between her and your mother."
+
+"No. And they were not alike in their lot."
+
+"You did not mention her to me," said Dorothea.
+
+"My aunt made an unfortunate marriage.  I never saw her."
+
+Dorothea wondered a little, but felt that it would be indelicate just
+then to ask for any information which Mr. Casaubon did not proffer, and
+she turned to the window to admire the view.  The sun had lately
+pierced the gray, and the avenue of limes cast shadows.
+
+"Shall we not walk in the garden now?" said Dorothea.
+
+"And you would like to see the church, you know," said Mr. Brooke.  "It
+is a droll little church.  And the village.  It all lies in a
+nut-shell. By the way, it will suit you, Dorothea; for the cottages are
+like a row of alms-houses--little gardens, gilly-flowers, that sort of
+thing."
+
+"Yes, please," said Dorothea, looking at Mr. Casaubon, "I should like
+to see all that." She had got nothing from him more graphic about the
+Lowick cottages than that they were "not bad."
+
+They were soon on a gravel walk which led chiefly between grassy
+borders and clumps of trees, this being the nearest way to the church,
+Mr. Casaubon said.  At the little gate leading into the churchyard
+there was a pause while Mr. Casaubon went to the parsonage close by to
+fetch a key.  Celia, who had been hanging a little in the rear, came up
+presently, when she saw that Mr. Casaubon was gone away, and said in
+her easy staccato, which always seemed to contradict the suspicion of
+any malicious intent--
+
+"Do you know, Dorothea, I saw some one quite young coming up one of the
+walks."
+
+"Is that astonishing, Celia?"
+
+"There may be a young gardener, you know--why not?" said Mr. Brooke.
+"I told Casaubon he should change his gardener."
+
+"No, not a gardener," said Celia; "a gentleman with a sketch-book. He
+had light-brown curls.  I only saw his back.  But he was quite young."
+
+"The curate's son, perhaps," said Mr. Brooke.  "Ah, there is Casaubon
+again, and Tucker with him.  He is going to introduce Tucker.  You
+don't know Tucker yet."
+
+Mr. Tucker was the middle-aged curate, one of the "inferior clergy,"
+who are usually not wanting in sons.  But after the introduction, the
+conversation did not lead to any question about his family, and the
+startling apparition of youthfulness was forgotten by every one but
+Celia.  She inwardly declined to believe that the light-brown curls and
+slim figure could have any relationship to Mr. Tucker, who was just as
+old and musty-looking as she would have expected Mr. Casaubon's curate
+to be; doubtless an excellent man who would go to heaven (for Celia
+wished not to be unprincipled), but the corners of his mouth were so
+unpleasant.  Celia thought with some dismalness of the time she should
+have to spend as bridesmaid at Lowick, while the curate had probably no
+pretty little children whom she could like, irrespective of principle.
+
+Mr. Tucker was invaluable in their walk; and perhaps Mr. Casaubon had
+not been without foresight on this head, the curate being able to
+answer all Dorothea's questions about the villagers and the other
+parishioners.  Everybody, he assured her, was well off in Lowick: not a
+cottager in those double cottages at a low rent but kept a pig, and the
+strips of garden at the back were well tended.  The small boys wore
+excellent corduroy, the girls went out as tidy servants, or did a
+little straw-plaiting at home: no looms here, no Dissent; and though
+the public disposition was rather towards laying by money than towards
+spirituality, there was not much vice.  The speckled fowls were so
+numerous that Mr. Brooke observed, "Your farmers leave some barley for
+the women to glean, I see.  The poor folks here might have a fowl in
+their pot, as the good French king used to wish for all his people.
+The French eat a good many fowls--skinny fowls, you know."
+
+"I think it was a very cheap wish of his," said Dorothea, indignantly.
+"Are kings such monsters that a wish like that must be reckoned a royal
+virtue?"
+
+"And if he wished them a skinny fowl," said Celia, "that would not be
+nice.  But perhaps he wished them to have fat fowls."
+
+"Yes, but the word has dropped out of the text, or perhaps was
+subauditum; that is, present in the king's mind, but not uttered," said
+Mr. Casaubon, smiling and bending his head towards Celia, who
+immediately dropped backward a little, because she could not bear Mr.
+Casaubon to blink at her.
+
+Dorothea sank into silence on the way back to the house.  She felt some
+disappointment, of which she was yet ashamed, that there was nothing
+for her to do in Lowick; and in the next few minutes her mind had
+glanced over the possibility, which she would have preferred, of
+finding that her home would be in a parish which had a larger share of
+the world's misery, so that she might have had more active duties in
+it.  Then, recurring to the future actually before her, she made a
+picture of more complete devotion to Mr. Casaubon's aims in which she
+would await new duties.  Many such might reveal themselves to the
+higher knowledge gained by her in that companionship.
+
+Mr. Tucker soon left them, having some clerical work which would not
+allow him to lunch at the Hall; and as they were re-entering the garden
+through the little gate, Mr. Casaubon said--
+
+"You seem a little sad, Dorothea.  I trust you are pleased with what
+you have seen."
+
+"I am feeling something which is perhaps foolish and wrong," answered
+Dorothea, with her usual openness--"almost wishing that the people
+wanted more to be done for them here.  I have known so few ways of
+making my life good for anything.  Of course, my notions of usefulness
+must be narrow.  I must learn new ways of helping people."
+
+"Doubtless," said Mr. Casaubon.  "Each position has its corresponding
+duties.  Yours, I trust, as the mistress of Lowick, will not leave any
+yearning unfulfilled."
+
+"Indeed, I believe that," said Dorothea, earnestly.  "Do not suppose
+that I am sad."
+
+"That is well.  But, if you are not tired, we will take another way to
+the house than that by which we came."
+
+Dorothea was not at all tired, and a little circuit was made towards a
+fine yew-tree, the chief hereditary glory of the grounds on this side
+of the house.  As they approached it, a figure, conspicuous on a dark
+background of evergreens, was seated on a bench, sketching the old
+tree.  Mr. Brooke, who was walking in front with Celia, turned his
+head, and said--
+
+"Who is that youngster, Casaubon?"
+
+They had come very near when Mr. Casaubon answered--
+
+"That is a young relative of mine, a second cousin: the grandson, in
+fact," he added, looking at Dorothea, "of the lady whose portrait you
+have been noticing, my aunt Julia."
+
+The young man had laid down his sketch-book and risen.  His bushy
+light-brown curls, as well as his youthfulness, identified him at once
+with Celia's apparition.
+
+"Dorothea, let me introduce to you my cousin, Mr. Ladislaw.  Will, this
+is Miss Brooke."
+
+The cousin was so close now, that, when he lifted his hat, Dorothea
+could see a pair of gray eyes rather near together, a delicate
+irregular nose with a little ripple in it, and hair falling backward;
+but there was a mouth and chin of a more prominent, threatening aspect
+than belonged to the type of the grandmother's miniature.  Young
+Ladislaw did not feel it necessary to smile, as if he were charmed with
+this introduction to his future second cousin and her relatives; but
+wore rather a pouting air of discontent.
+
+"You are an artist, I see," said Mr. Brooke, taking up the sketch-book
+and turning it over in his unceremonious fashion.
+
+"No, I only sketch a little.  There is nothing fit to be seen there,"
+said young Ladislaw, coloring, perhaps with temper rather than modesty.
+
+"Oh, come, this is a nice bit, now.  I did a little in this way myself
+at one time, you know.  Look here, now; this is what I call a nice
+thing, done with what we used to call _brio_." Mr. Brooke held out
+towards the two girls a large colored sketch of stony ground and trees,
+with a pool.
+
+"I am no judge of these things," said Dorothea, not coldly, but with an
+eager deprecation of the appeal to her.  "You know, uncle, I never see
+the beauty of those pictures which you say are so much praised.  They
+are a language I do not understand.  I suppose there is some relation
+between pictures and nature which I am too ignorant to feel--just as
+you see what a Greek sentence stands for which means nothing to me."
+Dorothea looked up at Mr. Casaubon, who bowed his head towards her,
+while Mr. Brooke said, smiling nonchalantly--
+
+"Bless me, now, how different people are!  But you had a bad style of
+teaching, you know--else this is just the thing for girls--sketching,
+fine art and so on.  But you took to drawing plans; you don't
+understand morbidezza, and that kind of thing.  You will come to my
+house, I hope, and I will show you what I did in this way," he
+continued, turning to young Ladislaw, who had to be recalled from his
+preoccupation in observing Dorothea.  Ladislaw had made up his mind
+that she must be an unpleasant girl, since she was going to marry
+Casaubon, and what she said of her stupidity about pictures would have
+confirmed that opinion even if he had believed her.  As it was, he took
+her words for a covert judgment, and was certain that she thought his
+sketch detestable.  There was too much cleverness in her apology: she
+was laughing both at her uncle and himself.  But what a voice!  It was
+like the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp.  This
+must be one of Nature's inconsistencies.  There could be no sort of
+passion in a girl who would marry Casaubon.  But he turned from her,
+and bowed his thanks for Mr. Brooke's invitation.
+
+"We will turn over my Italian engravings together," continued that
+good-natured man.  "I have no end of those things, that I have laid by
+for years.  One gets rusty in this part of the country, you know.  Not
+you, Casaubon; you stick to your studies; but my best ideas get
+undermost--out of use, you know.  You clever young men must guard
+against indolence.  I was too indolent, you know: else I might have
+been anywhere at one time."
+
+"That is a seasonable admonition," said Mr. Casaubon; "but now we will
+pass on to the house, lest the young ladies should be tired of
+standing."
+
+When their backs were turned, young Ladislaw sat down to go on with his
+sketching, and as he did so his face broke into an expression of
+amusement which increased as he went on drawing, till at last he threw
+back his head and laughed aloud.  Partly it was the reception of his
+own artistic production that tickled him; partly the notion of his
+grave cousin as the lover of that girl; and partly Mr. Brooke's
+definition of the place he might have held but for the impediment of
+indolence.  Mr. Will Ladislaw's sense of the ludicrous lit up his
+features very agreeably: it was the pure enjoyment of comicality, and
+had no mixture of sneering and self-exaltation.
+
+"What is your nephew going to do with himself, Casaubon?" said Mr.
+Brooke, as they went on.
+
+"My cousin, you mean--not my nephew."
+
+"Yes, yes, cousin.  But in the way of a career, you know."
+
+"The answer to that question is painfully doubtful.  On leaving Rugby
+he declined to go to an English university, where I would gladly have
+placed him, and chose what I must consider the anomalous course of
+studying at Heidelberg.  And now he wants to go abroad again, without
+any special object, save the vague purpose of what he calls culture,
+preparation for he knows not what.  He declines to choose a profession."
+
+"He has no means but what you furnish, I suppose."
+
+"I have always given him and his friends reason to understand that I
+would furnish in moderation what was necessary for providing him with a
+scholarly education, and launching him respectably.  I am-therefore
+bound to fulfil the expectation so raised," said Mr. Casaubon, putting
+his conduct in the light of mere rectitude: a trait of delicacy which
+Dorothea noticed with admiration.
+
+"He has a thirst for travelling; perhaps he may turn out a Bruce or a
+Mungo Park," said Mr. Brooke.  "I had a notion of that myself at one
+time."
+
+"No, he has no bent towards exploration, or the enlargement of our
+geognosis: that would be a special purpose which I could recognize with
+some approbation, though without felicitating him on a career which so
+often ends in premature and violent death.  But so far is he from
+having any desire for a more accurate knowledge of the earth's surface,
+that he said he should prefer not to know the sources of the Nile, and
+that there should be some unknown regions preserved as hunting grounds
+for the poetic imagination."
+
+"Well, there is something in that, you know," said Mr. Brooke, who had
+certainly an impartial mind.
+
+"It is, I fear, nothing more than a part of his general inaccuracy and
+indisposition to thoroughness of all kinds, which would be a bad augury
+for him in any profession, civil or sacred, even were he so far
+submissive to ordinary rule as to choose one."
+
+"Perhaps he has conscientious scruples founded on his own unfitness,"
+said Dorothea, who was interesting herself in finding a favorable
+explanation.  "Because the law and medicine should be very serious
+professions to undertake, should they not? People's lives and fortunes
+depend on them."
+
+"Doubtless; but I fear that my young relative Will Ladislaw is chiefly
+determined in his aversion to these callings by a dislike to steady
+application, and to that kind of acquirement which is needful
+instrumentally, but is not charming or immediately inviting to
+self-indulgent taste.  I have insisted to him on what Aristotle has
+stated with admirable brevity, that for the achievement of any work
+regarded as an end there must be a prior exercise of many energies or
+acquired facilities of a secondary order, demanding patience.  I have
+pointed to my own manuscript volumes, which represent the toil of years
+preparatory to a work not yet accomplished.  But in vain.  To careful
+reasoning of this kind he replies by calling himself Pegasus, and every
+form of prescribed work 'harness.'"
+
+Celia laughed.  She was surprised to find that Mr. Casaubon could say
+something quite amusing.
+
+"Well, you know, he may turn out a Byron, a Chatterton, a
+Churchill--that sort of thing--there's no telling," said Mr. Brooke.
+"Shall you let him go to Italy, or wherever else he wants to go?"
+
+"Yes; I have agreed to furnish him with moderate supplies for a year or
+so; he asks no more.  I shall let him be tried by the test of freedom."
+
+"That is very kind of you," said Dorothea, looking up at Mr. Casaubon
+with delight.  "It is noble.  After all, people may really have in them
+some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves, may they not?
+They may seem idle and weak because they are growing.  We should be
+very patient with each other, I think."
+
+"I suppose it is being engaged to be married that has made you think
+patience good," said Celia, as soon as she and Dorothea were alone
+together, taking off their wrappings.
+
+"You mean that I am very impatient, Celia."
+
+"Yes; when people don't do and say just what you like." Celia had
+become less afraid of "saying things" to Dorothea since this
+engagement: cleverness seemed to her more pitiable than ever.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X.
+
+    "He had catched a great cold, had he had no other clothes
+     to wear than the skin of a bear not yet killed."--FULLER.
+
+
+Young Ladislaw did not pay that visit to which Mr. Brooke had invited
+him, and only six days afterwards Mr. Casaubon mentioned that his young
+relative had started for the Continent, seeming by this cold vagueness
+to waive inquiry.  Indeed, Will had declined to fix on any more precise
+destination than the entire area of Europe.  Genius, he held, is
+necessarily intolerant of fetters: on the one hand it must have the
+utmost play for its spontaneity; on the other, it may confidently await
+those messages from the universe which summon it to its peculiar work,
+only placing itself in an attitude of receptivity towards all sublime
+chances.  The attitudes of receptivity are various, and Will had
+sincerely tried many of them.  He was not excessively fond of wine, but
+he had several times taken too much, simply as an experiment in that
+form of ecstasy; he had fasted till he was faint, and then supped on
+lobster; he had made himself ill with doses of opium.  Nothing greatly
+original had resulted from these measures; and the effects of the opium
+had convinced him that there was an entire dissimilarity between his
+constitution and De Quincey's. The superadded circumstance which would
+evolve the genius had not yet come; the universe had not yet beckoned.
+Even Caesar's fortune at one time was, but a grand presentiment.  We
+know what a masquerade all development is, and what effective shapes
+may be disguised in helpless embryos.--In fact, the world is full of
+hopeful analogies and handsome dubious eggs called possibilities.  Will
+saw clearly enough the pitiable instances of long incubation producing
+no chick, and but for gratitude would have laughed at Casaubon, whose
+plodding application, rows of note-books, and small taper of learned
+theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a
+moral entirely encouraging to Will's generous reliance on the
+intentions of the universe with regard to himself.  He held that
+reliance to be a mark of genius; and certainly it is no mark to the
+contrary; genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humility,
+but in a power to make or do, not anything in general, but something in
+particular.  Let him start for the Continent, then, without our
+pronouncing on his future.  Among all forms of mistake, prophecy is the
+most gratuitous.
+
+But at present this caution against a too hasty judgment interests me
+more in relation to Mr. Casaubon than to his young cousin.  If to
+Dorothea Mr. Casaubon had been the mere occasion which had set alight
+the fine inflammable material of her youthful illusions, does it follow
+that he was fairly represented in the minds of those less impassioned
+personages who have hitherto delivered their judgments concerning him?
+I protest against any absolute conclusion, any prejudice derived from
+Mrs. Cadwallader's contempt for a neighboring clergyman's alleged
+greatness of soul, or Sir James Chettam's poor opinion of his rival's
+legs,--from Mr. Brooke's failure to elicit a companion's ideas, or from
+Celia's criticism of a middle-aged scholar's personal appearance.  I am
+not sure that the greatest man of his age, if ever that solitary
+superlative existed, could escape these unfavorable reflections of
+himself in various small mirrors; and even Milton, looking for his
+portrait in a spoon, must submit to have the facial angle of a bumpkin.
+Moreover, if Mr. Casaubon, speaking for himself, has rather a chilling
+rhetoric, it is not therefore certain that there is no good work or
+fine feeling in him.  Did not an immortal physicist and interpreter of
+hieroglyphs write detestable verses?  Has the theory of the solar
+system been advanced by graceful manners and conversational tact?
+Suppose we turn from outside estimates of a man, to wonder, with keener
+interest, what is the report of his own consciousness about his doings
+or capacity: with what hindrances he is carrying on his daily labors;
+what fading of hopes, or what deeper fixity of self-delusion the years
+are marking off within him; and with what spirit he wrestles against
+universal pressure, which will one day be too heavy for him, and bring
+his heart to its final pause.  Doubtless his lot is important in his
+own eyes; and the chief reason that we think he asks too large a place
+in our consideration must be our want of room for him, since we refer
+him to the Divine regard with perfect confidence; nay, it is even held
+sublime for our neighbor to expect the utmost there, however little he
+may have got from us.  Mr. Casaubon, too, was the centre of his own
+world; if he was liable to think that others were providentially made
+for him, and especially to consider them in the light of their fitness
+for the author of a "Key to all Mythologies," this trait is not quite
+alien to us, and, like the other mendicant hopes of mortals, claims
+some of our pity.
+
+Certainly this affair of his marriage with Miss Brooke touched him more
+nearly than it did any one of the persons who have hitherto shown their
+disapproval of it, and in the present stage of things I feel more
+tenderly towards his experience of success than towards the
+disappointment of the amiable Sir James.  For in truth, as the day
+fixed for his marriage came nearer, Mr. Casaubon did not find his
+spirits rising; nor did the contemplation of that matrimonial garden
+scene, where, as all experience showed, the path was to be bordered
+with flowers, prove persistently more enchanting to him than the
+accustomed vaults where he walked taper in hand.  He did not confess to
+himself, still less could he have breathed to another, his surprise
+that though he had won a lovely and noble-hearted girl he had not won
+delight,--which he had also regarded as an object to be found by
+search.  It is true that he knew all the classical passages implying
+the contrary; but knowing classical passages, we find, is a mode of
+motion, which explains why they leave so little extra force for their
+personal application.
+
+Poor Mr. Casaubon had imagined that his long studious bachelorhood had
+stored up for him a compound interest of enjoyment, and that large
+drafts on his affections would not fail to be honored; for we all of
+us, grave or light, get our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act
+fatally on the strength of them.  And now he was in danger of being
+saddened by the very conviction that his circumstances were unusually
+happy: there was nothing external by which he could account for a
+certain blankness of sensibility which came over him just when his
+expectant gladness should have been most lively, just when he exchanged
+the accustomed dulness of his Lowick library for his visits to the
+Grange.  Here was a weary experience in which he was as utterly
+condemned to loneliness as in the despair which sometimes threatened
+him while toiling in the morass of authorship without seeming nearer to
+the goal.  And his was that worst loneliness which would shrink from
+sympathy.  He could not but wish that Dorothea should think him not
+less happy than the world would expect her successful suitor to be; and
+in relation to his authorship he leaned on her young trust and
+veneration, he liked to draw forth her fresh interest in listening, as
+a means of encouragement to himself: in talking to her he presented all
+his performance and intention with the reflected confidence of the
+pedagogue, and rid himself for the time of that chilling ideal audience
+which crowded his laborious uncreative hours with the vaporous pressure
+of Tartarean shades.
+
+For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted to
+young ladies which had made the chief part of her education, Mr.
+Casaubon's talk about his great book was full of new vistas; and this
+sense of revelation, this surprise of a nearer introduction to Stoics
+and Alexandrians, as people who had ideas not totally unlike her own,
+kept in abeyance for the time her usual eagerness for a binding theory
+which could bring her own life and doctrine into strict connection with
+that amazing past, and give the remotest sources of knowledge some
+bearing on her actions.  That more complete teaching would come--Mr.
+Casaubon would tell her all that: she was looking forward to higher
+initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, and
+blending her dim conceptions of both.  It would be a great mistake to
+suppose that Dorothea would have cared about any share in Mr.
+Casaubon's learning as mere accomplishment; for though opinion in the
+neighborhood of Freshitt and Tipton had pronounced her clever, that
+epithet would not have described her to circles in whose more precise
+vocabulary cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowing and doing,
+apart from character.  All her eagerness for acquirement lay within
+that full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses
+were habitually swept along.  She did not want to deck herself with
+knowledge--to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her
+action; and if she had written a book she must have done it as Saint
+Theresa did, under the command of an authority that constrained her
+conscience.  But something she yearned for by which her life might be
+filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was
+gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer
+heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but
+knowledge?  Surely learned men kept the only oil; and who more learned
+than Mr. Casaubon?
+
+Thus in these brief weeks Dorothea's joyous grateful expectation was
+unbroken, and however her lover might occasionally be conscious of
+flatness, he could never refer it to any slackening of her affectionate
+interest.
+
+The season was mild enough to encourage the project of extending the
+wedding journey as far as Rome, and Mr. Casaubon was anxious for this
+because he wished to inspect some manuscripts in the Vatican.
+
+"I still regret that your sister is not to accompany us," he said one
+morning, some time after it had been ascertained that Celia objected to
+go, and that Dorothea did not wish for her companionship.  "You will
+have many lonely hours, Dorothea, for I shall be constrained to make
+the utmost use of my time during our stay in Rome, and I should feel
+more at liberty if you had a companion."
+
+The words "I should feel more at liberty" grated on Dorothea.  For the
+first time in speaking to Mr. Casaubon she colored from annoyance.
+
+"You must have misunderstood me very much," she said, "if you think I
+should not enter into the value of your time--if you think that I
+should not willingly give up whatever interfered with your using it to
+the best purpose."
+
+"That is very amiable in you, my dear Dorothea," said Mr. Casaubon, not
+in the least noticing that she was hurt; "but if you had a lady as your
+companion, I could put you both under the care of a cicerone, and we
+could thus achieve two purposes in the same space of time."
+
+"I beg you will not refer to this again," said Dorothea, rather
+haughtily.  But immediately she feared that she was wrong, and turning
+towards him she laid her hand on his, adding in a different tone, "Pray
+do not be anxious about me.  I shall have so much to think of when I am
+alone.  And Tantripp will be a sufficient companion, just to take care
+of me.  I could not bear to have Celia: she would be miserable."
+
+It was time to dress.  There was to be a dinner-party that day, the
+last of the parties which were held at the Grange as proper
+preliminaries to the wedding, and Dorothea was glad of a reason for
+moving away at once on the sound of the bell, as if she needed more
+than her usual amount of preparation.  She was ashamed of being
+irritated from some cause she could not define even to herself; for
+though she had no intention to be untruthful, her reply had not touched
+the real hurt within her.  Mr. Casaubon's words had been quite
+reasonable, yet they had brought a vague instantaneous sense of
+aloofness on his part.
+
+"Surely I am in a strangely selfish weak state of mind," she said to
+herself.  "How can I have a husband who is so much above me without
+knowing that he needs me less than I need him?"
+
+Having convinced herself that Mr. Casaubon was altogether right, she
+recovered her equanimity, and was an agreeable image of serene dignity
+when she came into the drawing-room in her silver-gray dress--the
+simple lines of her dark-brown hair parted over her brow and coiled
+massively behind, in keeping with the entire absence from her manner
+and expression of all search after mere effect.  Sometimes when
+Dorothea was in company, there seemed to be as complete an air of
+repose about her as if she had been a picture of Santa Barbara looking
+out from her tower into the clear air; but these intervals of quietude
+made the energy of her speech and emotion the more remarked when some
+outward appeal had touched her.
+
+She was naturally the subject of many observations this evening, for
+the dinner-party was large and rather more miscellaneous as to the male
+portion than any which had been held at the Grange since Mr. Brooke's
+nieces had resided with him, so that the talking was done in duos and
+trios more or less inharmonious.  There was the newly elected mayor of
+Middlemarch, who happened to be a manufacturer; the philanthropic
+banker his brother-in-law, who predominated so much in the town that
+some called him a Methodist, others a hypocrite, according to the
+resources of their vocabulary; and there were various professional men.
+In fact, Mrs. Cadwallader said that Brooke was beginning to treat the
+Middlemarchers, and that she preferred the farmers at the tithe-dinner,
+who drank her health unpretentiously, and were not ashamed of their
+grandfathers' furniture.  For in that part of the country, before
+reform had done its notable part in developing the political
+consciousness, there was a clearer distinction of ranks and a dimmer
+distinction of parties; so that Mr. Brooke's miscellaneous invitations
+seemed to belong to that general laxity which came from his inordinate
+travel and habit of taking too much in the form of ideas.
+
+Already, as Miss Brooke passed out of the dining-room, opportunity was
+found for some interjectional "asides."
+
+"A fine woman, Miss Brooke! an uncommonly fine woman, by God!" said Mr.
+Standish, the old lawyer, who had been so long concerned with the
+landed gentry that he had become landed himself, and used that oath in
+a deep-mouthed manner as a sort of armorial bearings, stamping the
+speech of a man who held a good position.
+
+Mr. Bulstrode, the banker, seemed to be addressed, but that gentleman
+disliked coarseness and profanity, and merely bowed.  The remark was
+taken up by Mr. Chichely, a middle-aged bachelor and coursing
+celebrity, who had a complexion something like an Easter egg, a few
+hairs carefully arranged, and a carriage implying the consciousness of
+a distinguished appearance.
+
+"Yes, but not my style of woman: I like a woman who lays herself out a
+little more to please us.  There should be a little filigree about a
+woman--something of the coquette.  A man likes a sort of challenge.
+The more of a dead set she makes at you the better."
+
+"There's some truth in that," said Mr. Standish, disposed to be genial.
+"And, by God, it's usually the way with them.  I suppose it answers
+some wise ends: Providence made them so, eh, Bulstrode?"
+
+"I should be disposed to refer coquetry to another source," said Mr.
+Bulstrode.  "I should rather refer it to the devil."
+
+"Ay, to be sure, there should be a little devil in a woman," said Mr.
+Chichely, whose study of the fair sex seemed to have been detrimental
+to his theology.  "And I like them blond, with a certain gait, and a
+swan neck.  Between ourselves, the mayor's daughter is more to my taste
+than Miss Brooke or Miss Celia either.  If I were a marrying man I
+should choose Miss Vincy before either of them."
+
+"Well, make up, make up," said Mr. Standish, jocosely; "you see the
+middle-aged fellows early the day."
+
+Mr. Chichely shook his head with much meaning: he was not going to
+incur the certainty of being accepted by the woman he would choose.
+
+The Miss Vincy who had the honor of being Mr. Chichely's ideal was of
+course not present; for Mr. Brooke, always objecting to go too far,
+would not have chosen that his nieces should meet the daughter of a
+Middlemarch manufacturer, unless it were on a public occasion.  The
+feminine part of the company included none whom Lady Chettam or Mrs.
+Cadwallader could object to; for Mrs. Renfrew, the colonel's widow, was
+not only unexceptionable in point of breeding, but also interesting on
+the ground of her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, and seemed
+clearly a case wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might need
+the supplement of quackery.  Lady Chettam, who attributed her own
+remarkable health to home-made bitters united with constant medical
+attendance, entered with much exercise of the imagination into Mrs.
+Renfrew's account of symptoms, and into the amazing futility in her
+case of all strengthening medicines.
+
+"Where can all the strength of those medicines go, my dear?" said the
+mild but stately dowager, turning to Mrs. Cadwallader reflectively,
+when Mrs. Renfrew's attention was called away.
+
+"It strengthens the disease," said the Rector's wife, much too
+well-born not to be an amateur in medicine.  "Everything depends on the
+constitution: some people make fat, some blood, and some bile--that's
+my view of the matter; and whatever they take is a sort of grist to the
+mill."
+
+"Then she ought to take medicines that would reduce--reduce the
+disease, you know, if you are right, my dear.  And I think what you say
+is reasonable."
+
+"Certainly it is reasonable.  You have two sorts of potatoes, fed on
+the same soil.  One of them grows more and more watery--"
+
+"Ah! like this poor Mrs. Renfrew--that is what I think.  Dropsy!  There
+is no swelling yet--it is inward.  I should say she ought to take
+drying medicines, shouldn't you?--or a dry hot-air bath.  Many things
+might be tried, of a drying nature."
+
+"Let her try a certain person's pamphlets," said Mrs. Cadwallader in an
+undertone, seeing the gentlemen enter.  "He does not want drying."
+
+"Who, my dear?" said Lady Chettam, a charming woman, not so quick as to
+nullify the pleasure of explanation.
+
+"The bridegroom--Casaubon. He has certainly been drying up faster since
+the engagement: the flame of passion, I suppose."
+
+"I should think he is far from having a good constitution," said Lady
+Chettam, with a still deeper undertone.  "And then his studies--so very
+dry, as you say."
+
+"Really, by the side of Sir James, he looks like a death's head skinned
+over for the occasion.  Mark my words: in a year from this time that
+girl will hate him.  She looks up to him as an oracle now, and
+by-and-by she will be at the other extreme.  All flightiness!"
+
+"How very shocking!  I fear she is headstrong.  But tell me--you know
+all about him--is there anything very bad?  What is the truth?"
+
+"The truth? he is as bad as the wrong physic--nasty to take, and sure
+to disagree."
+
+"There could not be anything worse than that," said Lady Chettam, with
+so vivid a conception of the physic that she seemed to have learned
+something exact about Mr. Casaubon's disadvantages.  "However, James
+will hear nothing against Miss Brooke.  He says she is the mirror of
+women still."
+
+"That is a generous make-believe of his.  Depend upon it, he likes
+little Celia better, and she appreciates him.  I hope you like my
+little Celia?"
+
+"Certainly; she is fonder of geraniums, and seems more docile, though
+not so fine a figure.  But we were talking of physic.  Tell me about
+this new young surgeon, Mr. Lydgate.  I am told he is wonderfully
+clever: he certainly looks it--a fine brow indeed."
+
+"He is a gentleman.  I heard him talking to Humphrey.  He talks well."
+
+"Yes. Mr. Brooke says he is one of the Lydgates of Northumberland,
+really well connected.  One does not expect it in a practitioner of
+that kind.  For my own part, I like a medical man more on a footing
+with the servants; they are often all the cleverer.  I assure you I
+found poor Hicks's judgment unfailing; I never knew him wrong.  He was
+coarse and butcher-like, but he knew my constitution.  It was a loss to
+me his going off so suddenly.  Dear me, what a very animated
+conversation Miss Brooke seems to be having with this Mr. Lydgate!"
+
+"She is talking cottages and hospitals with him," said Mrs.
+Cadwallader, whose ears and power of interpretation were quick.  "I
+believe he is a sort of philanthropist, so Brooke is sure to take him
+up."
+
+"James," said Lady Chettam when her son came near, "bring Mr. Lydgate
+and introduce him to me.  I want to test him."
+
+The affable dowager declared herself delighted with this opportunity of
+making Mr. Lydgate's acquaintance, having heard of his success in
+treating fever on a new plan.
+
+Mr. Lydgate had the medical accomplishment of looking perfectly grave
+whatever nonsense was talked to him, and his dark steady eyes gave him
+impressiveness as a listener.  He was as little as possible like the
+lamented Hicks, especially in a certain careless refinement about his
+toilet and utterance.  Yet Lady Chettam gathered much confidence in
+him.  He confirmed her view of her own constitution as being peculiar,
+by admitting that all constitutions might be called peculiar, and he
+did not deny that hers might be more peculiar than others.  He did not
+approve of a too lowering system, including reckless cupping, nor, on
+the other hand, of incessant port wine and bark.  He said "I think so"
+with an air of so much deference accompanying the insight of agreement,
+that she formed the most cordial opinion of his talents.
+
+"I am quite pleased with your protege," she said to Mr. Brooke before
+going away.
+
+"My protege?--dear me!--who is that?" said Mr. Brooke.
+
+"This young Lydgate, the new doctor. He seems to me to understand his
+profession admirably."
+
+"Oh, Lydgate! he is not my protege, you know; only I knew an uncle of
+his who sent me a letter about him.  However, I think he is likely to
+be first-rate--has studied in Paris, knew Broussais; has ideas, you
+know--wants to raise the profession."
+
+"Lydgate has lots of ideas, quite new, about ventilation and diet, that
+sort of thing," resumed Mr. Brooke, after he had handed out Lady
+Chettam, and had returned to be civil to a group of Middlemarchers.
+
+"Hang it, do you think that is quite sound?--upsetting The old
+treatment, which has made Englishmen what they are?" said Mr. Standish.
+
+"Medical knowledge is at a low ebb among us," said Mr. Bulstrode, who
+spoke in a subdued tone, and had rather a sickly air.  "I, for my part,
+hail the advent of Mr. Lydgate.  I hope to find good reason for
+confiding the new hospital to his management."
+
+"That is all very fine," replied Mr. Standish, who was not fond of Mr.
+Bulstrode; "if you like him to try experiments on your hospital
+patients, and kill a few people for charity I have no objection.  But I
+am not going to hand money out of my purse to have experiments tried on
+me.  I like treatment that has been tested a little."
+
+"Well, you know, Standish, every dose you take is an experiment-an
+experiment, you know," said Mr. Brooke, nodding towards the lawyer.
+
+"Oh, if you talk in that sense!" said Mr. Standish, with as much
+disgust at such non-legal quibbling as a man can well betray towards a
+valuable client.
+
+"I should be glad of any treatment that would cure me without reducing
+me to a skeleton, like poor Grainger," said Mr. Vincy, the mayor, a
+florid man, who would have served for a study of flesh in striking
+contrast with the Franciscan tints of Mr. Bulstrode.  "It's an
+uncommonly dangerous thing to be left without any padding against the
+shafts of disease, as somebody said,--and I think it a very good
+expression myself."
+
+Mr. Lydgate, of course, was out of hearing.  He had quitted the party
+early, and would have thought it altogether tedious but for the novelty
+of certain introductions, especially the introduction to Miss Brooke,
+whose youthful bloom, with her approaching marriage to that faded
+scholar, and her interest in matters socially useful, gave her the
+piquancy of an unusual combination.
+
+"She is a good creature--that fine girl--but a little too earnest," he
+thought.  "It is troublesome to talk to such women.  They are always
+wanting reasons, yet they are too ignorant to understand the merits of
+any question, and usually fall back on their moral sense to settle
+things after their own taste."
+
+Evidently Miss Brooke was not Mr. Lydgate's style of woman any more
+than Mr. Chichely's. Considered, indeed, in relation to the latter,
+whose mind was matured, she was altogether a mistake, and calculated to
+shock his trust in final causes, including the adaptation of fine young
+women to purplefaced bachelors.  But Lydgate was less ripe, and might
+possibly have experience before him which would modify his opinion as
+to the most excellent things in woman.
+
+Miss Brooke, however, was not again seen by either of these gentlemen
+under her maiden name.  Not long after that dinner-party she had become
+Mrs. Casaubon, and was on her way to Rome.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI.
+
+    "But deeds and language such as men do use,
+     And persons such as comedy would choose,
+     When she would show an image of the times,
+     And sport with human follies, not with crimes."
+                                       --BEN JONSON.
+
+
+Lydgate, in fact, was already conscious of being fascinated by a woman
+strikingly different from Miss Brooke: he did not in the least suppose
+that he had lost his balance and fallen in love, but he had said of
+that particular woman, "She is grace itself; she is perfectly lovely
+and accomplished.  That is what a woman ought to be: she ought to
+produce the effect of exquisite music." Plain women he regarded as he
+did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and
+investigated by science.  But Rosamond Vincy seemed to have the true
+melodic charm; and when a man has seen the woman whom he would have
+chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor
+will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his.  Lydgate
+believed that he should not marry for several years: not marry until he
+had trodden out a good clear path for himself away from the broad road
+which was quite ready made.  He had seen Miss Vincy above his horizon
+almost as long as it had taken Mr. Casaubon to become engaged and
+married: but this learned gentleman was possessed of a fortune; he had
+assembled his voluminous notes, and had made that sort of reputation
+which precedes performance,--often the larger part of a man's fame.  He
+took a wife, as we have seen, to adorn the remaining quadrant of his
+course, and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculable
+perturbation.  But Lydgate was young, poor, ambitious.  He had his
+half-century before him instead of behind him, and he had come to
+Middlemarch bent on doing many things that were not directly fitted to
+make his fortune or even secure him a good income.  To a man under such
+circumstances, taking a wife is something more than a question of
+adornment, however highly he may rate this; and Lydgate was disposed to
+give it the first place among wifely functions.  To his taste, guided
+by a single conversation, here was the point on which Miss Brooke would
+be found wanting, notwithstanding her undeniable beauty.  She did not
+look at things from the proper feminine angle.  The society of such
+women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second
+form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for
+bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.
+
+Certainly nothing at present could seem much less important to Lydgate
+than the turn of Miss Brooke's mind, or to Miss Brooke than the
+qualities of the woman who had attracted this young surgeon.  But any
+one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow
+preparation of effects from one life on another, which tells like a
+calculated irony on the indifference or the frozen stare with which we
+look at our unintroduced neighbor.  Destiny stands by sarcastic with
+our dramatis personae folded in her hand.
+
+Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not
+only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies
+who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children for their
+establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes which are
+constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse, and begetting
+new consciousness of interdependence.  Some slipped a little downward,
+some got higher footing: people denied aspirates, gained wealth, and
+fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in political
+currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves
+surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families
+that stood with rocky firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly
+presenting new aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the
+double change of self and beholder.  Municipal town and rural parish
+gradually made fresh threads of connection--gradually, as the old
+stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and the worship of the solar
+guinea became extinct; while squires and baronets, and even lords who
+had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the
+faultiness of closer acquaintanceship.  Settlers, too, came from
+distant counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with
+an offensive advantage in cunning.  In fact, much the same sort of
+movement and mixture went on in old England as we find in older
+Herodotus, who also, in telling what had been, thought it well to take
+a woman's lot for his starting-point; though Io, as a maiden apparently
+beguiled by attractive merchandise, was the reverse of Miss Brooke, and
+in this respect perhaps bore more resemblance to Rosamond Vincy, who
+had excellent taste in costume, with that nymph-like figure and pure
+blindness which give the largest range to choice in the flow and color
+of drapery.  But these things made only part of her charm.  She was
+admitted to be the flower of Mrs. Lemon's school, the chief school in
+the county, where the teaching included all that was demanded in the
+accomplished female--even to extras, such as the getting in and out of
+a carriage.  Mrs. Lemon herself had always held up Miss Vincy as an
+example: no pupil, she said, exceeded that young lady for mental
+acquisition and propriety of speech, while her musical execution was
+quite exceptional.  We cannot help the way in which people speak of us,
+and probably if Mrs. Lemon had undertaken to describe Juliet or Imogen,
+these heroines would not have seemed poetical.  The first vision of
+Rosamond would have been enough with most judges to dispel any
+prejudice excited by Mrs. Lemon's praise.
+
+Lydgate could not be long in Middlemarch without having that agreeable
+vision, or even without making the acquaintance of the Vincy family;
+for though Mr. Peacock, whose practice he had paid something to enter
+on, had not been their doctor (Mrs. Vincy not liking the lowering
+system adopted by him), he had many patients among their connections
+and acquaintances.  For who of any consequence in Middlemarch was not
+connected or at least acquainted with the Vincys?  They were old
+manufacturers, and had kept a good house for three generations, in
+which there had naturally been much intermarrying with neighbors more
+or less decidedly genteel.  Mr. Vincy's sister had made a wealthy match
+in accepting Mr. Bulstrode, who, however, as a man not born in the
+town, and altogether of dimly known origin, was considered to have done
+well in uniting himself with a real Middlemarch family; on the other
+hand, Mr. Vincy had descended a little, having taken an innkeeper's
+daughter.  But on this side too there was a cheering sense of money;
+for Mrs. Vincy's sister had been second wife to rich old Mr.
+Featherstone, and had died childless years ago, so that her nephews and
+nieces might be supposed to touch the affections of the widower.  And
+it happened that Mr. Bulstrode and Mr. Featherstone, two of Peacock's
+most important patients, had, from different causes, given an
+especially good reception to his successor, who had raised some
+partisanship as well as discussion.  Mr. Wrench, medical attendant to
+the Vincy family, very early had grounds for thinking lightly of
+Lydgate's professional discretion, and there was no report about him
+which was not retailed at the Vincys', where visitors were frequent.
+Mr. Vincy was more inclined to general good-fellowship than to taking
+sides, but there was no need for him to be hasty in making any new man
+acquaintance.  Rosamond silently wished that her father would invite
+Mr. Lydgate.  She was tired of the faces and figures she had always
+been used to--the various irregular profiles and gaits and turns of
+phrase distinguishing those Middlemarch young men whom she had known as
+boys.  She had been at school with girls of higher position, whose
+brothers, she felt sure, it would have been possible for her to be more
+interested in, than in these inevitable Middlemarch companions.  But
+she would not have chosen to mention her wish to her father; and he,
+for his part, was in no hurry on the subject.  An alderman about to be
+mayor must by-and-by enlarge his dinner-parties, but at present there
+were plenty of guests at his well-spread table.
+
+That table often remained covered with the relics of the family
+breakfast long after Mr. Vincy had gone with his second son to the
+warehouse, and when Miss Morgan was already far on in morning lessons
+with the younger girls in the schoolroom.  It awaited the family
+laggard, who found any sort of inconvenience (to others) less
+disagreeable than getting up when he was called.  This was the case one
+morning of the October in which we have lately seen Mr. Casaubon
+visiting the Grange; and though the room was a little overheated with
+the fire, which had sent the spaniel panting to a remote corner,
+Rosamond, for some reason, continued to sit at her embroidery longer
+than usual, now and then giving herself a little shake, and laying her
+work on her knee to contemplate it with an air of hesitating weariness.
+Her mamma, who had returned from an excursion to the kitchen, sat on
+the other side of the small work-table with an air of more entire
+placidity, until, the clock again giving notice that it was going to
+strike, she looked up from the lace-mending which was occupying her
+plump fingers and rang the bell.
+
+"Knock at Mr. Fred's door again, Pritchard, and tell him it has struck
+half-past ten."
+
+This was said without any change in the radiant good-humor of Mrs.
+Vincy's face, in which forty-five years had delved neither angles nor
+parallels; and pushing back her pink capstrings, she let her work rest
+on her lap, while she looked admiringly at her daughter.
+
+"Mamma," said Rosamond, "when Fred comes down I wish you would not let
+him have red herrings.  I cannot bear the smell of them all over the
+house at this hour of the morning."
+
+"Oh, my dear, you are so hard on your brothers!  It is the only fault I
+have to find with you.  You are the sweetest temper in the world, but
+you are so tetchy with your brothers."
+
+"Not tetchy, mamma: you never hear me speak in an unladylike way."
+
+"Well, but you want to deny them things."
+
+"Brothers are so unpleasant."
+
+"Oh, my dear, you must allow for young men.  Be thankful if they have
+good hearts.  A woman must learn to put up with little things.  You
+will be married some day."
+
+"Not to any one who is like Fred."
+
+"Don't decry your own brother, my dear.  Few young men have less
+against them, although he couldn't take his degree--I'm sure I can't
+understand why, for he seems to me most clever.  And you know yourself
+he was thought equal to the best society at college.  So particular as
+you are, my dear, I wonder you are not glad to have such a gentlemanly
+young man for a brother.  You are always finding fault with Bob because
+he is not Fred."
+
+"Oh no, mamma, only because he is Bob."
+
+"Well, my dear, you will not find any Middlemarch young man who has not
+something against him."
+
+"But"--here Rosamond's face broke into a smile which suddenly revealed
+two dimples.  She herself thought unfavorably of these dimples and
+smiled little in general society.  "But I shall not marry any
+Middlemarch young man."
+
+"So it seems, my love, for you have as good as refused the pick of
+them; and if there's better to be had, I'm sure there's no girl better
+deserves it."
+
+"Excuse me, mamma--I wish you would not say, 'the pick of them.'"
+
+"Why, what else are they?"
+
+"I mean, mamma, it is rather a vulgar expression."
+
+"Very likely, my dear; I never was a good speaker.  What should I say?"
+
+"The best of them."
+
+"Why, that seems just as plain and common.  If I had had time to think,
+I should have said, 'the most superior young men.' But with your
+education you must know."
+
+"What must Rosy know, mother?" said Mr. Fred, who had slid in
+unobserved through the half-open door while the ladies were bending
+over their work, and now going up to the fire stood with his back
+towards it, warming the soles of his slippers.
+
+"Whether it's right to say 'superior young men,'" said Mrs. Vincy,
+ringing the bell.
+
+"Oh, there are so many superior teas and sugars now.  Superior is
+getting to be shopkeepers' slang."
+
+"Are you beginning to dislike slang, then?" said Rosamond, with mild
+gravity.
+
+"Only the wrong sort.  All choice of words is slang.  It marks a class."
+
+"There is correct English: that is not slang."
+
+"I beg your pardon: correct English is the slang of prigs who write
+history and essays.  And the strongest slang of all is the slang of
+poets."
+
+"You will say anything, Fred, to gain your point."
+
+"Well, tell me whether it is slang or poetry to call an ox a
+leg-plaiter."
+
+"Of course you can call it poetry if you like."
+
+"Aha, Miss Rosy, you don't know Homer from slang.  I shall invent a new
+game; I shall write bits of slang and poetry on slips, and give them to
+you to separate."
+
+"Dear me, how amusing it is to hear young people talk!" said Mrs.
+Vincy, with cheerful admiration.
+
+"Have you got nothing else for my breakfast, Pritchard?" said Fred, to
+the servant who brought in coffee and buttered toast; while he walked
+round the table surveying the ham, potted beef, and other cold
+remnants, with an air of silent rejection, and polite forbearance from
+signs of disgust.
+
+"Should you like eggs, sir?"
+
+"Eggs, no!  Bring me a grilled bone."
+
+"Really, Fred," said Rosamond, when the servant had left the room, "if
+you must have hot things for breakfast, I wish you would come down
+earlier.  You can get up at six o'clock to go out hunting; I cannot
+understand why you find it so difficult to get up on other mornings."
+
+"That is your want of understanding, Rosy.  I can get up to go hunting
+because I like it."
+
+"What would you think of me if I came down two hours after every one
+else and ordered grilled bone?"
+
+"I should think you were an uncommonly fast young lady," said Fred,
+eating his toast with the utmost composure.
+
+"I cannot see why brothers are to make themselves disagreeable, any
+more than sisters."
+
+"I don't make myself disagreeable; it is you who find me so.
+Disagreeable is a word that describes your feelings and not my actions."
+
+"I think it describes the smell of grilled bone."
+
+"Not at all.  It describes a sensation in your little nose associated
+with certain finicking notions which are the classics of Mrs. Lemon's
+school.  Look at my mother; you don't see her objecting to everything
+except what she does herself.  She is my notion of a pleasant woman."
+
+"Bless you both, my dears, and don't quarrel," said Mrs. Vincy, with
+motherly cordiality.  "Come, Fred, tell us all about the new doctor.
+How is your uncle pleased with him?"
+
+"Pretty well, I think.  He asks Lydgate all sorts of questions and then
+screws up his face while he hears the answers, as if they were pinching
+his toes.  That's his way.  Ah, here comes my grilled bone."
+
+"But how came you to stay out so late, my dear?  You only said you were
+going to your uncle's."
+
+"Oh, I dined at Plymdale's. We had whist.  Lydgate was there too."
+
+"And what do you think of him?  He is very gentlemanly, I suppose.
+They say he is of excellent family--his relations quite county people."
+
+"Yes," said Fred.  "There was a Lydgate at John's who spent no end of
+money.  I find this man is a second cousin of his.  But rich men may
+have very poor devils for second cousins."
+
+"It always makes a difference, though, to be of good family," said
+Rosamond, with a tone of decision which showed that she had thought on
+this subject.  Rosamond felt that she might have been happier if she
+had not been the daughter of a Middlemarch manufacturer.  She disliked
+anything which reminded her that her mother's father had been an
+innkeeper.  Certainly any one remembering the fact might think that
+Mrs. Vincy had the air of a very handsome good-humored landlady,
+accustomed to the most capricious orders of gentlemen.
+
+"I thought it was odd his name was Tertius," said the bright-faced
+matron, "but of course it's a name in the family.  But now, tell us
+exactly what sort of man he is."
+
+"Oh, tallish, dark, clever--talks well--rather a prig, I think."
+
+"I never can make out what you mean by a prig," said Rosamond.
+
+"A fellow who wants to show that he has opinions."
+
+"Why, my dear, doctors must have opinions," said Mrs. Vincy.  "What are
+they there for else?"
+
+"Yes, mother, the opinions they are paid for.  But a prig is a fellow
+who is always making you a present of his opinions."
+
+"I suppose Mary Garth admires Mr. Lydgate," said Rosamond, not without
+a touch of innuendo.
+
+"Really, I can't say." said Fred, rather glumly, as he left the table,
+and taking up a novel which he had brought down with him, threw himself
+into an arm-chair. "If you are jealous of her, go oftener to Stone
+Court yourself and eclipse her."
+
+"I wish you would not be so vulgar, Fred.  If you have finished, pray
+ring the bell."
+
+"It is true, though--what your brother says, Rosamond," Mrs. Vincy
+began, when the servant had cleared the table.  "It is a thousand
+pities you haven't patience to go and see your uncle more, so proud of
+you as he is, and wanted you to live with him.  There's no knowing what
+he might have done for you as well as for Fred.  God knows, I'm fond of
+having you at home with me, but I can part with my children for their
+good.  And now it stands to reason that your uncle Featherstone will do
+something for Mary Garth."
+
+"Mary Garth can bear being at Stone Court, because she likes that
+better than being a governess," said Rosamond, folding up her work.  "I
+would rather not have anything left to me if I must earn it by enduring
+much of my uncle's cough and his ugly relations."
+
+"He can't be long for this world, my dear; I wouldn't hasten his end,
+but what with asthma and that inward complaint, let us hope there is
+something better for him in another.  And I have no ill-will toward's
+Mary Garth, but there's justice to be thought of.  And Mr.
+Featherstone's first wife brought him no money, as my sister did.  Her
+nieces and nephews can't have so much claim as my sister's.  And I must
+say I think Mary Garth a dreadful plain girl--more fit for a governess."
+
+"Every one would not agree with you there, mother," said Fred, who
+seemed to be able to read and listen too.
+
+"Well, my dear," said Mrs. Vincy, wheeling skilfully, "if she _had_
+some fortune left her,--a man marries his wife's relations, and the
+Garths are so poor, and live in such a small way.  But I shall leave
+you to your studies, my dear; for I must go and do some shopping."
+
+"Fred's studies are not very deep," said Rosamond, rising with her
+mamma, "he is only reading a novel."
+
+"Well, well, by-and-by he'll go to his Latin and things," said Mrs.
+Vincy, soothingly, stroking her son's head.  "There's a fire in the
+smoking-room on purpose.  It's your father's wish, you know--Fred, my
+dear--and I always tell him you will be good, and go to college again
+to take your degree."
+
+Fred drew his mother's hand down to his lips, but said nothing.
+
+"I suppose you are not going out riding to-day?" said Rosamond,
+lingering a little after her mamma was gone.
+
+"No; why?"
+
+"Papa says I may have the chestnut to ride now."
+
+"You can go with me to-morrow, if you like.  Only I am going to Stone
+Court, remember."
+
+"I want to ride so much, it is indifferent to me where we go." Rosamond
+really wished to go to Stone Court, of all other places.
+
+"Oh, I say, Rosy," said Fred, as she was passing out of the room, "if
+you are going to the piano, let me come and play some airs with you."
+
+"Pray do not ask me this morning."
+
+"Why not this morning?"
+
+"Really, Fred, I wish you would leave off playing the flute.  A man
+looks very silly playing the flute.  And you play so out of tune."
+
+"When next any one makes love to you, Miss Rosamond, I will tell him
+how obliging you are."
+
+"Why should you expect me to oblige you by hearing you play the flute,
+any more than I should expect you to oblige me by not playing it?"
+
+"And why should you expect me to take you out riding?"
+
+This question led to an adjustment, for Rosamond had set her mind on
+that particular ride.
+
+So Fred was gratified with nearly an hour's practice of "Ar hyd y nos,"
+"Ye banks and braes," and other favorite airs from his "Instructor on
+the Flute;" a wheezy performance, into which he threw much ambition and
+an irrepressible hopefulness.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII.
+
+    "He had more tow on his distaffe
+     Than Gerveis knew."
+                           --CHAUCER.
+
+
+The ride to Stone Court, which Fred and Rosamond took the next morning,
+lay through a pretty bit of midland landscape, almost all meadows and
+pastures, with hedgerows still allowed to grow in bushy beauty and to
+spread out coral fruit for the birds.  Little details gave each field a
+particular physiognomy, dear to the eyes that have looked on them from
+childhood: the pool in the corner where the grasses were dank and trees
+leaned whisperingly; the great oak shadowing a bare place in
+mid-pasture; the high bank where the ash-trees grew; the sudden slope
+of the old marl-pit making a red background for the burdock; the
+huddled roofs and ricks of the homestead without a traceable way of
+approach; the gray gate and fences against the depths of the bordering
+wood; and the stray hovel, its old, old thatch full of mossy hills and
+valleys with wondrous modulations of light and shadow such as we travel
+far to see in later life, and see larger, but not more beautiful.
+These are the things that make the gamut of joy in landscape to
+midland-bred souls--the things they toddled among, or perhaps learned
+by heart standing between their father's knees while he drove leisurely.
+
+But the road, even the byroad, was excellent; for Lowick, as we have
+seen, was not a parish of muddy lanes and poor tenants; and it was into
+Lowick parish that Fred and Rosamond entered after a couple of miles'
+riding.  Another mile would bring them to Stone Court, and at the end
+of the first half, the house was already visible, looking as if it had
+been arrested in its growth toward a stone mansion by an unexpected
+budding of farm-buildings on its left flank, which had hindered it from
+becoming anything more than the substantial dwelling of a gentleman
+farmer.  It was not the less agreeable an object in the distance for
+the cluster of pinnacled corn-ricks which balanced the fine row of
+walnuts on the right.
+
+Presently it was possible to discern something that might be a gig on
+the circular drive before the front door.
+
+"Dear me," said Rosamond, "I hope none of my uncle's horrible relations
+are there."
+
+"They are, though.  That is Mrs. Waule's gig--the last yellow gig left,
+I should think.  When I see Mrs. Waule in it, I understand how yellow
+can have been worn for mourning.  That gig seems to me more funereal
+than a hearse.  But then Mrs. Waule always has black crape on.  How
+does she manage it, Rosy?  Her friends can't always be dying."
+
+"I don't know at all.  And she is not in the least evangelical," said
+Rosamond, reflectively, as if that religious point of view would have
+fully accounted for perpetual crape.  "And, not poor," she added, after
+a moment's pause.
+
+"No, by George!  They are as rich as Jews, those Waules and
+Featherstones; I mean, for people like them, who don't want to spend
+anything.  And yet they hang about my uncle like vultures, and are
+afraid of a farthing going away from their side of the family.  But I
+believe he hates them all."
+
+The Mrs. Waule who was so far from being admirable in the eyes of these
+distant connections, had happened to say this very morning (not at all
+with a defiant air, but in a low, muffled, neutral tone, as of a voice
+heard through cotton wool) that she did not wish "to enjoy their good
+opinion." She was seated, as she observed, on her own brother's hearth,
+and had been Jane Featherstone five-and-twenty years before she had
+been Jane Waule, which entitled her to speak when her own brother's
+name had been made free with by those who had no right to it.
+
+"What are you driving at there?" said Mr. Featherstone, holding his
+stick between his knees and settling his wig, while he gave her a
+momentary sharp glance, which seemed to react on him like a draught of
+cold air and set him coughing.
+
+Mrs. Waule had to defer her answer till he was quiet again, till Mary
+Garth had supplied him with fresh syrup, and he had begun to rub the
+gold knob of his stick, looking bitterly at the fire.  It was a bright
+fire, but it made no difference to the chill-looking purplish tint of
+Mrs. Waule's face, which was as neutral as her voice; having mere
+chinks for eyes, and lips that hardly moved in speaking.
+
+"The doctors can't master that cough, brother.  It's just like what I
+have; for I'm your own sister, constitution and everything.  But, as I
+was saying, it's a pity Mrs. Vincy's family can't be better conducted."
+
+"Tchah! you said nothing o' the sort.  You said somebody had made free
+with my name."
+
+"And no more than can be proved, if what everybody says is true.  My
+brother Solomon tells me it's the talk up and down in Middlemarch how
+unsteady young Vincy is, and has been forever gambling at billiards
+since home he came."
+
+"Nonsense!  What's a game at billiards?  It's a good gentlemanly game;
+and young Vincy is not a clodhopper.  If your son John took to
+billiards, now, he'd make a fool of himself."
+
+"Your nephew John never took to billiards or any other game, brother,
+and is far from losing hundreds of pounds, which, if what everybody
+says is true, must be found somewhere else than out of Mr. Vincy the
+father's pocket.  For they say he's been losing money for years, though
+nobody would think so, to see him go coursing and keeping open house as
+they do.  And I've heard say Mr. Bulstrode condemns Mrs. Vincy beyond
+anything for her flightiness, and spoiling her children so."
+
+"What's Bulstrode to me?  I don't bank with him."
+
+"Well, Mrs. Bulstrode is Mr. Vincy's own sister, and they do say that
+Mr. Vincy mostly trades on the Bank money; and you may see yourself,
+brother, when a woman past forty has pink strings always flying, and
+that light way of laughing at everything, it's very unbecoming.  But
+indulging your children is one thing, and finding money to pay their
+debts is another.  And it's openly said that young Vincy has raised
+money on his expectations.  I don't say what expectations.  Miss Garth
+hears me, and is welcome to tell again.  I know young people hang
+together."
+
+"No, thank you, Mrs. Waule," said Mary Garth.  "I dislike hearing
+scandal too much to wish to repeat it."
+
+Mr. Featherstone rubbed the knob of his stick and made a brief
+convulsive show of laughter, which had much the same genuineness as an
+old whist-player's chuckle over a bad hand.  Still looking at the fire,
+he said--
+
+"And who pretends to say Fred Vincy hasn't got expectations?  Such a
+fine, spirited fellow is like enough to have 'em."
+
+There was a slight pause before Mrs. Waule replied, and when she did
+so, her voice seemed to be slightly moistened with tears, though her
+face was still dry.
+
+"Whether or no, brother, it is naturally painful to me and my brother
+Solomon to hear your name made free with, and your complaint being such
+as may carry you off sudden, and people who are no more Featherstones
+than the Merry-Andrew at the fair, openly reckoning on your property
+coming to _them_.  And me your own sister, and Solomon your own
+brother!  And if that's to be it, what has it pleased the Almighty to
+make families for?" Here Mrs. Waule's tears fell, but with moderation.
+
+"Come, out with it, Jane!" said Mr. Featherstone, looking at her.  "You
+mean to say, Fred Vincy has been getting somebody to advance him money
+on what he says he knows about my will, eh?"
+
+"I never said so, brother" (Mrs. Waule's voice had again become dry and
+unshaken). "It was told me by my brother Solomon last night when he
+called coming from market to give me advice about the old wheat, me
+being a widow, and my son John only three-and-twenty, though steady
+beyond anything.  And he had it from most undeniable authority, and not
+one, but many."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!  I don't believe a word of it.  It's all a got-up
+story.  Go to the window, missy; I thought I heard a horse.  See if the
+doctor's coming."
+
+"Not got up by me, brother, nor yet by Solomon, who, whatever else he
+may be--and I don't deny he has oddities--has made his will and parted
+his property equal between such kin as he's friends with; though, for
+my part, I think there are times when some should be considered more
+than others.  But Solomon makes it no secret what he means to do."
+
+"The more fool he!" said Mr. Featherstone, with some difficulty;
+breaking into a severe fit of coughing that required Mary Garth to
+stand near him, so that she did not find out whose horses they were
+which presently paused stamping on the gravel before the door.
+
+Before Mr. Featherstone's cough was quiet, Rosamond entered, bearing up
+her riding-habit with much grace.  She bowed ceremoniously to Mrs.
+Waule, who said stiffly, "How do you do, miss?" smiled and nodded
+silently to Mary, and remained standing till the coughing should cease,
+and allow her uncle to notice her.
+
+"Heyday, miss!" he said at last, "you have a fine color.  Where's Fred?"
+
+"Seeing about the horses.  He will be in presently."
+
+"Sit down, sit down.  Mrs. Waule, you'd better go."
+
+Even those neighbors who had called Peter Featherstone an old fox, had
+never accused him of being insincerely polite, and his sister was quite
+used to the peculiar absence of ceremony with which he marked his sense
+of blood-relationship. Indeed, she herself was accustomed to think that
+entire freedom from the necessity of behaving agreeably was included in
+the Almighty's intentions about families.  She rose slowly without any
+sign of resentment, and said in her usual muffled monotone, "Brother, I
+hope the new doctor will be able to do something for you.  Solomon says
+there's great talk of his cleverness.  I'm sure it's my wish you should
+be spared.  And there's none more ready to nurse you than your own
+sister and your own nieces, if you'd only say the word.  There's
+Rebecca, and Joanna, and Elizabeth, you know."
+
+"Ay, ay, I remember--you'll see I've remembered 'em all--all dark and
+ugly.  They'd need have some money, eh?  There never was any beauty in
+the women of our family; but the Featherstones have always had some
+money, and the Waules too.  Waule had money too.  A warm man was Waule.
+Ay, ay; money's a good egg; and if you 've got money to leave behind
+you, lay it in a warm nest.  Good-by, Mrs. Waule." Here Mr.
+Featherstone pulled at both sides of his wig as if he wanted to deafen
+himself, and his sister went away ruminating on this oracular speech of
+his.  Notwithstanding her jealousy of the Vincys and of Mary Garth,
+there remained as the nethermost sediment in her mental shallows a
+persuasion that her brother Peter Featherstone could never leave his
+chief property away from his blood-relations:--else, why had the
+Almighty carried off his two wives both childless, after he had gained
+so much by manganese and things, turning up when nobody expected
+it?--and why was there a Lowick parish church, and the Waules and
+Powderells all sitting in the same pew for generations, and the
+Featherstone pew next to them, if, the Sunday after her brother Peter's
+death, everybody was to know that the property was gone out of the
+family?  The human mind has at no period accepted a moral chaos; and so
+preposterous a result was not strictly conceivable.  But we are
+frightened at much that is not strictly conceivable.
+
+When Fred came in the old man eyed him with a peculiar twinkle, which
+the younger had often had reason to interpret as pride in the
+satisfactory details of his appearance.
+
+"You two misses go away," said Mr. Featherstone.  "I want to speak to
+Fred."
+
+"Come into my room, Rosamond, you will not mind the cold for a little
+while," said Mary.  The two girls had not only known each other in
+childhood, but had been at the same provincial school together (Mary as
+an articled pupil), so that they had many memories in common, and liked
+very well to talk in private.  Indeed, this tete-a-tete was one of
+Rosamond's objects in coming to Stone Court.
+
+Old Featherstone would not begin the dialogue till the door had been
+closed.  He continued to look at Fred with the same twinkle and with
+one of his habitual grimaces, alternately screwing and widening his
+mouth; and when he spoke, it was in a low tone, which might be taken
+for that of an informer ready to be bought off, rather than for the
+tone of an offended senior.  He was not a man to feel any strong moral
+indignation even on account of trespasses against himself.  It was
+natural that others should want to get an advantage over him, but then,
+he was a little too cunning for them.
+
+"So, sir, you've been paying ten per cent for money which you've
+promised to pay off by mortgaging my land when I'm dead and gone, eh?
+You put my life at a twelvemonth, say.  But I can alter my will yet."
+
+Fred blushed.  He had not borrowed money in that way, for excellent
+reasons.  But he was conscious of having spoken with some confidence
+(perhaps with more than he exactly remembered) about his prospect of
+getting Featherstone's land as a future means of paying present debts.
+
+"I don't know what you refer to, sir.  I have certainly never borrowed
+any money on such an insecurity.  Please do explain."
+
+"No, sir, it's you must explain.  I can alter my will yet, let me tell
+you.  I'm of sound mind--can reckon compound interest in my head, and
+remember every fool's name as well as I could twenty years ago.  What
+the deuce?  I'm under eighty.  I say, you must contradict this story."
+
+"I have contradicted it, sir," Fred answered, with a touch of
+impatience, not remembering that his uncle did not verbally
+discriminate contradicting from disproving, though no one was further
+from confounding the two ideas than old Featherstone, who often
+wondered that so many fools took his own assertions for proofs.  "But I
+contradict it again.  The story is a silly lie."
+
+"Nonsense! you must bring dockiments.  It comes from authority."
+
+"Name the authority, and make him name the man of whom I borrowed the
+money, and then I can disprove the story."
+
+"It's pretty good authority, I think--a man who knows most of what goes
+on in Middlemarch.  It's that fine, religious, charitable uncle o'
+yours.  Come now!" Here Mr. Featherstone had his peculiar inward shake
+which signified merriment.
+
+"Mr. Bulstrode?"
+
+"Who else, eh?"
+
+"Then the story has grown into this lie out of some sermonizing words
+he may have let fall about me.  Do they pretend that he named the man
+who lent me the money?"
+
+"If there is such a man, depend upon it Bulstrode knows him.  But,
+supposing you only tried to get the money lent, and didn't get
+it--Bulstrode 'ud know that too.  You bring me a writing from Bulstrode
+to say he doesn't believe you've ever promised to pay your debts out o'
+my land.  Come now!"
+
+Mr. Featherstone's face required its whole scale of grimaces as a
+muscular outlet to his silent triumph in the soundness of his faculties.
+
+Fred felt himself to be in a disgusting dilemma.
+
+"You must be joking, sir.  Mr. Bulstrode, like other men, believes
+scores of things that are not true, and he has a prejudice against me.
+I could easily get him to write that he knew no facts in proof of the
+report you speak of, though it might lead to unpleasantness.  But I
+could hardly ask him to write down what he believes or does not believe
+about me." Fred paused an instant, and then added, in politic appeal to
+his uncle's vanity, "That is hardly a thing for a gentleman to ask."
+But he was disappointed in the result.
+
+"Ay, I know what you mean.  You'd sooner offend me than Bulstrode.  And
+what's he?--he's got no land hereabout that ever I heard tell of.  A
+speckilating fellow!  He may come down any day, when the devil leaves
+off backing him.  And that's what his religion means: he wants God
+A'mighty to come in.  That's nonsense!  There's one thing I made out
+pretty clear when I used to go to church--and it's this: God A'mighty
+sticks to the land.  He promises land, and He gives land, and He makes
+chaps rich with corn and cattle.  But you take the other side.  You
+like Bulstrode and speckilation better than Featherstone and land."
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir," said Fred, rising, standing with his back to
+the fire and beating his boot with his whip.  "I like neither Bulstrode
+nor speculation." He spoke rather sulkily, feeling himself stalemated.
+
+"Well, well, you can do without me, that's pretty clear," said old
+Featherstone, secretly disliking the possibility that Fred would show
+himself at all independent.  "You neither want a bit of land to make a
+squire of you instead of a starving parson, nor a lift of a hundred
+pound by the way.  It's all one to me.  I can make five codicils if I
+like, and I shall keep my bank-notes for a nest-egg. It's all one to
+me."
+
+Fred colored again.  Featherstone had rarely given him presents of
+money, and at this moment it seemed almost harder to part with the
+immediate prospect of bank-notes than with the more distant prospect of
+the land.
+
+"I am not ungrateful, sir.  I never meant to show disregard for any
+kind intentions you might have towards me.  On the contrary."
+
+"Very good.  Then prove it.  You bring me a letter from Bulstrode
+saying he doesn't believe you've been cracking and promising to pay
+your debts out o' my land, and then, if there's any scrape you've got
+into, we'll see if I can't back you a bit.  Come now!  That's a
+bargain.  Here, give me your arm.  I'll try and walk round the room."
+
+Fred, in spite of his irritation, had kindness enough in him to be a
+little sorry for the unloved, unvenerated old man, who with his
+dropsical legs looked more than usually pitiable in walking.  While
+giving his arm, he thought that he should not himself like to be an old
+fellow with his constitution breaking up; and he waited
+good-temperedly, first before the window to hear the wonted remarks
+about the guinea-fowls and the weather-cock, and then before the scanty
+book-shelves, of which the chief glories in dark calf were Josephus,
+Culpepper, Klopstock's "Messiah," and several volumes of the
+"Gentleman's Magazine."
+
+"Read me the names o' the books.  Come now! you're a college man."
+
+Fred gave him the titles.
+
+"What did missy want with more books?  What must you be bringing her
+more books for?"
+
+"They amuse her, sir.  She is very fond of reading."
+
+"A little too fond," said Mr. Featherstone, captiously.  "She was for
+reading when she sat with me.  But I put a stop to that.  She's got the
+newspaper to read out loud.  That's enough for one day, I should think.
+I can't abide to see her reading to herself.  You mind and not bring
+her any more books, do you hear?"
+
+"Yes, sir, I hear." Fred had received this order before, and had
+secretly disobeyed it.  He intended to disobey it again.
+
+"Ring the bell," said Mr. Featherstone; "I want missy to come down."
+
+Rosamond and Mary had been talking faster than their male friends.
+They did not think of sitting down, but stood at the toilet-table near
+the window while Rosamond took off her hat, adjusted her veil, and
+applied little touches of her finger-tips to her hair--hair of
+infantine fairness, neither flaxen nor yellow.  Mary Garth seemed all
+the plainer standing at an angle between the two nymphs--the one in the
+glass, and the one out of it, who looked at each other with eyes of
+heavenly blue, deep enough to hold the most exquisite meanings an
+ingenious beholder could put into them, and deep enough to hide the
+meanings of the owner if these should happen to be less exquisite.
+Only a few children in Middlemarch looked blond by the side of
+Rosamond, and the slim figure displayed by her riding-habit had
+delicate undulations.  In fact, most men in Middlemarch, except her
+brothers, held that Miss Vincy was the best girl in the world, and some
+called her an angel.  Mary Garth, on the contrary, had the aspect of an
+ordinary sinner: she was brown; her curly dark hair was rough and
+stubborn; her stature was low; and it would not be true to declare, in
+satisfactory antithesis, that she had all the virtues.  Plainness has
+its peculiar temptations and vices quite as much as beauty; it is apt
+either to feign amiability, or, not feigning it, to show all the
+repulsiveness of discontent: at any rate, to be called an ugly thing in
+contrast with that lovely creature your companion, is apt to produce
+some effect beyond a sense of fine veracity and fitness in the phrase.
+At the age of two-and-twenty Mary had certainly not attained that
+perfect good sense and good principle which are usually recommended to
+the less fortunate girl, as if they were to be obtained in quantities
+ready mixed, with a flavor of resignation as required.  Her shrewdness
+had a streak of satiric bitterness continually renewed and never
+carried utterly out of sight, except by a strong current of gratitude
+towards those who, instead of telling her that she ought to be
+contented, did something to make her so.  Advancing womanhood had
+tempered her plainness, which was of a good human sort, such as the
+mothers of our race have very commonly worn in all latitudes under a
+more or less becoming headgear.  Rembrandt would have painted her with
+pleasure, and would have made her broad features look out of the canvas
+with intelligent honesty.  For honesty, truth-telling fairness, was
+Mary's reigning virtue: she neither tried to create illusions, nor
+indulged in them for her own behoof, and when she was in a good mood
+she had humor enough in her to laugh at herself.  When she and Rosamond
+happened both to be reflected in the glass, she said, laughingly--
+
+"What a brown patch I am by the side of you, Rosy!  You are the most
+unbecoming companion."
+
+"Oh no!  No one thinks of your appearance, you are so sensible and
+useful, Mary.  Beauty is of very little consequence in reality," said
+Rosamond, turning her head towards Mary, but with eyes swerving towards
+the new view of her neck in the glass.
+
+"You mean my beauty," said Mary, rather sardonically.
+
+Rosamond thought, "Poor Mary, she takes the kindest things ill." Aloud
+she said, "What have you been doing lately?"
+
+"I?  Oh, minding the house--pouring out syrup--pretending to be amiable
+and contented--learning to have a bad opinion of everybody."
+
+"It is a wretched life for you."
+
+"No," said Mary, curtly, with a little toss of her head.  "I think my
+life is pleasanter than your Miss Morgan's."
+
+"Yes; but Miss Morgan is so uninteresting, and not young."
+
+"She is interesting to herself, I suppose; and I am not at all sure
+that everything gets easier as one gets older."
+
+"No," said Rosamond, reflectively; "one wonders what such people do,
+without any prospect.  To be sure, there is religion as a support.
+But," she added, dimpling, "it is very different with you, Mary.  You
+may have an offer."
+
+"Has any one told you he means to make me one?"
+
+"Of course not.  I mean, there is a gentleman who may fall in love with
+you, seeing you almost every day."
+
+A certain change in Mary's face was chiefly determined by the resolve
+not to show any change.
+
+"Does that always make people fall in love?" she answered, carelessly;
+"it seems to me quite as often a reason for detesting each other."
+
+"Not when they are interesting and agreeable.  I hear that Mr. Lydgate
+is both."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Lydgate!" said Mary, with an unmistakable lapse into
+indifference.  "You want to know something about him," she added, not
+choosing to indulge Rosamond's indirectness.
+
+"Merely, how you like him."
+
+"There is no question of liking at present.  My liking always wants
+some little kindness to kindle it.  I am not magnanimous enough to like
+people who speak to me without seeming to see me."
+
+"Is he so haughty?" said Rosamond, with heightened satisfaction.  "You
+know that he is of good family?"
+
+"No; he did not give that as a reason."
+
+"Mary! you are the oddest girl.  But what sort of looking man is he?
+Describe him to me."
+
+"How can one describe a man?  I can give you an inventory: heavy
+eyebrows, dark eyes, a straight nose, thick dark hair, large solid
+white hands--and--let me see--oh, an exquisite cambric
+pocket-handkerchief.  But you will see him.  You know this is about the
+time of his visits."
+
+Rosamond blushed a little, but said, meditatively, "I rather like a
+haughty manner.  I cannot endure a rattling young man."
+
+"I did not tell you that Mr. Lydgate was haughty; but il y en a pour
+tous les gouts, as little Mamselle used to say, and if any girl can
+choose the particular sort of conceit she would like, I should think it
+is you, Rosy."
+
+"Haughtiness is not conceit; I call Fred conceited."
+
+"I wish no one said any worse of him.  He should be more careful.  Mrs.
+Waule has been telling uncle that Fred is very unsteady." Mary spoke
+from a girlish impulse which got the better of her judgment.  There was
+a vague uneasiness associated with the word "unsteady" which she hoped
+Rosamond might say something to dissipate.  But she purposely abstained
+from mentioning Mrs. Waule's more special insinuation.
+
+"Oh, Fred is horrid!" said Rosamond.  She would not have allowed
+herself so unsuitable a word to any one but Mary.
+
+"What do you mean by horrid?"
+
+"He is so idle, and makes papa so angry, and says he will not take
+orders."
+
+"I think Fred is quite right."
+
+"How can you say he is quite right, Mary?  I thought you had more sense
+of religion."
+
+"He is not fit to be a clergyman."
+
+"But he ought to be fit."--"Well, then, he is not what he ought to be.
+I know some other people who are in the same case."
+
+"But no one approves of them.  I should not like to marry a clergyman;
+but there must be clergymen."
+
+"It does not follow that Fred must be one."
+
+"But when papa has been at the expense of educating him for it!  And
+only suppose, if he should have no fortune left him?"
+
+"I can suppose that very well," said Mary, dryly.
+
+"Then I wonder you can defend Fred," said Rosamond, inclined to push
+this point.
+
+"I don't defend him," said Mary, laughing; "I would defend any parish
+from having him for a clergyman."
+
+"But of course if he were a clergyman, he must be different."
+
+"Yes, he would be a great hypocrite; and he is not that yet."
+
+"It is of no use saying anything to you, Mary.  You always take Fred's
+part."
+
+"Why should I not take his part?" said Mary, lighting up.  "He would
+take mine.  He is the only person who takes the least trouble to oblige
+me."
+
+"You make me feel very uncomfortable, Mary," said Rosamond, with her
+gravest mildness; "I would not tell mamma for the world."
+
+"What would you not tell her?" said Mary, angrily.
+
+"Pray do not go into a rage, Mary," said Rosamond, mildly as ever.
+
+"If your mamma is afraid that Fred will make me an offer, tell her that
+I would not marry him if he asked me.  But he is not going to do so,
+that I am aware.  He certainly never has asked me."
+
+"Mary, you are always so violent."
+
+"And you are always so exasperating."
+
+"I?  What can you blame me for?"
+
+"Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating.  There is the
+bell--I think we must go down."
+
+"I did not mean to quarrel," said Rosamond, putting on her hat.
+
+"Quarrel?  Nonsense; we have not quarrelled.  If one is not to get into
+a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?"
+
+"Am I to repeat what you have said?" "Just as you please.  I never say
+what I am afraid of having repeated.  But let us go down."
+
+Mr. Lydgate was rather late this morning, but the visitors stayed long
+enough to see him; for Mr. Featherstone asked Rosamond to sing to him,
+and she herself was so kind as to propose a second favorite song of
+his--"Flow on, thou shining river"--after she had sung "Home, sweet
+home" (which she detested). This hard-headed old Overreach approved of
+the sentimental song, as the suitable garnish for girls, and also as
+fundamentally fine, sentiment being the right thing for a song.
+
+Mr. Featherstone was still applauding the last performance, and
+assuring missy that her voice was as clear as a blackbird's, when Mr.
+Lydgate's horse passed the window.
+
+His dull expectation of the usual disagreeable routine with an aged
+patient--who can hardly believe that medicine would not "set him up" if
+the doctor were only clever enough--added to his general disbelief in
+Middlemarch charms, made a doubly effective background to this vision
+of Rosamond, whom old Featherstone made haste ostentatiously to
+introduce as his niece, though he had never thought it worth while to
+speak of Mary Garth in that light.  Nothing escaped Lydgate in
+Rosamond's graceful behavior: how delicately she waived the notice
+which the old man's want of taste had thrust upon her by a quiet
+gravity, not showing her dimples on the wrong occasion, but showing
+them afterwards in speaking to Mary, to whom she addressed herself with
+so much good-natured interest, that Lydgate, after quickly examining
+Mary more fully than he had done before, saw an adorable kindness in
+Rosamond's eyes.  But Mary from some cause looked rather out of temper.
+
+"Miss Rosy has been singing me a song--you've nothing to say against
+that, eh, doctor?" said Mr. Featherstone.  "I like it better than your
+physic."
+
+"That has made me forget how the time was going," said Rosamond, rising
+to reach her hat, which she had laid aside before singing, so that her
+flower-like head on its white stem was seen in perfection above-her
+riding-habit. "Fred, we must really go."
+
+"Very good," said Fred, who had his own reasons for not being in the
+best spirits, and wanted to get away.
+
+"Miss Vincy is a musician?" said Lydgate, following her with his eyes.
+(Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness
+that she was being looked at.  She was by nature an actress of parts
+that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and
+so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.)
+
+"The best in Middlemarch, I'll be bound," said Mr. Featherstone, "let
+the next be who she will.  Eh, Fred?  Speak up for your sister."
+
+"I'm afraid I'm out of court, sir.  My evidence would be good for
+nothing."
+
+"Middlemarch has not a very high standard, uncle," said Rosamond, with
+a pretty lightness, going towards her whip, which lay at a distance.
+
+Lydgate was quick in anticipating her.  He reached the whip before she
+did, and turned to present it to her.  She bowed and looked at him: he
+of course was looking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar
+meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden
+divine clearance of haze.  I think Lydgate turned a little paler than
+usual, but Rosamond blushed deeply and felt a certain astonishment.
+After that, she was really anxious to go, and did not know what sort of
+stupidity her uncle was talking of when she went to shake hands with
+him.
+
+Yet this result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called
+falling in love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand.
+Ever since that important new arrival in Middlemarch she had woven a
+little future, of which something like this scene was the necessary
+beginning.  Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly
+escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a
+circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native
+merit has urged itself in vain.  And a stranger was absolutely
+necessary to Rosamond's social romance, which had always turned on a
+lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher, and who had no
+connections at all like her own: of late, indeed, the construction
+seemed to demand that he should somehow be related to a baronet.  Now
+that she and the stranger had met, reality proved much more moving than
+anticipation, and Rosamond could not doubt that this was the great
+epoch of her life.  She judged of her own symptoms as those of
+awakening love, and she held it still more natural that Mr. Lydgate
+should have fallen in love at first sight of her.  These things
+happened so often at balls, and why not by the morning light, when the
+complexion showed all the better for it?  Rosamond, though no older
+than Mary, was rather used to being fallen in love with; but she, for
+her part, had remained indifferent and fastidiously critical towards
+both fresh sprig and faded bachelor.  And here was Mr. Lydgate suddenly
+corresponding to her ideal, being altogether foreign to Middlemarch,
+carrying a certain air of distinction congruous with good family, and
+possessing connections which offered vistas of that middle-class
+heaven, rank; a man of talent, also, whom it would be especially
+delightful to enslave: in fact, a man who had touched her nature quite
+newly, and brought a vivid interest into her life which was better than
+any fancied "might-be" such as she was in the habit of opposing to the
+actual.
+
+Thus, in riding home, both the brother and the sister were preoccupied
+and inclined to be silent.  Rosamond, whose basis for her structure had
+the usual airy slightness, was of remarkably detailed and realistic
+imagination when the foundation had been once presupposed; and before
+they had ridden a mile she was far on in the costume and introductions
+of her wedded life, having determined on her house in Middlemarch, and
+foreseen the visits she would pay to her husband's high-bred relatives
+at a distance, whose finished manners she could appropriate as
+thoroughly as she had done her school accomplishments, preparing
+herself thus for vaguer elevations which might ultimately come.  There
+was nothing financial, still less sordid, in her previsions: she cared
+about what were considered refinements, and not about the money that
+was to pay for them.
+
+Fred's mind, on the other hand, was busy with an anxiety which even his
+ready hopefulness could not immediately quell.  He saw no way of
+eluding Featherstone's stupid demand without incurring consequences
+which he liked less even than the task of fulfilling it.  His father
+was already out of humor with him, and would be still more so if he
+were the occasion of any additional coolness between his own family and
+the Bulstrodes.  Then, he himself hated having to go and speak to his
+uncle Bulstrode, and perhaps after drinking wine he had said many
+foolish things about Featherstone's property, and these had been
+magnified by report.  Fred felt that he made a wretched figure as a
+fellow who bragged about expectations from a queer old miser like
+Featherstone, and went to beg for certificates at his bidding.
+But--those expectations!  He really had them, and he saw no agreeable
+alternative if he gave them up; besides, he had lately made a debt
+which galled him extremely, and old Featherstone had almost bargained
+to pay it off.  The whole affair was miserably small: his debts were
+small, even his expectations were not anything so very magnificent.
+Fred had known men to whom he would have been ashamed of confessing the
+smallness of his scrapes.  Such ruminations naturally produced a streak
+of misanthropic bitterness.  To be born the son of a Middlemarch
+manufacturer, and inevitable heir to nothing in particular, while such
+men as Mainwaring and Vyan--certainly life was a poor business, when a
+spirited young fellow, with a good appetite for the best of everything,
+had so poor an outlook.
+
+It had not occurred to Fred that the introduction of Bulstrode's name
+in the matter was a fiction of old Featherstone's; nor could this have
+made any difference to his position.  He saw plainly enough that the
+old man wanted to exercise his power by tormenting him a little, and
+also probably to get some satisfaction out of seeing him on unpleasant
+terms with Bulstrode.  Fred fancied that he saw to the bottom of his
+uncle Featherstone's soul, though in reality half what he saw there was
+no more than the reflex of his own inclinations.  The difficult task of
+knowing another soul is not for young gentlemen whose consciousness is
+chiefly made up of their own wishes.
+
+Fred's main point of debate with himself was, whether he should tell
+his father, or try to get through the affair without his father's
+knowledge.  It was probably Mrs. Waule who had been talking about him;
+and if Mary Garth had repeated Mrs. Waule's report to Rosamond, it
+would be sure to reach his father, who would as surely question him
+about it.  He said to Rosamond, as they slackened their pace--
+
+"Rosy, did Mary tell you that Mrs. Waule had said anything about me?"
+
+"Yes, indeed, she did."
+
+"What?"
+
+"That you were very unsteady."
+
+"Was that all?"
+
+"I should think that was enough, Fred."
+
+"You are sure she said no more?"
+
+"Mary mentioned nothing else.  But really, Fred, I think you ought to
+be ashamed."
+
+"Oh, fudge!  Don't lecture me.  What did Mary say about it?"
+
+"I am not obliged to tell you.  You care so very much what Mary says,
+and you are too rude to allow me to speak."
+
+"Of course I care what Mary says.  She is the best girl I know."
+
+"I should never have thought she was a girl to fall in love with."
+
+"How do you know what men would fall in love with?  Girls never know."
+
+"At least, Fred, let me advise _you_ not to fall in love with her, for
+she says she would not marry you if you asked her."
+
+"She might have waited till I did ask her."
+
+"I knew it would nettle you, Fred."
+
+"Not at all.  She would not have said so if you had not provoked her."
+Before reaching home, Fred concluded that he would tell the whole
+affair as simply as possible to his father, who might perhaps take on
+himself the unpleasant business of speaking to Bulstrode.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II.
+
+
+
+
+OLD AND YOUNG.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII.
+
+    1st Gent. How class your man?--as better than the most,
+                 Or, seeming better, worse beneath that cloak?
+                 As saint or knave, pilgrim or hypocrite?
+    2d Gent.  Nay, tell me how you class your wealth of books
+                 The drifted relics of all time.
+                 As well sort them at once by size and livery:
+                 Vellum, tall copies, and the common calf
+                 Will hardly cover more diversity
+                 Than all your labels cunningly devised
+                 To class your unread authors.
+
+
+In consequence of what he had heard from Fred, Mr. Vincy determined to
+speak with Mr. Bulstrode in his private room at the Bank at half-past
+one, when he was usually free from other callers.  But a visitor had
+come in at one o'clock, and Mr. Bulstrode had so much to say to him,
+that there was little chance of the interview being over in half an
+hour.  The banker's speech was fluent, but it was also copious, and he
+used up an appreciable amount of time in brief meditative pauses.  Do
+not imagine his sickly aspect to have been of the yellow, black-haired
+sort: he had a pale blond skin, thin gray-besprinkled brown hair,
+light-gray eyes, and a large forehead.  Loud men called his subdued
+tone an undertone, and sometimes implied that it was inconsistent with
+openness; though there seems to be no reason why a loud man should not
+be given to concealment of anything except his own voice, unless it can
+be shown that Holy Writ has placed the seat of candor in the lungs.
+Mr. Bulstrode had also a deferential bending attitude in listening, and
+an apparently fixed attentiveness in his eyes which made those persons
+who thought themselves worth hearing infer that he was seeking the
+utmost improvement from their discourse.  Others, who expected to make
+no great figure, disliked this kind of moral lantern turned on them.
+If you are not proud of your cellar, there is no thrill of satisfaction
+in seeing your guest hold up his wine-glass to the light and look
+judicial.  Such joys are reserved for conscious merit.  Hence Mr.
+Bulstrode's close attention was not agreeable to the publicans and
+sinners in Middlemarch; it was attributed by some to his being a
+Pharisee, and by others to his being Evangelical.  Less superficial
+reasoners among them wished to know who his father and grandfather
+were, observing that five-and-twenty years ago nobody had ever heard of
+a Bulstrode in Middlemarch.  To his present visitor, Lydgate, the
+scrutinizing look was a matter of indifference: he simply formed an
+unfavorable opinion of the banker's constitution, and concluded that he
+had an eager inward life with little enjoyment of tangible things.
+
+"I shall be exceedingly obliged if you will look in on me here
+occasionally, Mr. Lydgate," the banker observed, after a brief pause.
+"If, as I dare to hope, I have the privilege of finding you a valuable
+coadjutor in the interesting matter of hospital management, there will
+be many questions which we shall need to discuss in private.  As to the
+new hospital, which is nearly finished, I shall consider what you have
+said about the advantages of the special destination for fevers.  The
+decision will rest with me, for though Lord Medlicote has given the
+land and timber for the building, he is not disposed to give his
+personal attention to the object."
+
+"There are few things better worth the pains in a provincial town like
+this," said Lydgate.  "A fine fever hospital in addition to the old
+infirmary might be the nucleus of a medical school here, when once we
+get our medical reforms; and what would do more for medical education
+than the spread of such schools over the country?  A born provincial
+man who has a grain of public spirit as well as a few ideas, should do
+what he can to resist the rush of everything that is a little better
+than common towards London.  Any valid professional aims may often find
+a freer, if not a richer field, in the provinces."
+
+One of Lydgate's gifts was a voice habitually deep and sonorous, yet
+capable of becoming very low and gentle at the right moment.  About his
+ordinary bearing there was a certain fling, a fearless expectation of
+success, a confidence in his own powers and integrity much fortified by
+contempt for petty obstacles or seductions of which he had had no
+experience.  But this proud openness was made lovable by an expression
+of unaffected good-will. Mr. Bulstrode perhaps liked him the better for
+the difference between them in pitch and manners; he certainly liked
+him the better, as Rosamond did, for being a stranger in Middlemarch.
+One can begin so many things with a new person!--even begin to be a
+better man.
+
+"I shall rejoice to furnish your zeal with fuller opportunities," Mr.
+Bulstrode answered; "I mean, by confiding to you the superintendence of
+my new hospital, should a maturer knowledge favor that issue, for I am
+determined that so great an object shall not be shackled by our two
+physicians.  Indeed, I am encouraged to consider your advent to this
+town as a gracious indication that a more manifest blessing is now to
+be awarded to my efforts, which have hitherto been much with stood.
+With regard to the old infirmary, we have gained the initial point--I
+mean your election.  And now I hope you will not shrink from incurring
+a certain amount of jealousy and dislike from your professional
+brethren by presenting yourself as a reformer."
+
+"I will not profess bravery," said Lydgate, smiling, "but I acknowledge
+a good deal of pleasure in fighting, and I should not care for my
+profession, if I did not believe that better methods were to be found
+and enforced there as well as everywhere else."
+
+"The standard of that profession is low in Middlemarch, my dear sir,"
+said the banker.  "I mean in knowledge and skill; not in social status,
+for our medical men are most of them connected with respectable
+townspeople here.  My own imperfect health has induced me to give some
+attention to those palliative resources which the divine mercy has
+placed within our reach.  I have consulted eminent men in the
+metropolis, and I am painfully aware of the backwardness under which
+medical treatment labors in our provincial districts."
+
+"Yes;--with our present medical rules and education, one must be
+satisfied now and then to meet with a fair practitioner.  As to all the
+higher questions which determine the starting-point of a diagnosis--as
+to the philosophy of medical evidence--any glimmering of these can only
+come from a scientific culture of which country practitioners have
+usually no more notion than the man in the moon."
+
+Mr. Bulstrode, bending and looking intently, found the form which
+Lydgate had given to his agreement not quite suited to his
+comprehension.  Under such circumstances a judicious man changes the
+topic and enters on ground where his own gifts may be more useful.
+
+"I am aware," he said, "that the peculiar bias of medical ability is
+towards material means.  Nevertheless, Mr. Lydgate, I hope we shall not
+vary in sentiment as to a measure in which you are not likely to be
+actively concerned, but in which your sympathetic concurrence may be an
+aid to me.  You recognize, I hope; the existence of spiritual interests
+in your patients?"
+
+"Certainly I do.  But those words are apt to cover different meanings
+to different minds."
+
+"Precisely.  And on such subjects wrong teaching is as fatal as no
+teaching.  Now a point which I have much at heart to secure is a new
+regulation as to clerical attendance at the old infirmary.  The
+building stands in Mr. Farebrother's parish.  You know Mr. Farebrother?"
+
+"I have seen him.  He gave me his vote.  I must call to thank him.  He
+seems a very bright pleasant little fellow.  And I understand he is a
+naturalist."
+
+"Mr. Farebrother, my dear sir, is a man deeply painful to contemplate.
+I suppose there is not a clergyman in this country who has greater
+talents."  Mr. Bulstrode paused and looked meditative.
+
+"I have not yet been pained by finding any excessive talent in
+Middlemarch," said Lydgate, bluntly.
+
+"What I desire," Mr. Bulstrode continued, looking still more serious,
+"is that Mr. Farebrother's attendance at the hospital should be
+superseded by the appointment of a chaplain--of Mr. Tyke, in fact--and
+that no other spiritual aid should be called in."
+
+"As a medical man I could have no opinion on such a point unless I knew
+Mr. Tyke, and even then I should require to know the cases in which he
+was applied."  Lydgate smiled, but he was bent on being circumspect.
+
+"Of course you cannot enter fully into the merits of this measure at
+present.  But"--here Mr. Bulstrode began to speak with a more chiselled
+emphasis--"the subject is likely to be referred to the medical board of
+the infirmary, and what I trust I may ask of you is, that in virtue of
+the cooperation between us which I now look forward to, you will not,
+so far as you are concerned, be influenced by my opponents in this
+matter."
+
+"I hope I shall have nothing to do with clerical disputes," said
+Lydgate.  "The path I have chosen is to work well in my own profession."
+
+"My responsibility, Mr. Lydgate, is of a broader kind.  With me,
+indeed, this question is one of sacred accountableness; whereas with my
+opponents, I have good reason to say that it is an occasion for
+gratifying a spirit of worldly opposition.  But I shall not therefore
+drop one iota of my convictions, or cease to identify myself with that
+truth which an evil generation hates.  I have devoted myself to this
+object of hospital-improvement, but I will boldly confess to you, Mr.
+Lydgate, that I should have no interest in hospitals if I believed that
+nothing more was concerned therein than the cure of mortal diseases.  I
+have another ground of action, and in the face of persecution I will
+not conceal it."
+
+Mr. Bulstrode's voice had become a loud and agitated whisper as he said
+the last words.
+
+"There we certainly differ," said Lydgate.  But he was not sorry that
+the door was now opened, and Mr. Vincy was announced.  That florid
+sociable personage was become more interesting to him since he had seen
+Rosamond.  Not that, like her, he had been weaving any future in which
+their lots were united; but a man naturally remembers a charming girl
+with pleasure, and is willing to dine where he may see her again.
+Before he took leave, Mr. Vincy had given that invitation which he had
+been "in no hurry about," for Rosamond at breakfast had mentioned that
+she thought her uncle Featherstone had taken the new doctor into great
+favor.
+
+Mr. Bulstrode, alone with his brother-in-law, poured himself out a
+glass of water, and opened a sandwich-box.
+
+"I cannot persuade you to adopt my regimen, Vincy?"
+
+"No, no; I've no opinion of that system.  Life wants padding," said Mr.
+Vincy, unable to omit his portable theory.  "However," he went on,
+accenting the word, as if to dismiss all irrelevance, "what I came here
+to talk about was a little affair of my young scapegrace, Fred's."
+
+"That is a subject on which you and I are likely to take quite as
+different views as on diet, Vincy."
+
+"I hope not this time."  (Mr. Vincy was resolved to be good-humored.)
+"The fact is, it's about a whim of old Featherstone's. Somebody has
+been cooking up a story out of spite, and telling it to the old man, to
+try to set him against Fred.  He's very fond of Fred, and is likely to
+do something handsome for him; indeed he has as good as told Fred that
+he means to leave him his land, and that makes other people jealous."
+
+"Vincy, I must repeat, that you will not get any concurrence from me as
+to the course you have pursued with your eldest son.  It was entirely
+from worldly vanity that you destined him for the Church: with a family
+of three sons and four daughters, you were not warranted in devoting
+money to an expensive education which has succeeded in nothing but in
+giving him extravagant idle habits.  You are now reaping the
+consequences."
+
+To point out other people's errors was a duty that Mr. Bulstrode rarely
+shrank from, but Mr. Vincy was not equally prepared to be patient.
+When a man has the immediate prospect of being mayor, and is ready, in
+the interests of commerce, to take up a firm attitude on politics
+generally, he has naturally a sense of his importance to the framework
+of things which seems to throw questions of private conduct into the
+background.  And this particular reproof irritated him more than any
+other.  It was eminently superfluous to him to be told that he was
+reaping the consequences.  But he felt his neck under Bulstrode's yoke;
+and though he usually enjoyed kicking, he was anxious to refrain from
+that relief.
+
+"As to that, Bulstrode, it's no use going back.  I'm not one of your
+pattern men, and I don't pretend to be.  I couldn't foresee everything
+in the trade; there wasn't a finer business in Middlemarch than ours,
+and the lad was clever.  My poor brother was in the Church, and would
+have done well--had got preferment already, but that stomach fever took
+him off: else he might have been a dean by this time.  I think I was
+justified in what I tried to do for Fred.  If you come to religion, it
+seems to me a man shouldn't want to carve out his meat to an ounce
+beforehand:--one must trust a little to Providence and be generous.
+It's a good British feeling to try and raise your family a little: in
+my opinion, it's a father's duty to give his sons a fine chance."
+
+"I don't wish to act otherwise than as your best friend, Vincy, when I
+say that what you have been uttering just now is one mass of
+worldliness and inconsistent folly."
+
+"Very well," said Mr. Vincy, kicking in spite of resolutions, "I never
+professed to be anything but worldly; and, what's more, I don't see
+anybody else who is not worldly.  I suppose you don't conduct business
+on what you call unworldly principles.  The only difference I see is
+that one worldliness is a little bit honester than another."
+
+"This kind of discussion is unfruitful, Vincy," said Mr. Bulstrode,
+who, finishing his sandwich, had thrown himself back in his chair, and
+shaded his eyes as if weary.  "You had some more particular business."
+
+"Yes, yes.  The long and short of it is, somebody has told old
+Featherstone, giving you as the authority, that Fred has been borrowing
+or trying to borrow money on the prospect of his land.  Of course you
+never said any such nonsense.  But the old fellow will insist on it
+that Fred should bring him a denial in your handwriting; that is, just
+a bit of a note saying you don't believe a word of such stuff, either
+of his having borrowed or tried to borrow in such a fool's way.  I
+suppose you can have no objection to do that."
+
+"Pardon me.  I have an objection.  I am by no means sure that your son,
+in his recklessness and ignorance--I will use no severer word--has not
+tried to raise money by holding out his future prospects, or even that
+some one may not have been foolish enough to supply him on so vague a
+presumption: there is plenty of such lax money-lending as of other
+folly in the world."
+
+"But Fred gives me his honor that he has never borrowed money on the
+pretence of any understanding about his uncle's land.  He is not a
+liar.  I don't want to make him better than he is.  I have blown him up
+well--nobody can say I wink at what he does.  But he is not a liar.
+And I should have thought--but I may be wrong--that there was no
+religion to hinder a man from believing the best of a young fellow,
+when you don't know worse.  It seems to me it would be a poor sort of
+religion to put a spoke in his wheel by refusing to say you don't
+believe such harm of him as you've got no good reason to believe."
+
+"I am not at all sure that I should be befriending your son by
+smoothing his way to the future possession of Featherstone's property.
+I cannot regard wealth as a blessing to those who use it simply as a
+harvest for this world.  You do not like to hear these things, Vincy,
+but on this occasion I feel called upon to tell you that I have no
+motive for furthering such a disposition of property as that which you
+refer to.  I do not shrink from saying that it will not tend to your
+son's eternal welfare or to the glory of God.  Why then should you
+expect me to pen this kind of affidavit, which has no object but to
+keep up a foolish partiality and secure a foolish bequest?"
+
+"If you mean to hinder everybody from having money but saints and
+evangelists, you must give up some profitable partnerships, that's all
+I can say," Mr. Vincy burst out very bluntly.  "It may be for the glory
+of God, but it is not for the glory of the Middlemarch trade, that
+Plymdale's house uses those blue and green dyes it gets from the
+Brassing manufactory; they rot the silk, that's all I know about it.
+Perhaps if other people knew so much of the profit went to the glory of
+God, they might like it better.  But I don't mind so much about that--I
+could get up a pretty row, if I chose."
+
+Mr. Bulstrode paused a little before he answered.  "You pain me very
+much by speaking in this way, Vincy.  I do not expect you to understand
+my grounds of action--it is not an easy thing even to thread a path for
+principles in the intricacies of the world--still less to make the
+thread clear for the careless and the scoffing.  You must remember, if
+you please, that I stretch my tolerance towards you as my wife's
+brother, and that it little becomes you to complain of me as
+withholding material help towards the worldly position of your family.
+I must remind you that it is not your own prudence or judgment that has
+enabled you to keep your place in the trade."
+
+"Very likely not; but you have been no loser by my trade yet," said Mr.
+Vincy, thoroughly nettled (a result which was seldom much retarded by
+previous resolutions). "And when you married Harriet, I don't see how
+you could expect that our families should not hang by the same nail.
+If you've changed your mind, and want my family to come down in the
+world, you'd better say so.  I've never changed; I'm a plain Churchman
+now, just as I used to be before doctrines came up.  I take the world
+as I find it, in trade and everything else.  I'm contented to be no
+worse than my neighbors.  But if you want us to come down in the world,
+say so.  I shall know better what to do then."
+
+"You talk unreasonably.  Shall you come down in the world for want of
+this letter about your son?"
+
+"Well, whether or not, I consider it very unhandsome of you to refuse
+it.  Such doings may be lined with religion, but outside they have a
+nasty, dog-in-the-manger look.  You might as well slander Fred: it
+comes pretty near to it when you refuse to say you didn't set a slander
+going.  It's this sort of thing--this tyrannical spirit, wanting to
+play bishop and banker everywhere--it's this sort of thing makes a
+man's name stink."
+
+"Vincy, if you insist on quarrelling with me, it will be exceedingly
+painful to Harriet as well as myself," said Mr. Bulstrode, with a
+trifle more eagerness and paleness than usual.
+
+"I don't want to quarrel.  It's for my interest--and perhaps for yours
+too--that we should be friends.  I bear you no grudge; I think no worse
+of you than I do of other people.  A man who half starves himself, and
+goes the length in family prayers, and so on, that you do, believes in
+his religion whatever it may be: you could turn over your capital just
+as fast with cursing and swearing:--plenty of fellows do.  You like to
+be master, there's no denying that; you must be first chop in heaven,
+else you won't like it much.  But you're my sister's husband, and we
+ought to stick together; and if I know Harriet, she'll consider it your
+fault if we quarrel because you strain at a gnat in this way, and
+refuse to do Fred a good turn.  And I don't mean to say I shall bear it
+well.  I consider it unhandsome."
+
+Mr. Vincy rose, began to button his great-coat, and looked steadily at
+his brother-in-law, meaning to imply a demand for a decisive answer.
+
+This was not the first time that Mr. Bulstrode had begun by admonishing
+Mr. Vincy, and had ended by seeing a very unsatisfactory reflection of
+himself in the coarse unflattering mirror which that manufacturer's
+mind presented to the subtler lights and shadows of his fellow-men; and
+perhaps his experience ought to have warned him how the scene would
+end.  But a full-fed fountain will be generous with its waters even in
+the rain, when they are worse than useless; and a fine fount of
+admonition is apt to be equally irrepressible.
+
+It was not in Mr. Bulstrode's nature to comply directly in consequence
+of uncomfortable suggestions.  Before changing his course, he always
+needed to shape his motives and bring them into accordance with his
+habitual standard.  He said, at last--
+
+"I will reflect a little, Vincy.  I will mention the subject to
+Harriet.  I shall probably send you a letter."
+
+"Very well.  As soon as you can, please.  I hope it will all be settled
+before I see you to-morrow."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV.
+
+    "Follows here the strict receipt
+     For that sauce to dainty meat,
+     Named Idleness, which many eat
+     By preference, and call it sweet:
+     First watch for morsels, like a hound
+     Mix well with buffets, stir them round
+     With good thick oil of flatteries,
+     And froth with mean self-lauding lies.
+     Serve warm: the vessels you must choose
+     To keep it in are dead men's shoes."
+
+
+Mr. Bulstrode's consultation of Harriet seemed to have had the effect
+desired by Mr. Vincy, for early the next morning a letter came which
+Fred could carry to Mr. Featherstone as the required testimony.
+
+The old gentleman was staying in bed on account of the cold weather,
+and as Mary Garth was not to be seen in the sitting-room, Fred went
+up-stairs immediately and presented the letter to his uncle, who,
+propped up comfortably on a bed-rest, was not less able than usual to
+enjoy his consciousness of wisdom in distrusting and frustrating
+mankind.  He put on his spectacles to read the letter, pursing up his
+lips and drawing down their corners.
+
+"Under the circumstances I will not decline to state my
+conviction--tchah! what fine words the fellow puts!  He's as fine as an
+auctioneer--that your son Frederic has not obtained any advance of
+money on bequests promised by Mr. Featherstone--promised? who said I
+had ever promised?  I promise nothing--I shall make codicils as long as
+I like--and that considering the nature of such a proceeding, it is
+unreasonable to presume that a young man of sense and character would
+attempt it--ah, but the gentleman doesn't say you are a young man of
+sense and character, mark you that, sir!--As to my own concern with any
+report of such a nature, I distinctly affirm that I never made any
+statement to the effect that your son had borrowed money on any
+property that might accrue to him on Mr. Featherstone's demise--bless
+my heart! 'property'--accrue--demise!  Lawyer Standish is nothing to
+him.  He couldn't speak finer if he wanted to borrow.  Well," Mr.
+Featherstone here looked over his spectacles at Fred, while he handed
+back the letter to him with a contemptuous gesture, "you don't suppose
+I believe a thing because Bulstrode writes it out fine, eh?"
+
+Fred colored.  "You wished to have the letter, sir.  I should think it
+very likely that Mr. Bulstrode's denial is as good as the authority
+which told you what he denies."
+
+"Every bit.  I never said I believed either one or the other.  And now
+what d' you expect?" said Mr. Featherstone, curtly, keeping on his
+spectacles, but withdrawing his hands under his wraps.
+
+"I expect nothing, sir."  Fred with difficulty restrained himself from
+venting his irritation.  "I came to bring you the letter.  If you like
+I will bid you good morning."
+
+"Not yet, not yet.  Ring the bell; I want missy to come."
+
+It was a servant who came in answer to the bell.
+
+"Tell missy to come!" said Mr. Featherstone, impatiently.  "What
+business had she to go away?"  He spoke in the same tone when Mary came.
+
+"Why couldn't you sit still here till I told you to go? I want my
+waistcoat now.  I told you always to put it on the bed."
+
+Mary's eyes looked rather red, as if she had been crying.  It was clear
+that Mr. Featherstone was in one of his most snappish humors this
+morning, and though Fred had now the prospect of receiving the
+much-needed present of money, he would have preferred being free to
+turn round on the old tyrant and tell him that Mary Garth was too good
+to be at his beck.  Though Fred had risen as she entered the room, she
+had barely noticed him, and looked as if her nerves were quivering with
+the expectation that something would be thrown at her.  But she never
+had anything worse than words to dread.  When she went to reach the
+waistcoat from a peg, Fred went up to her and said, "Allow me."
+
+"Let it alone!  You bring it, missy, and lay it down here," said Mr.
+Featherstone.  "Now you go away again till I call you," he added, when
+the waistcoat was laid down by him.  It was usual with him to season
+his pleasure in showing favor to one person by being especially
+disagreeable to another, and Mary was always at hand to furnish the
+condiment.  When his own relatives came she was treated better.  Slowly
+he took out a bunch of keys from the waistcoat pocket, and slowly he
+drew forth a tin box which was under the bed-clothes.
+
+"You expect I am going to give you a little fortune, eh?" he said,
+looking above his spectacles and pausing in the act of opening the lid.
+
+"Not at all, sir.  You were good enough to speak of making me a present
+the other day, else, of course, I should not have thought of the
+matter."  But Fred was of a hopeful disposition, and a vision had
+presented itself of a sum just large enough to deliver him from a
+certain anxiety.  When Fred got into debt, it always seemed to him
+highly probable that something or other--he did not necessarily
+conceive what--would come to pass enabling him to pay in due time.  And
+now that the providential occurrence was apparently close at hand, it
+would have been sheer absurdity to think that the supply would be short
+of the need: as absurd as a faith that believed in half a miracle for
+want of strength to believe in a whole one.
+
+The deep-veined hands fingered many bank-notes-one after the other,
+laying them down flat again, while Fred leaned back in his chair,
+scorning to look eager.  He held himself to be a gentleman at heart,
+and did not like courting an old fellow for his money.  At last, Mr.
+Featherstone eyed him again over his spectacles and presented him with
+a little sheaf of notes: Fred could see distinctly that there were but
+five, as the less significant edges gaped towards him.  But then, each
+might mean fifty pounds.  He took them, saying--
+
+"I am very much obliged to you, sir," and was going to roll them up
+without seeming to think of their value.  But this did not suit Mr.
+Featherstone, who was eying him intently.
+
+"Come, don't you think it worth your while to count 'em?  You take
+money like a lord; I suppose you lose it like one."
+
+"I thought I was not to look a gift-horse in the mouth, sir.  But I
+shall be very happy to count them."
+
+Fred was not so happy, however, after he had counted them.  For they
+actually presented the absurdity of being less than his hopefulness had
+decided that they must be.  What can the fitness of things mean, if not
+their fitness to a man's expectations?  Failing this, absurdity and
+atheism gape behind him.  The collapse for Fred was severe when he
+found that he held no more than five twenties, and his share in the
+higher education of this country did not seem to help him.
+Nevertheless he said, with rapid changes in his fair complexion--
+
+"It is very handsome of you, sir."
+
+"I should think it is," said Mr. Featherstone, locking his box and
+replacing it, then taking off his spectacles deliberately, and at
+length, as if his inward meditation had more deeply convinced him,
+repeating, "I should think it handsome."
+
+"I assure you, sir, I am very grateful," said Fred, who had had time to
+recover his cheerful air.
+
+"So you ought to be.  You want to cut a figure in the world, and I
+reckon Peter Featherstone is the only one you've got to trust to." Here
+the old man's eyes gleamed with a curiously mingled satisfaction in the
+consciousness that this smart young fellow relied upon him, and that
+the smart young fellow was rather a fool for doing so.
+
+"Yes, indeed: I was not born to very splendid chances.  Few men have
+been more cramped than I have been," said Fred, with some sense of
+surprise at his own virtue, considering how hardly he was dealt with.
+"It really seems a little too bad to have to ride a broken-winded
+hunter, and see men, who, are not half such good judges as yourself,
+able to throw away any amount of money on buying bad bargains."
+
+"Well, you can buy yourself a fine hunter now.  Eighty pound is enough
+for that, I reckon--and you'll have twenty pound over to get yourself
+out of any little scrape," said Mr. Featherstone, chuckling slightly.
+
+"You are very good, sir," said Fred, with a fine sense of contrast
+between the words and his feeling.
+
+"Ay, rather a better uncle than your fine uncle Bulstrode.  You won't
+get much out of his spekilations, I think.  He's got a pretty strong
+string round your father's leg, by what I hear, eh?"
+
+"My father never tells me anything about his affairs, sir."
+
+"Well, he shows some sense there.  But other people find 'em out
+without his telling.  _He'll_ never have much to leave you: he'll
+most-like die without a will--he's the sort of man to do it--let 'em
+make him mayor of Middlemarch as much as they like.  But you won't get
+much by his dying without a will, though you _are_ the eldest son."
+
+Fred thought that Mr. Featherstone had never been so disagreeable
+before.  True, he had never before given him quite so much money at
+once.
+
+"Shall I destroy this letter of Mr. Bulstrode's, sir?" said Fred,
+rising with the letter as if he would put it in the fire.
+
+"Ay, ay, I don't want it.  It's worth no money to me."
+
+Fred carried the letter to the fire, and thrust the poker through it
+with much zest.  He longed to get out of the room, but he was a little
+ashamed before his inner self, as well as before his uncle, to run away
+immediately after pocketing the money.  Presently, the farm-bailiff
+came up to give his master a report, and Fred, to his unspeakable
+relief, was dismissed with the injunction to come again soon.
+
+He had longed not only to be set free from his uncle, but also to find
+Mary Garth.  She was now in her usual place by the fire, with sewing in
+her hands and a book open on the little table by her side.  Her eyelids
+had lost some of their redness now, and she had her usual air of
+self-command.
+
+"Am I wanted up-stairs?" she said, half rising as Fred entered.
+
+"No; I am only dismissed, because Simmons is gone up."
+
+Mary sat down again, and resumed her work.  She was certainly treating
+him with more indifference than usual: she did not know how
+affectionately indignant he had felt on her behalf up-stairs.
+
+"May I stay here a little, Mary, or shall I bore you?"
+
+"Pray sit down," said Mary; "you will not be so heavy a bore as Mr.
+John Waule, who was here yesterday, and he sat down without asking my
+leave."
+
+"Poor fellow!  I think he is in love with you."
+
+"I am not aware of it.  And to me it is one of the most odious things
+in a girl's life, that there must always be some supposition of falling
+in love coming between her and any man who is kind to her, and to whom
+she is grateful.  I should have thought that I, at least, might have
+been safe from all that.  I have no ground for the nonsensical vanity
+of fancying everybody who comes near me is in love with me."
+
+Mary did not mean to betray any feeling, but in spite of herself she
+ended in a tremulous tone of vexation.
+
+"Confound John Waule!  I did not mean to make you angry.  I didn't know
+you had any reason for being grateful to me.  I forgot what a great
+service you think it if any one snuffs a candle for you."  Fred also had
+his pride, and was not going to show that he knew what had called forth
+this outburst of Mary's.
+
+"Oh, I am not angry, except with the ways of the world.  I do like to
+be spoken to as if I had common-sense. I really often feel as if I
+could understand a little more than I ever hear even from young
+gentlemen who have been to college."  Mary had recovered, and she spoke
+with a suppressed rippling under-current of laughter pleasant to hear.
+
+"I don't care how merry you are at my expense this morning," said Fred,
+"I thought you looked so sad when you came up-stairs. It is a shame you
+should stay here to be bullied in that way."
+
+"Oh, I have an easy life--by comparison.  I have tried being a teacher,
+and I am not fit for that: my mind is too fond of wandering on its own
+way.  I think any hardship is better than pretending to do what one is
+paid for, and never really doing it.  Everything here I can do as well
+as any one else could; perhaps better than some--Rosy, for example.
+Though she is just the sort of beautiful creature that is imprisoned
+with ogres in fairy tales."
+
+"_Rosy!_" cried Fred, in a tone of profound brotherly scepticism.
+
+"Come, Fred!" said Mary, emphatically; "you have no right to be so
+critical."
+
+"Do you mean anything particular--just now?"
+
+"No, I mean something general--always."
+
+"Oh, that I am idle and extravagant.  Well, I am not fit to be a poor
+man.  I should not have made a bad fellow if I had been rich."
+
+"You would have done your duty in that state of life to which it has
+not pleased God to call you," said Mary, laughing.
+
+"Well, I couldn't do my duty as a clergyman, any more than you could do
+yours as a governess.  You ought to have a little fellow-feeling there,
+Mary."
+
+"I never said you ought to be a clergyman.  There are other sorts of
+work.  It seems to me very miserable not to resolve on some course and
+act accordingly."
+
+"So I could, if--" Fred broke off, and stood up, leaning against the
+mantel-piece.
+
+"If you were sure you should not have a fortune?"
+
+"I did not say that.  You want to quarrel with me.  It is too bad of
+you to be guided by what other people say about me."
+
+"How can I want to quarrel with you?  I should be quarrelling with all
+my new books," said Mary, lifting the volume on the table.  "However
+naughty you may be to other people, you are good to me."
+
+"Because I like you better than any one else.  But I know you despise
+me."
+
+"Yes, I do--a little," said Mary, nodding, with a smile.
+
+"You would admire a stupendous fellow, who would have wise opinions
+about everything."
+
+"Yes, I should."  Mary was sewing swiftly, and seemed provokingly
+mistress of the situation.  When a conversation has taken a wrong turn
+for us, we only get farther and farther into the swamp of awkwardness.
+This was what Fred Vincy felt.
+
+"I suppose a woman is never in love with any one she has always
+known--ever since she can remember; as a man often is.  It is always
+some new fellow who strikes a girl."
+
+"Let me see," said Mary, the corners of her mouth curling archly; "I
+must go back on my experience.  There is Juliet--she seems an example
+of what you say.  But then Ophelia had probably known Hamlet a long
+while; and Brenda Troil--she had known Mordaunt Merton ever since they
+were children; but then he seems to have been an estimable young man;
+and Minna was still more deeply in love with Cleveland, who was a
+stranger.  Waverley was new to Flora MacIvor; but then she did not fall
+in love with him.  And there are Olivia and Sophia Primrose, and
+Corinne--they may be said to have fallen in love with new men.
+Altogether, my experience is rather mixed."
+
+Mary looked up with some roguishness at Fred, and that look of hers was
+very dear to him, though the eyes were nothing more than clear windows
+where observation sat laughingly.  He was certainly an affectionate
+fellow, and as he had grown from boy to man, he had grown in love with
+his old playmate, notwithstanding that share in the higher education of
+the country which had exalted his views of rank and income.
+
+"When a man is not loved, it is no use for him to say that he could be
+a better fellow--could do anything--I mean, if he were sure of being
+loved in return."
+
+"Not of the least use in the world for him to say he _could_ be better.
+Might, could, would--they are contemptible auxiliaries."
+
+"I don't see how a man is to be good for much unless he has some one
+woman to love him dearly."
+
+"I think the goodness should come before he expects that."
+
+"You know better, Mary.  Women don't love men for their goodness."
+
+"Perhaps not.  But if they love them, they never think them bad."
+
+"It is hardly fair to say I am bad."
+
+"I said nothing at all about you."
+
+"I never shall be good for anything, Mary, if you will not say that you
+love me--if you will not promise to marry me--I mean, when I am able to
+marry."
+
+"If I did love you, I would not marry you: I would certainly not
+promise ever to marry you."
+
+"I think that is quite wicked, Mary.  If you love me, you ought to
+promise to marry me."
+
+"On the contrary, I think it would be wicked in me to marry you even if
+I did love you."
+
+"You mean, just as I am, without any means of maintaining a wife.  Of
+course: I am but three-and-twenty."
+
+"In that last point you will alter.  But I am not so sure of any other
+alteration.  My father says an idle man ought not to exist, much less,
+be married."
+
+"Then I am to blow my brains out?"
+
+"No; on the whole I should think you would do better to pass your
+examination.  I have heard Mr. Farebrother say it is disgracefully
+easy."
+
+"That is all very fine.  Anything is easy to him.  Not that cleverness
+has anything to do with it.  I am ten times cleverer than many men who
+pass."
+
+"Dear me!" said Mary, unable to repress her sarcasm; "that accounts for
+the curates like Mr. Crowse.  Divide your cleverness by ten, and the
+quotient--dear me!--is able to take a degree.  But that only shows you
+are ten times more idle than the others."
+
+"Well, if I did pass, you would not want me to go into the Church?"
+
+"That is not the question--what I want you to do.  You have a
+conscience of your own, I suppose.  There! there is Mr. Lydgate.  I
+must go and tell my uncle."
+
+"Mary," said Fred, seizing her hand as she rose; "if you will not give
+me some encouragement, I shall get worse instead of better."
+
+"I will not give you any encouragement," said Mary, reddening.  "Your
+friends would dislike it, and so would mine.  My father would think it
+a disgrace to me if I accepted a man who got into debt, and would not
+work!"
+
+Fred was stung, and released her hand.  She walked to the door, but
+there she turned and said: "Fred, you have always been so good, so
+generous to me.  I am not ungrateful.  But never speak to me in that
+way again."
+
+"Very well," said Fred, sulkily, taking up his hat and whip.  His
+complexion showed patches of pale pink and dead white.  Like many a
+plucked idle young gentleman, he was thoroughly in love, and with a
+plain girl, who had no money!  But having Mr. Featherstone's land in
+the background, and a persuasion that, let Mary say what she would, she
+really did care for him, Fred was not utterly in despair.
+
+When he got home, he gave four of the twenties to his mother, asking
+her to keep them for him.  "I don't want to spend that money, mother.
+I want it to pay a debt with.  So keep it safe away from my fingers."
+
+"Bless you, my dear," said Mrs. Vincy.  She doted on her eldest son and
+her youngest girl (a child of six), whom others thought her two
+naughtiest children.  The mother's eyes are not always deceived in
+their partiality: she at least can best judge who is the tender,
+filial-hearted child.  And Fred was certainly very fond of his mother.
+Perhaps it was his fondness for another person also that made him
+particularly anxious to take some security against his own liability to
+spend the hundred pounds.  For the creditor to whom he owed a hundred
+and sixty held a firmer security in the shape of a bill signed by
+Mary's father.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV.
+
+    "Black eyes you have left, you say,
+     Blue eyes fail to draw you;
+     Yet you seem more rapt to-day,
+     Than of old we saw you.
+
+    "Oh, I track the fairest fair
+     Through new haunts of pleasure;
+     Footprints here and echoes there
+     Guide me to my treasure:
+
+    "Lo! she turns--immortal youth
+     Wrought to mortal stature,
+     Fresh as starlight's aged truth--
+     Many-named Nature!"
+
+
+A great historian, as he insisted on calling himself, who had the
+happiness to be dead a hundred and twenty years ago, and so to take his
+place among the colossi whose huge legs our living pettiness is
+observed to walk under, glories in his copious remarks and digressions
+as the least imitable part of his work, and especially in those initial
+chapters to the successive books of his history, where he seems to
+bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty
+ease of his fine English.  But Fielding lived when the days were longer
+(for time, like money, is measured by our needs), when summer
+afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter
+evenings.  We belated historians must not linger after his example; and
+if we did so, it is probable that our chat would be thin and eager, as
+if delivered from a campstool in a parrot-house.  I at least have so
+much to do in unraveling certain human lots, and seeing how they were
+woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be
+concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that
+tempting range of relevancies called the universe.
+
+At present I have to make the new settler Lydgate better known to any
+one interested in him than he could possibly be even to those who had
+seen the most of him since his arrival in Middlemarch.  For surely all
+must admit that a man may be puffed and belauded, envied, ridiculed,
+counted upon as a tool and fallen in love with, or at least selected as
+a future husband, and yet remain virtually unknown--known merely as a
+cluster of signs for his neighbors' false suppositions.  There was a
+general impression, however, that Lydgate was not altogether a common
+country doctor, and in Middlemarch at that time such an impression was
+significant of great things being expected from him.  For everybody's
+family doctor was remarkably clever, and was understood to have
+immeasurable skill in the management and training of the most skittish
+or vicious diseases.  The evidence of his cleverness was of the higher
+intuitive order, lying in his lady-patients' immovable conviction, and
+was unassailable by any objection except that their intuitions were
+opposed by others equally strong; each lady who saw medical truth in
+Wrench and "the strengthening treatment" regarding Toller and "the
+lowering system" as medical perdition.  For the heroic times of copious
+bleeding and blistering had not yet departed, still less the times of
+thorough-going theory, when disease in general was called by some bad
+name, and treated accordingly without shilly-shally--as if, for
+example, it were to be called insurrection, which must not be fired on
+with blank-cartridge, but have its blood drawn at once.  The
+strengtheners and the lowerers were all "clever" men in somebody's
+opinion, which is really as much as can be said for any living talents.
+Nobody's imagination had gone so far as to conjecture that Mr. Lydgate
+could know as much as Dr. Sprague and Dr. Minchin, the two physicians,
+who alone could offer any hope when danger was extreme, and when the
+smallest hope was worth a guinea.  Still, I repeat, there was a general
+impression that Lydgate was something rather more uncommon than any
+general practitioner in Middlemarch.  And this was true.  He was but
+seven-and-twenty, an age at which many men are not quite common--at
+which they are hopeful of achievement, resolute in avoidance, thinking
+that Mammon shall never put a bit in their mouths and get astride their
+backs, but rather that Mammon, if they have anything to do with him,
+shall draw their chariot.
+
+He had been left an orphan when he was fresh from a public school.  His
+father, a military man, had made but little provision for three
+children, and when the boy Tertius asked to have a medical education,
+it seemed easier to his guardians to grant his request by apprenticing
+him to a country practitioner than to make any objections on the score
+of family dignity.  He was one of the rarer lads who early get a
+decided bent and make up their minds that there is something particular
+in life which they would like to do for its own sake, and not because
+their fathers did it.  Most of us who turn to any subject with love
+remember some morning or evening hour when we got on a high stool to
+reach down an untried volume, or sat with parted lips listening to a
+new talker, or for very lack of books began to listen to the voices
+within, as the first traceable beginning of our love.  Something of
+that sort happened to Lydgate.  He was a quick fellow, and when hot
+from play, would toss himself in a corner, and in five minutes be deep
+in any sort of book that he could lay his hands on: if it were Rasselas
+or Gulliver, so much the better, but Bailey's Dictionary would do, or
+the Bible with the Apocrypha in it.  Something he must read, when he
+was not riding the pony, or running and hunting, or listening to the
+talk of men.  All this was true of him at ten years of age; he had then
+read through "Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea," which was
+neither milk for babes, nor any chalky mixture meant to pass for milk,
+and it had already occurred to him that books were stuff, and that life
+was stupid.  His school studies had not much modified that opinion, for
+though he "did" his classics and mathematics, he was not pre-eminent in
+them.  It was said of him, that Lydgate could do anything he liked, but
+he had certainly not yet liked to do anything remarkable.  He was a
+vigorous animal with a ready understanding, but no spark had yet
+kindled in him an intellectual passion; knowledge seemed to him a very
+superficial affair, easily mastered: judging from the conversation of
+his elders, he had apparently got already more than was necessary for
+mature life.  Probably this was not an exceptional result of expensive
+teaching at that period of short-waisted coats, and other fashions
+which have not yet recurred.  But, one vacation, a wet day sent him to
+the small home library to hunt once more for a book which might have
+some freshness for him: in vain! unless, indeed, he took down a dusty
+row of volumes with gray-paper backs and dingy labels--the volumes of
+an old Cyclopaedia which he had never disturbed.  It would at least be
+a novelty to disturb them.  They were on the highest shelf, and he
+stood on a chair to get them down.  But he opened the volume which he
+first took from the shelf: somehow, one is apt to read in a makeshift
+attitude, just where it might seem inconvenient to do so.  The page he
+opened on was under the head of Anatomy, and the first passage that
+drew his eyes was on the valves of the heart.  He was not much
+acquainted with valves of any sort, but he knew that valvae were
+folding-doors, and through this crevice came a sudden light startling
+him with his first vivid notion of finely adjusted mechanism in the
+human frame.  A liberal education had of course left him free to read
+the indecent passages in the school classics, but beyond a general
+sense of secrecy and obscenity in connection with his internal
+structure, had left his imagination quite unbiassed, so that for
+anything he knew his brains lay in small bags at his temples, and he
+had no more thought of representing to himself how his blood circulated
+than how paper served instead of gold.  But the moment of vocation had
+come, and before he got down from his chair, the world was made new to
+him by a presentiment of endless processes filling the vast spaces
+planked out of his sight by that wordy ignorance which he had supposed
+to be knowledge.  From that hour Lydgate felt the growth of an
+intellectual passion.
+
+We are not afraid of telling over and over again how a man comes to
+fall in love with a woman and be wedded to her, or else be fatally
+parted from her.  Is it due to excess of poetry or of stupidity that we
+are never weary of describing what King James called a woman's "makdom
+and her fairnesse," never weary of listening to the twanging of the old
+Troubadour strings, and are comparatively uninterested in that other
+kind of "makdom and fairnesse" which must be wooed with industrious
+thought and patient renunciation of small desires?  In the story of
+this passion, too, the development varies: sometimes it is the glorious
+marriage, sometimes frustration and final parting.  And not seldom the
+catastrophe is bound up with the other passion, sung by the
+Troubadours.  For in the multitude of middle-aged men who go about
+their vocations in a daily course determined for them much in the same
+way as the tie of their cravats, there is always a good number who once
+meant to shape their own deeds and alter the world a little.  The story
+of their coming to be shapen after the average and fit to be packed by
+the gross, is hardly ever told even in their consciousness; for perhaps
+their ardor in generous unpaid toil cooled as imperceptibly as the
+ardor of other youthful loves, till one day their earlier self walked
+like a ghost in its old home and made the new furniture ghastly.
+Nothing in the world more subtle than the process of their gradual
+change!  In the beginning they inhaled it unknowingly: you and I may
+have sent some of our breath towards infecting them, when we uttered
+our conforming falsities or drew our silly conclusions: or perhaps it
+came with the vibrations from a woman's glance.
+
+Lydgate did not mean to be one of those failures, and there was the
+better hope of him because his scientific interest soon took the form
+of a professional enthusiasm: he had a youthful belief in his
+bread-winning work, not to be stifled by that initiation in makeshift
+called his 'prentice days; and he carried to his studies in London,
+Edinburgh, and Paris, the conviction that the medical profession as it
+might be was the finest in the world; presenting the most perfect
+interchange between science and art; offering the most direct alliance
+between intellectual conquest and the social good.  Lydgate's nature
+demanded this combination: he was an emotional creature, with a
+flesh-and-blood sense of fellowship which withstood all the
+abstractions of special study.  He cared not only for "cases," but for
+John and Elizabeth, especially Elizabeth.
+
+There was another attraction in his profession: it wanted reform, and
+gave a man an opportunity for some indignant resolve to reject its
+venal decorations and other humbug, and to be the possessor of genuine
+though undemanded qualifications.  He went to study in Paris with the
+determination that when he came home again he would settle in some
+provincial town as a general practitioner, and resist the
+irrational severance between medical and surgical knowledge in the
+interest of his own scientific pursuits, as well as of the general
+advance: he would keep away from the range of London intrigues,
+jealousies, and social truckling, and win celebrity, however slowly, as
+Jenner had done, by the independent value of his work.  For it must be
+remembered that this was a dark period; and in spite of venerable
+colleges which used great efforts to secure purity of knowledge by
+making it scarce, and to exclude error by a rigid exclusiveness in
+relation to fees and appointments, it happened that very ignorant young
+gentlemen were promoted in town, and many more got a legal right to
+practise over large areas in the country.  Also, the high standard held
+up to the public mind by the College of Physicians, which gave its peculiar
+sanction to the expensive and highly rarefied medical instruction
+obtained by graduates of Oxford and Cambridge, did not hinder quackery
+from having an excellent time of it; for since professional practice
+chiefly consisted in giving a great many drugs, the public inferred
+that it might be better off with more drugs still, if they could only
+be got cheaply, and hence swallowed large cubic measures of physic
+prescribed by unscrupulous ignorance which had taken no degrees.
+Considering that statistics had not yet embraced a calculation as to
+the number of ignorant or canting doctors which absolutely must exist
+in the teeth of all changes, it seemed to Lydgate that a change in the
+units was the most direct mode of changing the numbers.  He meant to be
+a unit who would make a certain amount of difference towards that
+spreading change which would one day tell appreciably upon the
+averages, and in the mean time have the pleasure of making an
+advantageous difference to the viscera of his own patients.  But he did
+not simply aim at a more genuine kind of practice than was common.  He
+was ambitious of a wider effect: he was fired with the possibility that
+he might work out the proof of an anatomical conception and make a link
+in the chain of discovery.
+
+Does it seem incongruous to you that a Middlemarch surgeon should dream
+of himself as a discoverer?  Most of us, indeed, know little of the
+great originators until they have been lifted up among the
+constellations and already rule our fates.  But that Herschel, for
+example, who "broke the barriers of the heavens"--did he not once play
+a provincial church-organ, and give music-lessons to stumbling
+pianists?  Each of those Shining Ones had to walk on the earth among
+neighbors who perhaps thought much more of his gait and his garments
+than of anything which was to give him a title to everlasting fame:
+each of them had his little local personal history sprinkled with small
+temptations and sordid cares, which made the retarding friction of his
+course towards final companionship with the immortals.  Lydgate was not
+blind to the dangers of such friction, but he had plenty of confidence
+in his resolution to avoid it as far as possible: being
+seven-and-twenty, he felt himself experienced.  And he was not going to
+have his vanities provoked by contact with the showy worldly successes
+of the capital, but to live among people who could hold no rivalry with
+that pursuit of a great idea which was to be a twin object with the
+assiduous practice of his profession.  There was fascination in the
+hope that the two purposes would illuminate each other: the careful
+observation and inference which was his daily work, the use of the lens
+to further his judgment in special cases, would further his thought as
+an instrument of larger inquiry.  Was not this the typical pre-eminence
+of his profession?  He would be a good Middlemarch doctor, and by that
+very means keep himself in the track of far-reaching investigation.  On
+one point he may fairly claim approval at this particular stage of his
+career: he did not mean to imitate those philanthropic models who make
+a profit out of poisonous pickles to support themselves while they are
+exposing adulteration, or hold shares in a gambling-hell that they may
+have leisure to represent the cause of public morality.  He intended to
+begin in his own case some particular reforms which were quite
+certainly within his reach, and much less of a problem than the
+demonstrating of an anatomical conception.  One of these reforms was to
+act stoutly on the strength of a recent legal decision, and simply
+prescribe, without dispensing drugs or taking percentage from
+druggists.  This was an innovation for one who had chosen to adopt the
+style of general practitioner in a country town, and would be felt as
+offensive criticism by his professional brethren.  But Lydgate meant to
+innovate in his treatment also, and he was wise enough to see that the
+best security for his practising honestly according to his belief was
+to get rid of systematic temptations to the contrary.
+
+Perhaps that was a more cheerful time for observers and theorizers than
+the present; we are apt to think it the finest era of the world when
+America was beginning to be discovered, when a bold sailor, even if he
+were wrecked, might alight on a new kingdom; and about 1829 the dark
+territories of Pathology were a fine America for a spirited young
+adventurer.  Lydgate was ambitious above all to contribute towards
+enlarging the scientific, rational basis of his profession.  The more
+he became interested in special questions of disease, such as the
+nature of fever or fevers, the more keenly he felt the need for that
+fundamental knowledge of structure which just at the beginning of the
+century had been illuminated by the brief and glorious career of
+Bichat, who died when he was only one-and-thirty, but, like another
+Alexander, left a realm large enough for many heirs.  That great
+Frenchman first carried out the conception that living bodies,
+fundamentally considered, are not associations of organs which can be
+understood by studying them first apart, and then as it were federally;
+but must be regarded as consisting of certain primary webs or tissues,
+out of which the various organs--brain, heart, lungs, and so on--are
+compacted, as the various accommodations of a house are built up in
+various proportions of wood, iron, stone, brick, zinc, and the rest,
+each material having its peculiar composition and proportions.  No man,
+one sees, can understand and estimate the entire structure or its
+parts--what are its frailties and what its repairs, without knowing the
+nature of the materials.  And the conception wrought out by Bichat,
+with his detailed study of the different tissues, acted necessarily on
+medical questions as the turning of gas-light would act on a dim,
+oil-lit street, showing new connections and hitherto hidden facts of
+structure which must be taken into account in considering the symptoms
+of maladies and the action of medicaments.  But results which depend on
+human conscience and intelligence work slowly, and now at the end of
+1829, most medical practice was still strutting or shambling along the
+old paths, and there was still scientific work to be done which might
+have seemed to be a direct sequence of Bichat's. This great seer did
+not go beyond the consideration of the tissues as ultimate facts in the
+living organism, marking the limit of anatomical analysis; but it was
+open to another mind to say, have not these structures some common
+basis from which they have all started, as your sarsnet, gauze, net,
+satin, and velvet from the raw cocoon?  Here would be another light, as
+of oxy-hydrogen, showing the very grain of things, and revising all
+former explanations.  Of this sequence to Bichat's work, already
+vibrating along many currents of the European mind, Lydgate was
+enamoured; he longed to demonstrate the more intimate relations of
+living structure, and help to define men's thought more accurately
+after the true order.  The work had not yet been done, but only
+prepared for those who knew how to use the preparation.  What was the
+primitive tissue?  In that way Lydgate put the question--not quite in
+the way required by the awaiting answer; but such missing of the right
+word befalls many seekers.  And he counted on quiet intervals to be
+watchfully seized, for taking up the threads of investigation--on many
+hints to be won from diligent application, not only of the scalpel, but
+of the microscope, which research had begun to use again with new
+enthusiasm of reliance.  Such was Lydgate's plan of his future: to do
+good small work for Middlemarch, and great work for the world.
+
+He was certainly a happy fellow at this time: to be seven-and-twenty,
+without any fixed vices, with a generous resolution that his action
+should be beneficent, and with ideas in his brain that made life
+interesting quite apart from the cultus of horseflesh and other mystic
+rites of costly observance, which the eight hundred pounds left him
+after buying his practice would certainly not have gone far in paying
+for.  He was at a starting-point which makes many a man's career a fine
+subject for betting, if there were any gentlemen given to that
+amusement who could appreciate the complicated probabilities of an
+arduous purpose, with all the possible thwartings and furtherings of
+circumstance, all the niceties of inward balance, by which a man swims
+and makes his point or else is carried headlong.  The risk would remain
+even with close knowledge of Lydgate's character; for character too is
+a process and an unfolding.  The man was still in the making, as much
+as the Middlemarch doctor and immortal discoverer, and there were both
+virtues and faults capable of shrinking or expanding.  The faults will
+not, I hope, be a reason for the withdrawal of your interest in him.
+Among our valued friends is there not some one or other who is a little
+too self-confident and disdainful; whose distinguished mind is a little
+spotted with commonness; who is a little pinched here and protuberant
+there with native prejudices; or whose better energies are liable to
+lapse down the wrong channel under the influence of transient
+solicitations?  All these things might be alleged against Lydgate, but
+then, they are the periphrases of a polite preacher, who talks of Adam,
+and would not like to mention anything painful to the pew-renters.  The
+particular faults from which these delicate generalities are distilled
+have distinguishable physiognomies, diction, accent, and grimaces;
+filling up parts in very various dramas.  Our vanities differ as our
+noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in
+correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us
+differs from another.  Lydgate's conceit was of the arrogant sort,
+never simpering, never impertinent, but massive in its claims and
+benevolently contemptuous.  He would do a great deal for noodles, being
+sorry for them, and feeling quite sure that they could have no power
+over him: he had thought of joining the Saint Simonians when he was in
+Paris, in order to turn them against some of their own doctrines.  All
+his faults were marked by kindred traits, and were those of a man who
+had a fine baritone, whose clothes hung well upon him, and who even in
+his ordinary gestures had an air of inbred distinction.  Where then lay
+the spots of commonness? says a young lady enamoured of that careless
+grace.  How could there be any commonness in a man so well-bred, so
+ambitious of social distinction, so generous and unusual in his views
+of social duty?  As easily as there may be stupidity in a man of genius
+if you take him unawares on the wrong subject, or as many a man who has
+the best will to advance the social millennium might be ill-inspired in
+imagining its lighter pleasures; unable to go beyond Offenbach's music,
+or the brilliant punning in the last burlesque.  Lydgate's spots of
+commonness lay in the complexion of his prejudices, which, in spite of
+noble intention and sympathy, were half of them such as are found in
+ordinary men of the world: that distinction of mind which belonged to
+his intellectual ardor, did not penetrate his feeling and judgment
+about furniture, or women, or the desirability of its being known
+(without his telling) that he was better born than other country
+surgeons.  He did not mean to think of furniture at present; but
+whenever he did so it was to be feared that neither biology nor schemes
+of reform would lift him above the vulgarity of feeling that there
+would be an incompatibility in his furniture not being of the best.
+
+As to women, he had once already been drawn headlong by impetuous
+folly, which he meant to be final, since marriage at some distant
+period would of course not be impetuous.  For those who want to be
+acquainted with Lydgate it will be good to know what was that case of
+impetuous folly, for it may stand as an example of the fitful swerving
+of passion to which he was prone, together with the chivalrous kindness
+which helped to make him morally lovable.  The story can be told
+without many words.  It happened when he was studying in Paris, and
+just at the time when, over and above his other work, he was occupied
+with some galvanic experiments.  One evening, tired with his
+experimenting, and not being able to elicit the facts he needed, he
+left his frogs and rabbits to some repose under their trying and
+mysterious dispensation of unexplained shocks, and went to finish his
+evening at the theatre of the Porte Saint Martin, where there was a
+melodrama which he had already seen several times; attracted, not by
+the ingenious work of the collaborating authors, but by an actress
+whose part it was to stab her lover, mistaking him for the
+evil-designing duke of the piece.  Lydgate was in love with this
+actress, as a man is in love with a woman whom he never expects to
+speak to.  She was a Provencale, with dark eyes, a Greek profile, and
+rounded majestic form, having that sort of beauty which carries a sweet
+matronliness even in youth, and her voice was a soft cooing.  She had
+but lately come to Paris, and bore a virtuous reputation, her husband
+acting with her as the unfortunate lover.  It was her acting which was
+"no better than it should be," but the public was satisfied.  Lydgate's
+only relaxation now was to go and look at this woman, just as he might
+have thrown himself under the breath of the sweet south on a bank of
+violets for a while, without prejudice to his galvanism, to which he
+would presently return.  But this evening the old drama had a new
+catastrophe.  At the moment when the heroine was to act the stabbing of
+her lover, and he was to fall gracefully, the wife veritably stabbed
+her husband, who fell as death willed.  A wild shriek pierced the
+house, and the Provencale fell swooning: a shriek and a swoon were
+demanded by the play, but the swooning too was real this time.  Lydgate
+leaped and climbed, he hardly knew how, on to the stage, and was active
+in help, making the acquaintance of his heroine by finding a contusion
+on her head and lifting her gently in his arms.  Paris rang with the
+story of this death:--was it a murder?  Some of the actress's warmest
+admirers were inclined to believe in her guilt, and liked her the
+better for it (such was the taste of those times); but Lydgate was not
+one of these.  He vehemently contended for her innocence, and the
+remote impersonal passion for her beauty which he had felt before, had
+passed now into personal devotion, and tender thought of her lot.  The
+notion of murder was absurd: no motive was discoverable, the young
+couple being understood to dote on each other; and it was not
+unprecedented that an accidental slip of the foot should have brought
+these grave consequences.  The legal investigation ended in Madame
+Laure's release.  Lydgate by this time had had many interviews with
+her, and found her more and more adorable.  She talked little; but that
+was an additional charm.  She was melancholy, and seemed grateful; her
+presence was enough, like that of the evening light.  Lydgate was madly
+anxious about her affection, and jealous lest any other man than
+himself should win it and ask her to marry him.  But instead of
+reopening her engagement at the Porte Saint Martin, where she would
+have been all the more popular for the fatal episode, she left Paris
+without warning, forsaking her little court of admirers.  Perhaps no
+one carried inquiry far except Lydgate, who felt that all science had
+come to a stand-still while he imagined the unhappy Laure, stricken by
+ever-wandering sorrow, herself wandering, and finding no faithful
+comforter.  Hidden actresses, however, are not so difficult to find as
+some other hidden facts, and it was not long before Lydgate gathered
+indications that Laure had taken the route to Lyons.  He found her at
+last acting with great success at Avignon under the same name, looking
+more majestic than ever as a forsaken wife carrying her child in her
+arms.  He spoke to her after the play, was received with the usual
+quietude which seemed to him beautiful as clear depths of water, and
+obtained leave to visit her the next day; when he was bent on telling
+her that he adored her, and on asking her to marry him.  He knew that
+this was like the sudden impulse of a madman--incongruous even with his
+habitual foibles.  No matter!  It was the one thing which he was
+resolved to do.  He had two selves within him apparently, and they must
+learn to accommodate each other and bear reciprocal impediments.
+Strange, that some of us, with quick alternate vision, see beyond our
+infatuations, and even while we rave on the heights, behold the wide
+plain where our persistent self pauses and awaits us.
+
+To have approached Laure with any suit that was not reverentially
+tender would have been simply a contradiction of his whole feeling
+towards her.
+
+"You have come all the way from Paris to find me?" she said to him the
+next day, sitting before him with folded arms, and looking at him with
+eyes that seemed to wonder as an untamed ruminating animal wonders.
+"Are all Englishmen like that?"
+
+"I came because I could not live without trying to see you.  You are
+lonely; I love you; I want you to consent to be my wife; I will wait,
+but I want you to promise that you will marry me--no one else."
+
+Laure looked at him in silence with a melancholy radiance from under
+her grand eyelids, until he was full of rapturous certainty, and knelt
+close to her knees.
+
+"I will tell you something," she said, in her cooing way, keeping her
+arms folded.  "My foot really slipped."
+
+"I know, I know," said Lydgate, deprecatingly.  "It was a fatal
+accident--a dreadful stroke of calamity that bound me to you the more."
+
+Again Laure paused a little and then said, slowly, "_I meant to do it._"
+
+Lydgate, strong man as he was, turned pale and trembled: moments seemed
+to pass before he rose and stood at a distance from her.
+
+"There was a secret, then," he said at last, even vehemently.  "He was
+brutal to you: you hated him."
+
+"No! he wearied me; he was too fond: he would live in Paris, and not in
+my country; that was not agreeable to me."
+
+"Great God!" said Lydgate, in a groan of horror.  "And you planned to
+murder him?"
+
+"I did not plan: it came to me in the play--_I meant to do it._"
+
+Lydgate stood mute, and unconsciously pressed his hat on while he
+looked at her.  He saw this woman--the first to whom he had given his
+young adoration--amid the throng of stupid criminals.
+
+"You are a good young man," she said.  "But I do not like husbands.  I
+will never have another."
+
+Three days afterwards Lydgate was at his galvanism again in his Paris
+chambers, believing that illusions were at an end for him.  He was
+saved from hardening effects by the abundant kindness of his heart and
+his belief that human life might be made better.  But he had more
+reason than ever for trusting his judgment, now that it was so
+experienced; and henceforth he would take a strictly scientific view of
+woman, entertaining no expectations but such as were justified
+beforehand.
+
+No one in Middlemarch was likely to have such a notion of Lydgate's
+past as has here been faintly shadowed, and indeed the respectable
+townsfolk there were not more given than mortals generally to any eager
+attempt at exactness in the representation to themselves of what did
+not come under their own senses.  Not only young virgins of that town,
+but gray-bearded men also, were often in haste to conjecture how a new
+acquaintance might be wrought into their purposes, contented with very
+vague knowledge as to the way in which life had been shaping him for
+that instrumentality.  Middlemarch, in fact, counted on swallowing
+Lydgate and assimilating him very comfortably.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI.
+
+    "All that in woman is adored
+       In thy fair self I find--
+     For the whole sex can but afford
+       The handsome and the kind."
+                        --SIR CHARLES SEDLEY.
+
+
+The question whether Mr. Tyke should be appointed as salaried chaplain
+to the hospital was an exciting topic to the Middlemarchers; and
+Lydgate heard it discussed in a way that threw much light on the power
+exercised in the town by Mr. Bulstrode.  The banker was evidently a
+ruler, but there was an opposition party, and even among his supporters
+there were some who allowed it to be seen that their support was a
+compromise, and who frankly stated their impression that the general
+scheme of things, and especially the casualties of trade, required you
+to hold a candle to the devil.
+
+Mr. Bulstrode's power was not due simply to his being a country banker,
+who knew the financial secrets of most traders in the town and could
+touch the springs of their credit; it was fortified by a beneficence
+that was at once ready and severe--ready to confer obligations, and
+severe in watching the result.  He had gathered, as an industrious man
+always at his post, a chief share in administering the town charities,
+and his private charities were both minute and abundant.  He would take
+a great deal of pains about apprenticing Tegg the shoemaker's son, and
+he would watch over Tegg's church-going; he would defend Mrs. Strype
+the washerwoman against Stubbs's unjust exaction on the score of her
+drying-ground, and he would himself scrutinize a calumny against Mrs.
+Strype.  His private minor loans were numerous, but he would inquire
+strictly into the circumstances both before and after.  In this way a
+man gathers a domain in his neighbors' hope and fear as well as
+gratitude; and power, when once it has got into that subtle region,
+propagates itself, spreading out of all proportion to its external
+means.  It was a principle with Mr. Bulstrode to gain as much power as
+possible, that he might use it for the glory of God.  He went through a
+great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust
+his motives, and make clear to himself what God's glory required.  But,
+as we have seen, his motives were not always rightly appreciated.
+There were many crass minds in Middlemarch whose reflective scales
+could only weigh things in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion
+that since Mr. Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating
+and drinking so little as he did, and worreting himself about
+everything, he must have a sort of vampire's feast in the sense of
+mastery.
+
+The subject of the chaplaincy came up at Mr. Vincy's table when Lydgate
+was dining there, and the family connection with Mr. Bulstrode did not,
+he observed, prevent some freedom of remark even on the part of the
+host himself, though his reasons against the proposed arrangement
+turned entirely on his objection to Mr. Tyke's sermons, which were all
+doctrine, and his preference for Mr. Farebrother, whose sermons were
+free from that taint.  Mr. Vincy liked well enough the notion of the
+chaplain's having a salary, supposing it were given to Farebrother, who
+was as good a little fellow as ever breathed, and the best preacher
+anywhere, and companionable too.
+
+"What line shall you take, then?" said Mr. Chichely, the coroner, a
+great coursing comrade of Mr. Vincy's.
+
+"Oh, I'm precious glad I'm not one of the Directors now.  I shall vote
+for referring the matter to the Directors and the Medical Board
+together.  I shall roll some of my responsibility on your shoulders,
+Doctor," said Mr. Vincy, glancing first at Dr. Sprague, the senior
+physician of the town, and then at Lydgate who sat opposite.  "You
+medical gentlemen must consult which sort of black draught you will
+prescribe, eh, Mr. Lydgate?"
+
+"I know little of either," said Lydgate; "but in general, appointments
+are apt to be made too much a question of personal liking.  The fittest
+man for a particular post is not always the best fellow or the most
+agreeable.  Sometimes, if you wanted to get a reform, your only way
+would be to pension off the good fellows whom everybody is fond of, and
+put them out of the question."
+
+Dr. Sprague, who was considered the physician of most "weight," though
+Dr. Minchin was usually said to have more "penetration," divested his
+large heavy face of all expression, and looked at his wine-glass while
+Lydgate was speaking.  Whatever was not problematical and suspected
+about this young man--for example, a certain showiness as to foreign
+ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and
+forgotten by his elders--was positively unwelcome to a physician whose
+standing had been fixed thirty years before by a treatise on
+Meningitis, of which at least one copy marked "own" was bound in calf.
+For my part I have some fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague: one's
+self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very
+unpleasant to find deprecated.
+
+Lydgate's remark, however, did not meet the sense of the company.  Mr.
+Vincy said, that if he could have _his_ way, he would not put
+disagreeable fellows anywhere.
+
+"Hang your reforms!" said Mr. Chichely.  "There's no greater humbug in
+the world.  You never hear of a reform, but it means some trick to put
+in new men.  I hope you are not one of the 'Lancet's' men, Mr.
+Lydgate--wanting to take the coronership out of the hands of the legal
+profession: your words appear to point that way."
+
+"I disapprove of Wakley," interposed Dr. Sprague, "no man more: he is
+an ill-intentioned fellow, who would sacrifice the respectability of
+the profession, which everybody knows depends on the London Colleges,
+for the sake of getting some notoriety for himself.  There are men who
+don't mind about being kicked blue if they can only get talked about.
+But Wakley is right sometimes," the Doctor added, judicially.  "I could
+mention one or two points in which Wakley is in the right."
+
+"Oh, well," said Mr. Chichely, "I blame no man for standing up in favor
+of his own cloth; but, coming to argument, I should like to know how a
+coroner is to judge of evidence if he has not had a legal training?"
+
+"In my opinion," said Lydgate, "legal training only makes a man more
+incompetent in questions that require knowledge a of another kind.
+People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales
+by a blind Justice.  No man can judge what is good evidence on any
+particular subject, unless he knows that subject well.  A lawyer is no
+better than an old woman at a post-mortem examination.  How is he to
+know the action of a poison?  You might as well say that scanning verse
+will teach you to scan the potato crops."
+
+"You are aware, I suppose, that it is not the coroner's business to
+conduct the post-mortem, but only to take the evidence of the medical
+witness?" said Mr. Chichely, with some scorn.
+
+"Who is often almost as ignorant as the coroner himself," said Lydgate.
+"Questions of medical jurisprudence ought not to be left to the chance
+of decent knowledge in a medical witness, and the coroner ought not to
+be a man who will believe that strychnine will destroy the coats of the
+stomach if an ignorant practitioner happens to tell him so."
+
+Lydgate had really lost sight of the fact that Mr. Chichely was his
+Majesty's coroner, and ended innocently with the question, "Don't you
+agree with me, Dr. Sprague?"
+
+"To a certain extent--with regard to populous districts, and in the
+metropolis," said the Doctor.  "But I hope it will be long before this
+part of the country loses the services of my friend Chichely, even
+though it might get the best man in our profession to succeed him.  I
+am sure Vincy will agree with me."
+
+"Yes, yes, give me a coroner who is a good coursing man," said Mr.
+Vincy, jovially.  "And in my opinion, you're safest with a lawyer.
+Nobody can know everything. Most things are 'visitation of God.' And as
+to poisoning, why, what you want to know is the law. Come, shall we
+join the ladies?"
+
+Lydgate's private opinion was that Mr. Chichely might be the very
+coroner without bias as to the coats of the stomach, but he had not
+meant to be personal.  This was one of the difficulties of moving in
+good Middlemarch society: it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a
+qualification for any salaried office.  Fred Vincy had called Lydgate a
+prig, and now Mr. Chichely was inclined to call him prick-eared;
+especially when, in the drawing-room, he seemed to be making himself
+eminently agreeable to Rosamond, whom he had easily monopolized in a
+tete-a-tete, since Mrs. Vincy herself sat at the tea-table. She
+resigned no domestic function to her daughter; and the matron's
+blooming good-natured face, with the two volatile pink strings floating
+from her fine throat, and her cheery manners to husband and children,
+was certainly among the great attractions of the Vincy
+house--attractions which made it all the easier to fall in love with
+the daughter.  The tinge of unpretentious, inoffensive vulgarity in
+Mrs. Vincy gave more effect to Rosamond's refinement, which was beyond
+what Lydgate had expected.
+
+Certainly, small feet and perfectly turned shoulders aid the impression
+of refined manners, and the right thing said seems quite astonishingly
+right when it is accompanied with exquisite curves of lip and eyelid.
+And Rosamond could say the right thing; for she was clever with that
+sort of cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous.
+Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most
+decisive mark of her cleverness.
+
+She and Lydgate readily got into conversation.  He regretted that he
+had not heard her sing the other day at Stone Court.  The only pleasure
+he allowed himself during the latter part of his stay in Paris was to
+go and hear music.
+
+"You have studied music, probably?" said Rosamond.
+
+"No, I know the notes of many birds, and I know many melodies by ear;
+but the music that I don't know at all, and have no notion about,
+delights me--affects me.  How stupid the world is that it does not make
+more use of such a pleasure within its reach!"
+
+"Yes, and you will find Middlemarch very tuneless.  There are hardly
+any good musicians.  I only know two gentlemen who sing at all well."
+
+"I suppose it is the fashion to sing comic songs in a rhythmic way,
+leaving you to fancy the tune--very much as if it were tapped on a
+drum?"
+
+"Ah, you have heard Mr. Bowyer," said Rosamond, with one of her rare
+smiles.  "But we are speaking very ill of our neighbors."
+
+Lydgate was almost forgetting that he must carry on the conversation,
+in thinking how lovely this creature was, her garment seeming to be
+made out of the faintest blue sky, herself so immaculately blond, as if
+the petals of some gigantic flower had just opened and disclosed her;
+and yet with this infantine blondness showing so much ready,
+self-possessed grace.  Since he had had the memory of Laure, Lydgate
+had lost all taste for large-eyed silence: the divine cow no longer
+attracted him, and Rosamond was her very opposite.  But he recalled
+himself.
+
+"You will let me hear some music to-night, I hope."
+
+"I will let you hear my attempts, if you like," said Rosamond.  "Papa
+is sure to insist on my singing.  But I shall tremble before you, who
+have heard the best singers in Paris.  I have heard very little: I have
+only once been to London.  But our organist at St. Peter's is a good
+musician, and I go on studying with him."
+
+"Tell me what you saw in London."
+
+"Very little."  (A more naive girl would have said, "Oh, everything!"
+But Rosamond knew better.) "A few of the ordinary sights, such as raw
+country girls are always taken to."
+
+"Do you call yourself a raw country girl?" said Lydgate, looking at her
+with an involuntary emphasis of admiration, which made Rosamond blush
+with pleasure.  But she remained simply serious, turned her long neck a
+little, and put up her hand to touch her wondrous hair-plaits--an
+habitual gesture with her as pretty as any movements of a kitten's paw.
+Not that Rosamond was in the least like a kitten: she was a sylph
+caught young and educated at Mrs. Lemon's.
+
+"I assure you my mind is raw," she said immediately; "I pass at
+Middlemarch.  I am not afraid of talking to our old neighbors.  But I
+am really afraid of you."
+
+"An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though her
+knowledge is of a different sort.  I am sure you could teach me a
+thousand things--as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were
+any common language between them.  Happily, there is a common language
+between women and men, and so the bears can get taught."
+
+"Ah, there is Fred beginning to strum!  I must go and hinder him from
+jarring all your nerves," said Rosamond, moving to the other side of
+the room, where Fred having opened the piano, at his father's desire,
+that Rosamond might give them some music, was parenthetically
+performing "Cherry Ripe!" with one hand.  Able men who have passed
+their examinations will do these things sometimes, not less than the
+plucked Fred.
+
+"Fred, pray defer your practising till to-morrow; you will make Mr.
+Lydgate ill," said Rosamond.  "He has an ear."
+
+Fred laughed, and went on with his tune to the end.
+
+Rosamond turned to Lydgate, smiling gently, and said, "You perceive,
+the bears will not always be taught."
+
+"Now then, Rosy!" said Fred, springing from the stool and twisting it
+upward for her, with a hearty expectation of enjoyment.  "Some good
+rousing tunes first."
+
+Rosamond played admirably.  Her master at Mrs. Lemon's school (close to
+a county town with a memorable history that had its relics in church
+and castle) was one of those excellent musicians here and there to be
+found in our provinces, worthy to compare with many a noted
+Kapellmeister in a country which offers more plentiful conditions of
+musical celebrity.  Rosamond, with the executant's instinct, had seized
+his manner of playing, and gave forth his large rendering of noble
+music with the precision of an echo.  It was almost startling, heard
+for the first time.  A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from
+Rosamond's fingers; and so indeed it was, since souls live on in
+perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an
+originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter.  Lydgate
+was taken possession of, and began to believe in her as something
+exceptional.  After all, he thought, one need not be surprised to find
+the rare conjunctions of nature under circumstances apparently
+unfavorable: come where they may, they always depend on conditions that
+are not obvious.  He sat looking at her, and did not rise to pay her
+any compliments, leaving that to others, now that his admiration was
+deepened.
+
+Her singing was less remarkable, but also well trained, and sweet to
+hear as a chime perfectly in tune.  It is true she sang "Meet me by
+moonlight," and "I've been roaming"; for mortals must share the
+fashions of their time, and none but the ancients can be always
+classical.  But Rosamond could also sing "Black-eyed Susan" with
+effect, or Haydn's canzonets, or "Voi, che sapete," or "Batti,
+batti"--she only wanted to know what her audience liked.
+
+Her father looked round at the company, delighting in their admiration.
+Her mother sat, like a Niobe before her troubles, with her youngest
+little girl on her lap, softly beating the child's hand up and down in
+time to the music.  And Fred, notwithstanding his general scepticism
+about Rosy, listened to her music with perfect allegiance, wishing he
+could do the same thing on his flute.  It was the pleasantest family
+party that Lydgate had seen since he came to Middlemarch.  The Vincys
+had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the
+belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional in most
+county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had cast a certain
+suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements which survived
+in the provinces.  At the Vincys' there was always whist, and the
+card-tables stood ready now, making some of the company secretly
+impatient of the music.  Before it ceased Mr. Farebrother came in--a
+handsome, broad-chested but otherwise small man, about forty, whose
+black was very threadbare: the brilliancy was all in his quick gray
+eyes.  He came like a pleasant change in the light, arresting little
+Louisa with fatherly nonsense as she was being led out of the room by
+Miss Morgan, greeting everybody with some special word, and seeming to
+condense more talk into ten minutes than had been held all through the
+evening.  He claimed from Lydgate the fulfilment of a promise to come
+and see him.  "I can't let you off, you know, because I have some
+beetles to show you.  We collectors feel an interest in every new man
+till he has seen all we have to show him."
+
+But soon he swerved to the whist-table, rubbing his hands and saying,
+"Come now, let us be serious!  Mr. Lydgate? not play?  Ah! you are too
+young and light for this kind of thing."
+
+Lydgate said to himself that the clergyman whose abilities were so
+painful to Mr. Bulstrode, appeared to have found an agreeable resort in
+this certainly not erudite household.  He could half understand it: the
+good-humor, the good looks of elder and younger, and the provision for
+passing the time without any labor of intelligence, might make the
+house beguiling to people who had no particular use for their odd hours.
+
+Everything looked blooming and joyous except Miss Morgan, who was
+brown, dull, and resigned, and altogether, as Mrs. Vincy often said,
+just the sort of person for a governess.  Lydgate did not mean to pay
+many such visits himself.  They were a wretched waste of the evenings;
+and now, when he had talked a little more to Rosamond, he meant to
+excuse himself and go.
+
+"You will not like us at Middlemarch, I feel sure," she said, when the
+whist-players were settled.  "We are very stupid, and you have been
+used to something quite different."
+
+"I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike," said Lydgate.
+"But I have noticed that one always believes one's own town to be more
+stupid than any other.  I have made up my mind to take Middlemarch as
+it comes, and shall be much obliged if the town will take me in the
+same way.  I have certainly found some charms in it which are much
+greater than I had expected."
+
+"You mean the rides towards Tipton and Lowick; every one is pleased
+with those," said Rosamond, with simplicity.
+
+"No, I mean something much nearer to me."
+
+Rosamond rose and reached her netting, and then said, "Do you care
+about dancing at all?  I am not quite sure whether clever men ever
+dance."
+
+"I would dance with you if you would allow me."
+
+"Oh!" said Rosamond, with a slight deprecatory laugh.  "I was only
+going to say that we sometimes have dancing, and I wanted to know
+whether you would feel insulted if you were asked to come."
+
+"Not on the condition I mentioned."
+
+After this chat Lydgate thought that he was going, but on moving
+towards the whist-tables, he got interested in watching Mr.
+Farebrother's play, which was masterly, and also his face, which was a
+striking mixture of the shrewd and the mild.  At ten o'clock supper was
+brought in (such were the customs of Middlemarch) and there was
+punch-drinking; but Mr. Farebrother had only a glass of water.  He was
+winning, but there seemed to be no reason why the renewal of rubbers
+should end, and Lydgate at last took his leave.
+
+But as it was not eleven o'clock, he chose to walk in the brisk air
+towards the tower of St. Botolph's, Mr. Farebrother's church, which
+stood out dark, square, and massive against the starlight.  It was the
+oldest church in Middlemarch; the living, however, was but a vicarage
+worth barely four hundred a-year. Lydgate had heard that, and he
+wondered now whether Mr. Farebrother cared about the money he won at
+cards; thinking, "He seems a very pleasant fellow, but Bulstrode may
+have his good reasons."  Many things would be easier to Lydgate if it
+should turn out that Mr. Bulstrode was generally justifiable.  "What is
+his religious doctrine to me, if he carries some good notions along
+with it?  One must use such brains as are to be found."
+
+These were actually Lydgate's first meditations as he walked away from
+Mr. Vincy's, and on this ground I fear that many ladies will consider
+him hardly worthy of their attention.  He thought of Rosamond and her
+music only in the second place; and though, when her turn came, he
+dwelt on the image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt no
+agitation, and had no sense that any new current had set into his life.
+He could not marry yet; he wished not to marry for several years; and
+therefore he was not ready to entertain the notion of being in love
+with a girl whom he happened to admire.  He did admire Rosamond
+exceedingly; but that madness which had once beset him about Laure was
+not, he thought, likely to recur in relation to any other woman.
+Certainly, if falling in love had been at all in question, it would
+have been quite safe with a creature like this Miss Vincy, who had just
+the kind of intelligence one would desire in a woman--polished,
+refined, docile, lending itself to finish in all the delicacies of
+life, and enshrined in a body which expressed this with a force of
+demonstration that excluded the need for other evidence.  Lydgate felt
+sure that if ever he married, his wife would have that feminine
+radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers
+and music, that sort of beauty which by its very nature was virtuous,
+being moulded only for pure and delicate joys.
+
+But since he did not mean to marry for the next five years--his more
+pressing business was to look into Louis' new book on Fever, which he
+was specially interested in, because he had known Louis in Paris, and
+had followed many anatomical demonstrations in order to ascertain the
+specific differences of typhus and typhoid.  He went home and read far
+into the smallest hour, bringing a much more testing vision of details
+and relations into this pathological study than he had ever thought it
+necessary to apply to the complexities of love and marriage, these
+being subjects on which he felt himself amply informed by literature,
+and that traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial
+conversation of men.  Whereas Fever had obscure conditions, and gave
+him that delightful labor of the imagination which is not mere
+arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined power--combining and
+constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest
+obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with
+impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its
+own work.
+
+Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of
+their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:--reports
+of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer
+coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat's wings and
+spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to
+reflect life in a diseased dream.  But these kinds of inspiration
+Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the
+imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of
+lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of
+necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of
+Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally
+illuminated space.  He for his part had tossed away all cheap
+inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he was
+enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research,
+provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more
+exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those
+minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible
+thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and
+crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of
+happy or unhappy consciousness.
+
+As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the
+grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable
+afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a
+specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the
+rest of our existence--seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back
+after vigorous swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted
+strength--Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in his studies, and
+something like pity for those less lucky men who were not of his
+profession.
+
+"If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad," he thought, "I might
+have got into some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived always
+in blinkers.  I should never have been happy in any profession that did
+not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good
+warm contact with my neighbors.  There is nothing like the medical
+profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that
+touches the distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too.  It
+is rather harder for a clergyman: Farebrother seems to be an anomaly."
+
+This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures of the
+evening.  They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took up
+his bed-candle his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is
+apt to accompany agreeable recollections.  He was an ardent fellow, but
+at present his ardor was absorbed in love of his work and in the
+ambition of making his life recognized as a factor in the better life
+of mankind--like other heroes of science who had nothing but an obscure
+country practice to begin with.
+
+Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond!  Each lived in a world of
+which the other knew nothing.  It had not occurred to Lydgate that he
+had been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any
+reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any
+pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit,
+that inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases, which makes a
+large part in the lives of most girls.  He had not meant to look at her
+or speak to her with more than the inevitable amount of admiration and
+compliment which a man must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, it seemed
+to him that his enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, for
+he feared falling into the rudeness of telling her his great surprise
+at her possession of such accomplishment.  But Rosamond had registered
+every look and word, and estimated them as the opening incidents of a
+preconceived romance--incidents which gather value from the foreseen
+development and climax.  In Rosamond's romance it was not necessary to
+imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious
+business in the world: of course, he had a profession and was clever,
+as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate
+was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch
+admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and
+getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which
+she would have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last
+associate with relatives quite equal to the county people who looked
+down on the Middlemarchers.  It was part of Rosamond's cleverness to
+discern very subtly the faintest aroma of rank, and once when she had
+seen the Miss Brookes accompanying their uncle at the county assizes,
+and seated among the aristocracy, she had envied them, notwithstanding
+their plain dress.
+
+If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a man of family
+could cause thrills of satisfaction which had anything to do with the
+sense that she was in love with him, I will ask you to use your power
+of comparison a little more effectively, and consider whether red cloth
+and epaulets have never had an influence of that sort.  Our passions do
+not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe
+of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together,
+feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.
+
+Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly with Tertius
+Lydgate as he was in himself, but with his relation to her; and it was
+excusable in a girl who was accustomed to hear that all young men
+might, could, would be, or actually were in love with her, to believe
+at once that Lydgate could be no exception.  His looks and words meant
+more to her than other men's, because she cared more for them: she
+thought of them diligently, and diligently attended to that perfection
+of appearance, behavior, sentiments, and all other elegancies, which
+would find in Lydgate a more adequate admirer than she had yet been
+conscious of.
+
+For Rosamond, though she would never do anything that was disagreeable
+to her, was industrious; and now more than ever she was active in
+sketching her landscapes and market-carts and portraits of friends, in
+practising her music, and in being from morning till night her own
+standard of a perfect lady, having always an audience in her own
+consciousness, with sometimes the not unwelcome addition of a more
+variable external audience in the numerous visitors of the house.  She
+found time also to read the best novels, and even the second best, and
+she knew much poetry by heart.  Her favorite poem was "Lalla Rookh."
+
+"The best girl in the world!  He will be a happy fellow who gets her!"
+was the sentiment of the elderly gentlemen who visited the Vincys; and
+the rejected young men thought of trying again, as is the fashion in
+country towns where the horizon is not thick with coming rivals.  But
+Mrs. Plymdale thought that Rosamond had been educated to a ridiculous
+pitch, for what was the use of accomplishments which would be all laid
+aside as soon as she was married?  While her aunt Bulstrode, who had a
+sisterly faithfulness towards her brother's family, had two sincere
+wishes for Rosamond--that she might show a more serious turn of mind,
+and that she might meet with a husband whose wealth corresponded to her
+habits.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII.
+
+    "The clerkly person smiled and said
+     Promise was a pretty maid,
+     But being poor she died unwed."
+
+
+The Rev. Camden Farebrother, whom Lydgate went to see the next evening,
+lived in an old parsonage, built of stone, venerable enough to match
+the church which it looked out upon.  All the furniture too in the
+house was old, but with another grade of age--that of Mr. Farebrother's
+father and grandfather.  There were painted white chairs, with gilding
+and wreaths on them, and some lingering red silk damask with slits in
+it.  There were engraved portraits of Lord Chancellors and other
+celebrated lawyers of the last century; and there were old pier-glasses
+to reflect them, as well as the little satin-wood tables and the sofas
+resembling a prolongation of uneasy chairs, all standing in relief
+against the dark wainscot. This was the physiognomy of the drawing-room
+into which Lydgate was shown; and there were three ladies to receive
+him, who were also old-fashioned, and of a faded but genuine
+respectability: Mrs. Farebrother, the Vicar's white-haired mother,
+befrilled and kerchiefed with dainty cleanliness, upright, quick-eyed,
+and still under seventy; Miss Noble, her sister, a tiny old lady of
+meeker aspect, with frills and kerchief decidedly more worn and mended;
+and Miss Winifred Farebrother, the Vicar's elder sister, well-looking
+like himself, but nipped and subdued as single women are apt to be who
+spend their lives in uninterrupted subjection to their elders.  Lydgate
+had not expected to see so quaint a group: knowing simply that Mr.
+Farebrother was a bachelor, he had thought of being ushered into a
+snuggery where the chief furniture would probably be books and
+collections of natural objects.  The Vicar himself seemed to wear
+rather a changed aspect, as most men do when acquaintances made
+elsewhere see them for the first time in their own homes; some indeed
+showing like an actor of genial parts disadvantageously cast for the
+curmudgeon in a new piece.  This was not the case with Mr. Farebrother:
+he seemed a trifle milder and more silent, the chief talker being his
+mother, while he only put in a good-humored moderating remark here and
+there.  The old lady was evidently accustomed to tell her company what
+they ought to think, and to regard no subject as quite safe without her
+steering.  She was afforded leisure for this function by having all her
+little wants attended to by Miss Winifred.  Meanwhile tiny Miss Noble
+carried on her arm a small basket, into which she diverted a bit of
+sugar, which she had first dropped in her saucer as if by mistake;
+looking round furtively afterwards, and reverting to her teacup with a
+small innocent noise as of a tiny timid quadruped.  Pray think no ill
+of Miss Noble.  That basket held small savings from her more portable
+food, destined for the children of her poor friends among whom she
+trotted on fine mornings; fostering and petting all needy creatures
+being so spontaneous a delight to her, that she regarded it much as if
+it had been a pleasant vice that she was addicted to.  Perhaps she was
+conscious of being tempted to steal from those who had much that she
+might give to those who had nothing, and carried in her conscience the
+guilt of that repressed desire.  One must be poor to know the luxury of
+giving!
+
+Mrs. Farebrother welcomed the guest with a lively formality and
+precision.  She presently informed him that they were not often in want
+of medical aid in that house.  She had brought up her children to wear
+flannel and not to over-eat themselves, which last habit she considered
+the chief reason why people needed doctors.  Lydgate pleaded for those
+whose fathers and mothers had over-eaten themselves, but Mrs.
+Farebrother held that view of things dangerous: Nature was more just
+than that; it would be easy for any felon to say that his ancestors
+ought to have been hanged instead of him.  If those who had bad fathers
+and mothers were bad themselves, they were hanged for that.  There was
+no need to go back on what you couldn't see.
+
+"My mother is like old George the Third," said the Vicar, "she objects
+to metaphysics."
+
+"I object to what is wrong, Camden.  I say, keep hold of a few plain
+truths, and make everything square with them.  When I was young, Mr.
+Lydgate, there never was any question about right and wrong.  We knew
+our catechism, and that was enough; we learned our creed and our duty.
+Every respectable Church person had the same opinions.  But now, if you
+speak out of the Prayer-book itself, you are liable to be contradicted."
+
+"That makes rather a pleasant time of it for those who like to maintain
+their own point," said Lydgate.
+
+"But my mother always gives way," said the Vicar, slyly.
+
+"No, no, Camden, you must not lead Mr. Lydgate into a mistake about
+_me_. I shall never show that disrespect to my parents, to give up what
+they taught me.  Any one may see what comes of turning.  If you change
+once, why not twenty times?"
+
+"A man might see good arguments for changing once, and not see them for
+changing again," said Lydgate, amused with the decisive old lady.
+
+"Excuse me there.  If you go upon arguments, they are never wanting,
+when a man has no constancy of mind.  My father never changed, and he
+preached plain moral sermons without arguments, and was a good man--few
+better.  When you get me a good man made out of arguments, I will get
+you a good dinner with reading you the cookery-book. That's my opinion,
+and I think anybody's stomach will bear me out."
+
+"About the dinner certainly, mother," said Mr. Farebrother.
+
+"It is the same thing, the dinner or the man.  I am nearly seventy, Mr.
+Lydgate, and I go upon experience.  I am not likely to follow new
+lights, though there are plenty of them here as elsewhere.  I say, they
+came in with the mixed stuffs that will neither wash nor wear.  It was
+not so in my youth: a Churchman was a Churchman, and a clergyman, you
+might be pretty sure, was a gentleman, if nothing else.  But now he may
+be no better than a Dissenter, and want to push aside my son on
+pretence of doctrine.  But whoever may wish to push him aside, I am
+proud to say, Mr. Lydgate, that he will compare with any preacher in
+this kingdom, not to speak of this town, which is but a low standard to
+go by; at least, to my thinking, for I was born and bred at Exeter."
+
+"A mother is never partial," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling.  "What do
+you think Tyke's mother says about him?"
+
+"Ah, poor creature! what indeed?" said Mrs. Farebrother, her sharpness
+blunted for the moment by her confidence in maternal judgments.  "She
+says the truth to herself, depend upon it."
+
+"And what is the truth?" said Lydgate. "I am curious to know."
+
+"Oh, nothing bad at all," said Mr. Farebrother.  "He is a zealous
+fellow: not very learned, and not very wise, I think--because I don't
+agree with him."
+
+"Why, Camden!" said Miss Winifred, "Griffin and his wife told me only
+to-day, that Mr. Tyke said they should have no more coals if they came
+to hear you preach."
+
+Mrs. Farebrother laid down her knitting, which she had resumed after
+her small allowance of tea and toast, and looked at her son as if to
+say "You hear that?"  Miss Noble said, "Oh poor things! poor things!"
+in reference, probably, to the double loss of preaching and coal.  But
+the Vicar answered quietly--
+
+"That is because they are not my parishioners.  And I don't think my
+sermons are worth a load of coals to them."
+
+"Mr. Lydgate," said Mrs. Farebrother, who could not let this pass, "you
+don't know my son: he always undervalues himself.  I tell him he is
+undervaluing the God who made him, and made him a most excellent
+preacher."
+
+"That must be a hint for me to take Mr. Lydgate away to my study,
+mother," said the Vicar, laughing.  "I promised to show you my
+collection," he added, turning to Lydgate; "shall we go?"
+
+All three ladies remonstrated.  Mr. Lydgate ought not to be hurried
+away without being allowed to accept another cup of tea: Miss Winifred
+had abundance of good tea in the pot.  Why was Camden in such haste to
+take a visitor to his den?  There was nothing but pickled vermin, and
+drawers full of blue-bottles and moths, with no carpet on the floor.
+Mr. Lydgate must excuse it.  A game at cribbage would be far better.
+In short, it was plain that a vicar might be adored by his womankind as
+the king of men and preachers, and yet be held by them to stand in much
+need of their direction.  Lydgate, with the usual shallowness of a
+young bachelor, wondered that Mr. Farebrother had not taught them
+better.
+
+"My mother is not used to my having visitors who can take any interest
+in my hobbies," said the Vicar, as he opened the door of his study,
+which was indeed as bare of luxuries for the body as the ladies had
+implied, unless a short porcelain pipe and a tobacco-box were to be
+excepted.
+
+"Men of your profession don't generally smoke," he said.  Lydgate
+smiled and shook his head.  "Nor of mine either, properly, I suppose.
+You will hear that pipe alleged against me by Bulstrode and Company.
+They don't know how pleased the devil would be if I gave it up."
+
+"I understand.  You are of an excitable temper and want a sedative.  I
+am heavier, and should get idle with it.  I should rush into idleness,
+and stagnate there with all my might."
+
+"And you mean to give it all to your work.  I am some ten or twelve
+years older than you, and have come to a compromise.  I feed a weakness
+or two lest they should get clamorous.  See," continued the Vicar,
+opening several small drawers, "I fancy I have made an exhaustive study
+of the entomology of this district.  I am going on both with the fauna
+and flora; but I have at least done my insects well.  We are singularly
+rich in orthoptera: I don't know whether--Ah! you have got hold of that
+glass jar--you are looking into that instead of my drawers.  You don't
+really care about these things?"
+
+"Not by the side of this lovely anencephalous monster.  I have never
+had time to give myself much to natural history.  I was early bitten
+with an interest in structure, and it is what lies most directly in my
+profession.  I have no hobby besides.  I have the sea to swim in there."
+
+"Ah! you are a happy fellow," said Mr. Farebrother, turning on his heel
+and beginning to fill his pipe.  "You don't know what it is to want
+spiritual tobacco--bad emendations of old texts, or small items about a
+variety of Aphis Brassicae, with the well-known signature of
+Philomicron, for the 'Twaddler's Magazine;' or a learned treatise on
+the entomology of the Pentateuch, including all the insects not
+mentioned, but probably met with by the Israelites in their passage
+through the desert; with a monograph on the Ant, as treated by Solomon,
+showing the harmony of the Book of Proverbs with the results of modern
+research.  You don't mind my fumigating you?"
+
+Lydgate was more surprised at the openness of this talk than at its
+implied meaning--that the Vicar felt himself not altogether in the
+right vocation.  The neat fitting-up of drawers and shelves, and the
+bookcase filled with expensive illustrated books on Natural History,
+made him think again of the winnings at cards and their destination.
+But he was beginning to wish that the very best construction of
+everything that Mr. Farebrother did should be the true one.  The
+Vicar's frankness seemed not of the repulsive sort that comes from an
+uneasy consciousness seeking to forestall the judgment of others, but
+simply the relief of a desire to do with as little pretence as
+possible.  Apparently he was not without a sense that his freedom of
+speech might seem premature, for he presently said--
+
+"I have not yet told you that I have the advantage of you, Mr. Lydgate,
+and know you better than you know me.  You remember Trawley who shared
+your apartment at Paris for some time?  I was a correspondent of his,
+and he told me a good deal about you.  I was not quite sure when you
+first came that you were the same man.  I was very glad when I found
+that you were.  Only I don't forget that you have not had the like
+prologue about me."
+
+Lydgate divined some delicacy of feeling here, but did not half
+understand it.  "By the way," he said, "what has become of Trawley?  I
+have quite lost sight of him.  He was hot on the French social systems,
+and talked of going to the Backwoods to found a sort of Pythagorean
+community.  Is he gone?"
+
+"Not at all.  He is practising at a German bath, and has married a rich
+patient."
+
+"Then my notions wear the best, so far," said Lydgate, with a short
+scornful laugh.  "He would have it, the medical profession was an
+inevitable system of humbug.  I said, the fault was in the men--men who
+truckle to lies and folly.  Instead of preaching against humbug outside
+the walls, it might be better to set up a disinfecting apparatus
+within.  In short--I am reporting my own conversation--you may be sure
+I had all the good sense on my side."
+
+"Your scheme is a good deal more difficult to carry out than the
+Pythagorean community, though.  You have not only got the old Adam in
+yourself against you, but you have got all those descendants of the
+original Adam who form the society around you.  You see, I have paid
+twelve or thirteen years more than you for my knowledge of
+difficulties.  But"--Mr. Farebrother broke off a moment, and then
+added, "you are eying that glass vase again.  Do you want to make an
+exchange?  You shall not have it without a fair barter."
+
+"I have some sea-mice--fine specimens--in spirits.  And I will throw in
+Robert Brown's new thing--'Microscopic Observations on the Pollen of
+Plants'--if you don't happen to have it already."
+
+"Why, seeing how you long for the monster, I might ask a higher price.
+Suppose I ask you to look through my drawers and agree with me about
+all my new species?"  The Vicar, while he talked in this way,
+alternately moved about with his pipe in his mouth, and returned to
+hang rather fondly over his drawers.  "That would be good discipline,
+you know, for a young doctor who has to please his patients in
+Middlemarch.  You must learn to be bored, remember.  However, you shall
+have the monster on your own terms."
+
+"Don't you think men overrate the necessity for humoring everybody's
+nonsense, till they get despised by the very fools they humor?" said
+Lydgate, moving to Mr. Farebrother's side, and looking rather absently
+at the insects ranged in fine gradation, with names subscribed in
+exquisite writing.  "The shortest way is to make your value felt, so
+that people must put up with you whether you flatter them or not."
+
+"With all my heart.  But then you must be sure of having the value, and
+you must keep yourself independent.  Very few men can do that.  Either
+you slip out of service altogether, and become good for nothing, or you
+wear the harness and draw a good deal where your yoke-fellows pull you.
+But do look at these delicate orthoptera!"
+
+Lydgate had after all to give some scrutiny to each drawer, the Vicar
+laughing at himself, and yet persisting in the exhibition.
+
+"Apropos of what you said about wearing harness," Lydgate began, after
+they had sat down, "I made up my mind some time ago to do with as
+little of it as possible. That was why I determined not to try anything
+in London, for a good many years at least.  I didn't like what I saw
+when I was studying there--so much empty bigwiggism, and obstructive
+trickery.  In the country, people have less pretension to knowledge,
+and are less of companions, but for that reason they affect one's
+amour-propre less: one makes less bad blood, and can follow one's own
+course more quietly."
+
+"Yes--well--you have got a good start; you are in the right profession,
+the work you feel yourself most fit for.  Some people miss that, and
+repent too late.  But you must not be too sure of keeping your
+independence."
+
+"You mean of family ties?" said Lydgate, conceiving that these might
+press rather tightly on Mr. Farebrother.
+
+"Not altogether.  Of course they make many things more difficult.  But
+a good wife--a good unworldly woman--may really help a man, and keep
+him more independent.  There's a parishioner of mine--a fine fellow,
+but who would hardly have pulled through as he has done without his
+wife.  Do you know the Garths?  I think they were not Peacock's
+patients."
+
+"No; but there is a Miss Garth at old Featherstone's, at Lowick."
+
+"Their daughter: an excellent girl."
+
+"She is very quiet--I have hardly noticed her."
+
+"She has taken notice of you, though, depend upon it."
+
+"I don't understand," said Lydgate; he could hardly say "Of course."
+
+"Oh, she gauges everybody.  I prepared her for confirmation--she is a
+favorite of mine."
+
+Mr. Farebrother puffed a few moments in silence, Lydgate not caring to
+know more about the Garths.  At last the Vicar laid down his pipe,
+stretched out his legs, and turned his bright eyes with a smile towards
+Lydgate, saying--
+
+"But we Middlemarchers are not so tame as you take us to be.  We have
+our intrigues and our parties.  I am a party man, for example, and
+Bulstrode is another.  If you vote for me you will offend Bulstrode."
+
+"What is there against Bulstrode?" said Lydgate, emphatically.
+
+"I did not say there was anything against him except that.  If you vote
+against him you will make him your enemy."
+
+"I don't know that I need mind about that," said Lydgate, rather
+proudly; "but he seems to have good ideas about hospitals, and he
+spends large sums on useful public objects.  He might help me a good
+deal in carrying out my ideas.  As to his religious notions--why, as
+Voltaire said, incantations will destroy a flock of sheep if
+administered with a certain quantity of arsenic.  I look for the man
+who will bring the arsenic, and don't mind about his incantations."
+
+"Very good.  But then you must not offend your arsenic-man. You will
+not offend me, you know," said Mr. Farebrother, quite unaffectedly.  "I
+don't translate my own convenience into other people's duties.  I am
+opposed to Bulstrode in many ways.  I don't like the set he belongs to:
+they are a narrow ignorant set, and do more to make their neighbors
+uncomfortable than to make them better.  Their system is a sort of
+worldly-spiritual cliqueism: they really look on the rest of mankind as
+a doomed carcass which is to nourish them for heaven.  But," he added,
+smilingly, "I don't say that Bulstrode's new hospital is a bad thing;
+and as to his wanting to oust me from the old one--why, if he thinks me
+a mischievous fellow, he is only returning a compliment.  And I am not
+a model clergyman--only a decent makeshift."
+
+Lydgate was not at all sure that the Vicar maligned himself.  A model
+clergyman, like a model doctor, ought to think his own profession the
+finest in the world, and take all knowledge as mere nourishment to his
+moral pathology and therapeutics.  He only said, "What reason does
+Bulstrode give for superseding you?"
+
+"That I don't teach his opinions--which he calls spiritual religion;
+and that I have no time to spare.  Both statements are true.  But then
+I could make time, and I should be glad of the forty pounds.  That is
+the plain fact of the case.  But let us dismiss it.  I only wanted to
+tell you that if you vote for your arsenic-man, you are not to cut me
+in consequence.  I can't spare you.  You are a sort of circumnavigator
+come to settle among us, and will keep up my belief in the antipodes.
+Now tell me all about them in Paris."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII.
+
+    "Oh, sir, the loftiest hopes on earth
+     Draw lots with meaner hopes: heroic breasts,
+     Breathing bad air, ran risk of pestilence;
+     Or, lacking lime-juice when they cross the Line,
+     May languish with the scurvy."
+
+
+Some weeks passed after this conversation before the question of the
+chaplaincy gathered any practical import for Lydgate, and without
+telling himself the reason, he deferred the predetermination on which
+side he should give his vote.  It would really have been a matter of
+total indifference to him--that is to say, he would have taken the more
+convenient side, and given his vote for the appointment of Tyke without
+any hesitation--if he had not cared personally for Mr. Farebrother.
+
+But his liking for the Vicar of St. Botolph's grew with growing
+acquaintanceship.  That, entering into Lydgate's position as a
+new-comer who had his own professional objects to secure, Mr.
+Farebrother should have taken pains rather to warn off than to obtain
+his interest, showed an unusual delicacy and generosity, which
+Lydgate's nature was keenly alive to.  It went along with other points
+of conduct in Mr. Farebrother which were exceptionally fine, and made
+his character resemble those southern landscapes which seem divided
+between natural grandeur and social slovenliness.  Very few men could
+have been as filial and chivalrous as he was to the mother, aunt, and
+sister, whose dependence on him had in many ways shaped his life rather
+uneasily for himself; few men who feel the pressure of small needs are
+so nobly resolute not to dress up their inevitably self-interested
+desires in a pretext of better motives.  In these matters he was
+conscious that his life would bear the closest scrutiny; and perhaps
+the consciousness encouraged a little defiance towards the critical
+strictness of persons whose celestial intimacies seemed not to improve
+their domestic manners, and whose lofty aims were not needed to account
+for their actions.  Then, his preaching was ingenious and pithy, like
+the preaching of the English Church in its robust age, and his sermons
+were delivered without book.  People outside his parish went to hear
+him; and, since to fill the church was always the most difficult part
+of a clergyman's function, here was another ground for a careless sense
+of superiority.  Besides, he was a likable man: sweet-tempered,
+ready-witted, frank, without grins of suppressed bitterness or other
+conversational flavors which make half of us an affliction to our
+friends.  Lydgate liked him heartily, and wished for his friendship.
+
+With this feeling uppermost, he continued to waive the question of the
+chaplaincy, and to persuade himself that it was not only no proper
+business of his, but likely enough never to vex him with a demand for
+his vote.  Lydgate, at Mr. Bulstrode's request, was laying down plans
+for the internal arrangements of the new hospital, and the two were
+often in consultation.  The banker was always presupposing that he
+could count in general on Lydgate as a coadjutor, but made no special
+recurrence to the coming decision between Tyke and Farebrother.  When
+the General Board of the Infirmary had met, however, and Lydgate had
+notice that the question of the chaplaincy was thrown on a council of
+the directors and medical men, to meet on the following Friday, he had
+a vexed sense that he must make up his mind on this trivial Middlemarch
+business.  He could not help hearing within him the distinct
+declaration that Bulstrode was prime minister, and that the Tyke affair
+was a question of office or no office; and he could not help an equally
+pronounced dislike to giving up the prospect of office.  For his
+observation was constantly confirming Mr. Farebrother's assurance that
+the banker would not overlook opposition.  "Confound their petty
+politics!" was one of his thoughts for three mornings in the meditative
+process of shaving, when he had begun to feel that he must really hold
+a court of conscience on this matter.  Certainly there were valid
+things to be said against the election of Mr. Farebrother: he had too
+much on his hands already, especially considering how much time he
+spent on non-clerical occupations.  Then again it was a continually
+repeated shock, disturbing Lydgate's esteem, that the Vicar should
+obviously play for the sake of money, liking the play indeed, but
+evidently liking some end which it served.  Mr. Farebrother contended
+on theory for the desirability of all games, and said that Englishmen's
+wit was stagnant for want of them; but Lydgate felt certain that he
+would have played very much less but for the money.  There was a
+billiard-room at the Green Dragon, which some anxious mothers and wives
+regarded as the chief temptation in Middlemarch.  The Vicar was a
+first-rate billiard-player, and though he did not frequent the Green
+Dragon, there were reports that he had sometimes been there in the
+daytime and had won money.  And as to the chaplaincy, he did not
+pretend that he cared for it, except for the sake of the forty pounds.
+Lydgate was no Puritan, but he did not care for play, and winning money
+at it had always seemed a meanness to him; besides, he had an ideal of
+life which made this subservience of conduct to the gaining of small
+sums thoroughly hateful to him.  Hitherto in his own life his wants had
+been supplied without any trouble to himself, and his first impulse was
+always to be liberal with half-crowns as matters of no importance to a
+gentleman; it had never occurred to him to devise a plan for getting
+half-crowns.  He had always known in a general way that he was not
+rich, but he had never felt poor, and he had no power of imagining the
+part which the want of money plays in determining the actions of men.
+Money had never been a motive to him.  Hence he was not ready to frame
+excuses for this deliberate pursuit of small gains.  It was altogether
+repulsive to him, and he never entered into any calculation of the
+ratio between the Vicar's income and his more or less necessary
+expenditure.  It was possible that he would not have made such a
+calculation in his own case.
+
+And now, when the question of voting had come, this repulsive fact told
+more strongly against Mr. Farebrother than it had done before.  One
+would know much better what to do if men's characters were more
+consistent, and especially if one's friends were invariably fit for any
+function they desired to undertake!  Lydgate was convinced that if
+there had been no valid objection to Mr. Farebrother, he would have
+voted for him, whatever Bulstrode might have felt on the subject: he
+did not intend to be a vassal of Bulstrode's. On the other hand, there
+was Tyke, a man entirely given to his clerical office, who was simply
+curate at a chapel of ease in St. Peter's parish, and had time for
+extra duty.  Nobody had anything to say against Mr. Tyke, except that
+they could not bear him, and suspected him of cant.  Really, from his
+point of view, Bulstrode was thoroughly justified.
+
+But whichever way Lydgate began to incline, there was something to make
+him wince; and being a proud man, he was a little exasperated at being
+obliged to wince.  He did not like frustrating his own best purposes by
+getting on bad terms with Bulstrode; he did not like voting against
+Farebrother, and helping to deprive him of function and salary; and the
+question occurred whether the additional forty pounds might not leave
+the Vicar free from that ignoble care about winning at cards.
+Moreover, Lydgate did not like the consciousness that in voting for
+Tyke he should be voting on the side obviously convenient for himself.
+But would the end really be his own convenience?  Other people would
+say so, and would allege that he was currying favor with Bulstrode for
+the sake of making himself important and getting on in the world.  What
+then?  He for his own part knew that if his personal prospects simply
+had been concerned, he would not have cared a rotten nut for the
+banker's friendship or enmity.  What he really cared for was a medium
+for his work, a vehicle for his ideas; and after all, was he not bound
+to prefer the object of getting a good hospital, where he could
+demonstrate the specific distinctions of fever and test therapeutic
+results, before anything else connected with this chaplaincy?  For the
+first time Lydgate was feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of
+small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity.  At the end
+of his inward debate, when he set out for the hospital, his hope was
+really in the chance that discussion might somehow give a new aspect to
+the question, and make the scale dip so as to exclude the necessity for
+voting.  I think he trusted a little also to the energy which is
+begotten by circumstances--some feeling rushing warmly and making
+resolve easy, while debate in cool blood had only made it more
+difficult.  However it was, he did not distinctly say to himself on
+which side he would vote; and all the while he was inwardly resenting
+the subjection which had been forced upon him.  It would have seemed
+beforehand like a ridiculous piece of bad logic that he, with his
+unmixed resolutions of independence and his select purposes, would find
+himself at the very outset in the grasp of petty alternatives, each of
+which was repugnant to him.  In his student's chambers, he had
+prearranged his social action quite differently.
+
+Lydgate was late in setting out, but Dr. Sprague, the two other
+surgeons, and several of the directors had arrived early; Mr.
+Bulstrode, treasurer and chairman, being among those who were still
+absent.  The conversation seemed to imply that the issue was
+problematical, and that a majority for Tyke was not so certain as had
+been generally supposed.  The two physicians, for a wonder, turned out
+to be unanimous, or rather, though of different minds, they concurred
+in action.  Dr. Sprague, the rugged and weighty, was, as every one had
+foreseen, an adherent of Mr. Farebrother.  The Doctor was more than
+suspected of having no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this
+deficiency in him as if he had been a Lord Chancellor; indeed it is
+probable that his professional weight was the more believed in, the
+world-old association of cleverness with the evil principle being still
+potent in the minds even of lady-patients who had the strictest ideas
+of frilling and sentiment.  It was perhaps this negation in the Doctor
+which made his neighbors call him hard-headed and dry-witted;
+conditions of texture which were also held favorable to the storing of
+judgments connected with drugs.  At all events, it is certain that if
+any medical man had come to Middlemarch with the reputation of having
+very definite religious views, of being given to prayer, and of
+otherwise showing an active piety, there would have been a general
+presumption against his medical skill.
+
+On this ground it was (professionally speaking) fortunate for Dr.
+Minchin that his religious sympathies were of a general kind, and such
+as gave a distant medical sanction to all serious sentiment, whether of
+Church or Dissent, rather than any adhesion to particular tenets.  If
+Mr. Bulstrode insisted, as he was apt to do, on the Lutheran doctrine
+of justification, as that by which a Church must stand or fall, Dr.
+Minchin in return was quite sure that man was not a mere machine or a
+fortuitous conjunction of atoms; if Mrs. Wimple insisted on a
+particular providence in relation to her stomach complaint, Dr. Minchin
+for his part liked to keep the mental windows open and objected to
+fixed limits; if the Unitarian brewer jested about the Athanasian
+Creed, Dr. Minchin quoted Pope's "Essay on Man."  He objected to the
+rather free style of anecdote in which Dr. Sprague indulged, preferring
+well-sanctioned quotations, and liking refinement of all kinds: it was
+generally known that he had some kinship to a bishop, and sometimes
+spent his holidays at "the palace."
+
+Dr. Minchin was soft-handed, pale-complexioned, and of rounded outline,
+not to be distinguished from a mild clergyman in appearance: whereas
+Dr. Sprague was superfluously tall; his trousers got creased at the
+knees, and showed an excess of boot at a time when straps seemed
+necessary to any dignity of bearing; you heard him go in and out, and
+up and down, as if he had come to see after the roofing.  In short, he
+had weight, and might be expected to grapple with a disease and throw
+it; while Dr. Minchin might be better able to detect it lurking and to
+circumvent it.  They enjoyed about equally the mysterious privilege of
+medical reputation, and concealed with much etiquette their contempt
+for each other's skill.  Regarding themselves as Middlemarch
+institutions, they were ready to combine against all innovators, and
+against non-professionals given to interference.  On this ground they
+were both in their hearts equally averse to Mr. Bulstrode, though Dr.
+Minchin had never been in open hostility with him, and never differed
+from him without elaborate explanation to Mrs. Bulstrode, who had found
+that Dr. Minchin alone understood her constitution.  A layman who pried
+into the professional conduct of medical men, and was always obtruding
+his reforms,--though he was less directly embarrassing to the two
+physicians than to the surgeon-apothecaries who attended paupers by
+contract, was nevertheless offensive to the professional nostril as
+such; and Dr. Minchin shared fully in the new pique against Bulstrode,
+excited by his apparent determination to patronize Lydgate.  The
+long-established practitioners, Mr. Wrench and Mr. Toller; were just
+now standing apart and having a friendly colloquy, in which they agreed
+that Lydgate was a jackanapes, just made to serve Bulstrode's purpose.
+To non-medical friends they had already concurred in praising the other
+young practitioner, who had come into the town on Mr. Peacock's
+retirement without further recommendation than his own merits and such
+argument for solid professional acquirement as might be gathered from
+his having apparently wasted no time on other branches of knowledge.
+It was clear that Lydgate, by not dispensing drugs, intended to cast
+imputations on his equals, and also to obscure the limit between his
+own rank as a general practitioner and that of the physicians, who, in
+the interest of the profession, felt bound to maintain its various
+grades,--especially against a man who had not been to either of the
+English universities and enjoyed the absence of anatomical and bedside
+study there, but came with a libellous pretension to experience in
+Edinburgh and Paris, where observation might be abundant indeed, but
+hardly sound.
+
+Thus it happened that on this occasion Bulstrode became identified with
+Lydgate, and Lydgate with Tyke; and owing to this variety of
+interchangeable names for the chaplaincy question, diverse minds were
+enabled to form the same judgment concerning it.
+
+Dr. Sprague said at once bluntly to the group assembled when he
+entered, "I go for Farebrother.  A salary, with all my heart.  But why
+take it from the Vicar?  He has none too much--has to insure his life,
+besides keeping house, and doing a vicar's charities.  Put forty pounds
+in his pocket and you'll do no harm.  He's a good fellow, is
+Farebrother, with as little of the parson about him as will serve to
+carry orders."
+
+"Ho, ho!  Doctor," said old Mr. Powderell, a retired iron-monger of
+some standing--his interjection being something between a laugh and a
+Parliamentary disapproval; "we must let you have your say.  But what we
+have to consider is not anybody's income--it's the souls of the poor
+sick people"--here Mr. Powderell's voice and face had a sincere pathos
+in them.  "He is a real Gospel preacher, is Mr. Tyke.  I should vote
+against my conscience if I voted against Mr. Tyke--I should indeed."
+
+"Mr. Tyke's opponents have not asked any one to vote against his
+conscience, I believe," said Mr. Hackbutt, a rich tanner of fluent
+speech, whose glittering spectacles and erect hair were turned with
+some severity towards innocent Mr. Powderell.  "But in my judgment it
+behoves us, as Directors, to consider whether we will regard it as our
+whole business to carry out propositions emanating from a single
+quarter.  Will any member of the committee aver that he would have
+entertained the idea of displacing the gentleman who has always
+discharged the function of chaplain here, if it had not been suggested
+to him by parties whose disposition it is to regard every institution
+of this town as a machinery for carrying out their own views?  I tax no
+man's motives: let them lie between himself and a higher Power; but I
+do say, that there are influences at work here which are incompatible
+with genuine independence, and that a crawling servility is usually
+dictated by circumstances which gentlemen so conducting themselves
+could not afford either morally or financially to avow.  I myself am a
+layman, but I have given no inconsiderable attention to the divisions
+in the Church and--"
+
+"Oh, damn the divisions!" burst in Mr. Frank Hawley, lawyer and
+town-clerk, who rarely presented himself at the board, but now looked
+in hurriedly, whip in hand.  "We have nothing to do with them here.
+Farebrother has been doing the work--what there was--without pay, and
+if pay is to be given, it should be given to him.  I call it a
+confounded job to take the thing away from Farebrother."
+
+"I think it would be as well for gentlemen not to give their remarks a
+personal bearing," said Mr. Plymdale.  "I shall vote for the
+appointment of Mr. Tyke, but I should not have known, if Mr. Hackbutt
+hadn't hinted it, that I was a Servile Crawler."
+
+"I disclaim any personalities.  I expressly said, if I may be allowed
+to repeat, or even to conclude what I was about to say--"
+
+"Ah, here's Minchin!" said Mr. Frank Hawley; at which everybody turned
+away from Mr. Hackbutt, leaving him to feel the uselessness of superior
+gifts in Middlemarch.  "Come, Doctor, I must have you on the right
+side, eh?"
+
+"I hope so," said Dr. Minchin, nodding and shaking hands here and
+there; "at whatever cost to my feelings."
+
+"If there's any feeling here, it should be feeling for the man who is
+turned out, I think," said Mr. Frank Hawley.
+
+"I confess I have feelings on the other side also.  I have a divided
+esteem," said Dr. Minchin, rubbing his hands.  "I consider Mr. Tyke an
+exemplary man--none more so--and I believe him to be proposed from
+unimpeachable motives.  I, for my part, wish that I could give him my
+vote.  But I am constrained to take a view of the case which gives the
+preponderance to Mr. Farebrother's claims.  He is an amiable man, an
+able preacher, and has been longer among us."
+
+Old Mr. Powderell looked on, sad and silent.  Mr. Plymdale settled his
+cravat, uneasily.
+
+"You don't set up Farebrother as a pattern of what a clergyman ought to
+be, I hope," said Mr. Larcher, the eminent carrier, who had just come
+in.  "I have no ill-will towards him, but I think we owe something to
+the public, not to speak of anything higher, in these appointments.  In
+my opinion Farebrother is too lax for a clergyman.  I don't wish to
+bring up particulars against him; but he will make a little attendance
+here go as far as he can."
+
+"And a devilish deal better than too much," said Mr. Hawley, whose bad
+language was notorious in that part of the county.  "Sick people can't
+bear so much praying and preaching.  And that methodistical sort of
+religion is bad for the spirits--bad for the inside, eh?" he added,
+turning quickly round to the four medical men who were assembled.
+
+But any answer was dispensed with by the entrance of three gentlemen,
+with whom there were greetings more or less cordial.  These were the
+Reverend Edward Thesiger, Rector of St. Peter's, Mr. Bulstrode, and our
+friend Mr. Brooke of Tipton, who had lately allowed himself to be put
+on the board of directors in his turn, but had never before attended,
+his attendance now being due to Mr. Bulstrode's exertions.  Lydgate was
+the only person still expected.
+
+Every one now sat down, Mr. Bulstrode presiding, pale and
+self-restrained as usual.  Mr. Thesiger, a moderate evangelical, wished
+for the appointment of his friend Mr. Tyke, a zealous able man, who,
+officiating at a chapel of ease, had not a cure of souls too extensive
+to leave him ample time for the new duty.  It was desirable that
+chaplaincies of this kind should be entered on with a fervent
+intention: they were peculiar opportunities for spiritual influence;
+and while it was good that a salary should be allotted, there was the
+more need for scrupulous watching lest the office should be perverted
+into a mere question of salary.  Mr. Thesiger's manner had so much
+quiet propriety that objectors could only simmer in silence.
+
+Mr. Brooke believed that everybody meant well in the matter.  He had
+not himself attended to the affairs of the Infirmary, though he had a
+strong interest in whatever was for the benefit of Middlemarch, and was
+most happy to meet the gentlemen present on any public question--"any
+public question, you know," Mr. Brooke repeated, with his nod of
+perfect understanding.  "I am a good deal occupied as a magistrate, and
+in the collection of documentary evidence, but I regard my time as
+being at the disposal of the public--and, in short, my friends have
+convinced me that a chaplain with a salary--a salary, you know--is a
+very good thing, and I am happy to be able to come here and vote for
+the appointment of Mr. Tyke, who, I understand, is an unexceptionable
+man, apostolic and eloquent and everything of that kind--and I am the
+last man to withhold my vote--under the circumstances, you know."
+
+"It seems to me that you have been crammed with one side of the
+question, Mr. Brooke," said Mr. Frank Hawley, who was afraid of nobody,
+and was a Tory suspicious of electioneering intentions.  "You don't
+seem to know that one of the worthiest men we have has been doing duty
+as chaplain here for years without pay, and that Mr. Tyke is proposed
+to supersede him."
+
+"Excuse me, Mr. Hawley," said Mr. Bulstrode.  "Mr. Brooke has been
+fully informed of Mr. Farebrother's character and position."
+
+"By his enemies," flashed out Mr. Hawley.
+
+"I trust there is no personal hostility concerned here," said Mr.
+Thesiger.
+
+"I'll swear there is, though," retorted Mr. Hawley.
+
+"Gentlemen," said Mr. Bulstrode, in a subdued tone, "the merits of the
+question may be very briefly stated, and if any one present doubts that
+every gentleman who is about to give his vote has not been fully
+informed, I can now recapitulate the considerations that should weigh
+on either side."
+
+"I don't see the good of that," said Mr. Hawley.  "I suppose we all
+know whom we mean to vote for.  Any man who wants to do justice does
+not wait till the last minute to hear both sides of the question.  I
+have no time to lose, and I propose that the matter be put to the vote
+at once."
+
+A brief but still hot discussion followed before each person wrote
+"Tyke" or "Farebrother" on a piece of paper and slipped it into a glass
+tumbler; and in the mean time Mr. Bulstrode saw Lydgate enter.
+
+"I perceive that the votes are equally divided at present," said Mr.
+Bulstrode, in a clear biting voice.  Then, looking up at Lydgate--
+
+"There is a casting-vote still to be given.  It is yours, Mr. Lydgate:
+will you be good enough to write?"
+
+"The thing is settled now," said Mr. Wrench, rising.  "We all know how
+Mr. Lydgate will vote."
+
+"You seem to speak with some peculiar meaning, sir," said Lydgate,
+rather defiantly, and keeping his pencil suspended.
+
+"I merely mean that you are expected to vote with Mr. Bulstrode.  Do
+you regard that meaning as offensive?"
+
+"It may be offensive to others.  But I shall not desist from voting
+with him on that account."  Lydgate immediately wrote down "Tyke."
+
+So the Rev. Walter Tyke became chaplain to the Infirmary, and Lydgate
+continued to work with Mr. Bulstrode.  He was really uncertain whether
+Tyke were not the more suitable candidate, and yet his consciousness
+told him that if he had been quite free from indirect bias he should
+have voted for Mr. Farebrother.  The affair of the chaplaincy remained
+a sore point in his memory as a case in which this petty medium of
+Middlemarch had been too strong for him.  How could a man be satisfied
+with a decision between such alternatives and under such circumstances?
+No more than he can be satisfied with his hat, which he has chosen from
+among such shapes as the resources of the age offer him, wearing it at
+best with a resignation which is chiefly supported by comparison.
+
+But Mr. Farebrother met him with the same friendliness as before.  The
+character of the publican and sinner is not always practically
+incompatible with that of the modern Pharisee, for the majority of us
+scarcely see more distinctly the faultiness of our own conduct than the
+faultiness of our own arguments, or the dulness of our own jokes.  But
+the Vicar of St. Botolph's had certainly escaped the slightest tincture
+of the Pharisee, and by dint of admitting to himself that he was too
+much as other men were, he had become remarkably unlike them in
+this--that he could excuse others for thinking slightly of him, and
+could judge impartially of their conduct even when it told against him.
+
+"The world has been too strong for _me_, I know," he said one day to
+Lydgate.  "But then I am not a mighty man--I shall never be a man of
+renown.  The choice of Hercules is a pretty fable; but Prodicus makes
+it easy work for the hero, as if the first resolves were enough.
+Another story says that he came to hold the distaff, and at last wore
+the Nessus shirt.  I suppose one good resolve might keep a man right if
+everybody else's resolve helped him."
+
+The Vicar's talk was not always inspiriting: he had escaped being a
+Pharisee, but he had not escaped that low estimate of possibilities
+which we rather hastily arrive at as an inference from our own failure.
+Lydgate thought that there was a pitiable infirmity of will in Mr.
+Farebrother.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX.
+
+    "L' altra vedete ch'ha fatto alla guancia
+     Della sua palma, sospirando, letto."
+                              --Purgatorio, vii.
+
+
+When George the Fourth was still reigning over the privacies of
+Windsor, when the Duke of Wellington was Prime Minister, and Mr. Vincy
+was mayor of the old corporation in Middlemarch, Mrs. Casaubon, born
+Dorothea Brooke, had taken her wedding journey to Rome.  In those days
+the world in general was more ignorant of good and evil by forty years
+than it is at present.  Travellers did not often carry full information
+on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets; and even the
+most brilliant English critic of the day mistook the flower-flushed
+tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase due to the painter's
+fancy.  Romanticism, which has helped to fill some dull blanks with
+love and knowledge, had not yet penetrated the times with its leaven
+and entered into everybody's food; it was fermenting still as a
+distinguishable vigorous enthusiasm in certain long-haired German
+artists at Rome, and the youth of other nations who worked or idled
+near them were sometimes caught in the spreading movement.
+
+One fine morning a young man whose hair was not immoderately long, but
+abundant and curly, and who was otherwise English in his equipment, had
+just turned his back on the Belvedere Torso in the Vatican and was
+looking out on the magnificent view of the mountains from the adjoining
+round vestibule.  He was sufficiently absorbed not to notice the
+approach of a dark-eyed, animated German who came up to him and placing
+a hand on his shoulder, said with a strong accent, "Come here, quick!
+else she will have changed her pose."
+
+Quickness was ready at the call, and the two figures passed lightly
+along by the Meleager, towards the hall where the reclining Ariadne,
+then called the Cleopatra, lies in the marble voluptuousness of her
+beauty, the drapery folding around her with a petal-like ease and
+tenderness.  They were just in time to see another figure standing
+against a pedestal near the reclining marble: a breathing blooming
+girl, whose form, not shamed by the Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish gray
+drapery; her long cloak, fastened at the neck, was thrown backward from
+her arms, and one beautiful ungloved hand pillowed her cheek, pushing
+somewhat backward the white beaver bonnet which made a sort of halo to
+her face around the simply braided dark-brown hair.  She was not
+looking at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes
+were fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the
+floor.  But she became conscious of the two strangers who suddenly
+paused as if to contemplate the Cleopatra, and, without looking at
+them, immediately turned away to join a maid-servant and courier who
+were loitering along the hall at a little distance off.
+
+"What do you think of that for a fine bit of antithesis?" said the
+German, searching in his friend's face for responding admiration, but
+going on volubly without waiting for any other answer.  "There lies
+antique beauty, not corpse-like even in death, but arrested in the
+complete contentment of its sensuous perfection: and here stands beauty
+in its breathing life, with the consciousness of Christian centuries in
+its bosom.  But she should be dressed as a nun; I think she looks
+almost what you call a Quaker; I would dress her as a nun in my
+picture.  However, she is married; I saw her wedding-ring on that
+wonderful left hand, otherwise I should have thought the sallow
+Geistlicher was her father.  I saw him parting from her a good while
+ago, and just now I found her in that magnificent pose.  Only think! he
+is perhaps rich, and would like to have her portrait taken.  Ah! it is
+no use looking after her--there she goes!  Let us follow her home!"
+
+"No, no," said his companion, with a little frown.
+
+"You are singular, Ladislaw.  You look struck together.  Do you know
+her?"
+
+"I know that she is married to my cousin," said Will Ladislaw,
+sauntering down the hall with a preoccupied air, while his German
+friend kept at his side and watched him eagerly.
+
+"What! the Geistlicher? He looks more like an uncle--a more useful sort
+of relation."
+
+"He is not my uncle.  I tell you he is my second cousin," said
+Ladislaw, with some irritation.
+
+"Schon, schon.  Don't be snappish.  You are not angry with me for
+thinking Mrs. Second-Cousin the most perfect young Madonna I ever saw?"
+
+"Angry? nonsense.  I have only seen her once before, for a couple of
+minutes, when my cousin introduced her to me, just before I left
+England.  They were not married then.  I didn't know they were coming
+to Rome."
+
+"But you will go to see them now--you will find out what they have for
+an address--since you know the name.  Shall we go to the post?  And you
+could speak about the portrait."
+
+"Confound you, Naumann!  I don't know what I shall do.  I am not so
+brazen as you."
+
+"Bah! that is because you are dilettantish and amateurish.  If you were
+an artist, you would think of Mistress Second-Cousin as antique form
+animated by Christian sentiment--a sort of Christian Antigone--sensuous
+force controlled by spiritual passion."
+
+"Yes, and that your painting her was the chief outcome of her
+existence--the divinity passing into higher completeness and all but
+exhausted in the act of covering your bit of canvas.  I am amateurish
+if you like: I do _not_ think that all the universe is straining
+towards the obscure significance of your pictures."
+
+"But it is, my dear!--so far as it is straining through me, Adolf
+Naumann: that stands firm," said the good-natured painter, putting a
+hand on Ladislaw's shoulder, and not in the least disturbed by the
+unaccountable touch of ill-humor in his tone.  "See now!  My existence
+presupposes the existence of the whole universe--does it _not?_ and my
+function is to paint--and as a painter I have a conception which is
+altogether genialisch, of your great-aunt or second grandmother as a
+subject for a picture; therefore, the universe is straining towards
+that picture through that particular hook or claw which it puts forth
+in the shape of me--not true?"
+
+"But how if another claw in the shape of me is straining to thwart
+it?--the case is a little less simple then."
+
+"Not at all: the result of the struggle is the same thing--picture or
+no picture--logically."
+
+Will could not resist this imperturbable temper, and the cloud in his
+face broke into sunshiny laughter.
+
+"Come now, my friend--you will help?" said Naumann, in a hopeful tone.
+
+"No; nonsense, Naumann!  English ladies are not at everybody's service
+as models.  And you want to express too much with your painting.  You
+would only have made a better or worse portrait with a background which
+every connoisseur would give a different reason for or against.  And
+what is a portrait of a woman?  Your painting and Plastik are poor
+stuff after all.  They perturb and dull conceptions instead of raising
+them.  Language is a finer medium."
+
+"Yes, for those who can't paint," said Naumann.  "There you have
+perfect right.  I did not recommend you to paint, my friend."
+
+The amiable artist carried his sting, but Ladislaw did not choose to
+appear stung.  He went on as if he had not heard.
+
+"Language gives a fuller image, which is all the better for beings
+vague.  After all, the true seeing is within; and painting stares at
+you with an insistent imperfection.  I feel that especially about
+representations of women.  As if a woman were a mere colored
+superficies!  You must wait for movement and tone.  There is a
+difference in their very breathing: they change from moment to
+moment.--This woman whom you have just seen, for example: how would you
+paint her voice, pray?  But her voice is much diviner than anything you
+have seen of her."
+
+"I see, I see.  You are jealous.  No man must presume to think that he
+can paint your ideal.  This is serious, my friend!  Your great-aunt!
+'Der Neffe als Onkel' in a tragic sense--ungeheuer!"
+
+"You and I shall quarrel, Naumann, if you call that lady my aunt again."
+
+"How is she to be called then?"
+
+"Mrs. Casaubon."
+
+"Good.  Suppose I get acquainted with her in spite of you, and find
+that she very much wishes to be painted?"
+
+"Yes, suppose!" said Will Ladislaw, in a contemptuous undertone,
+intended to dismiss the subject.  He was conscious of being irritated
+by ridiculously small causes, which were half of his own creation.  Why
+was he making any fuss about Mrs. Casaubon?  And yet he felt as if
+something had happened to him with regard to her.  There are characters
+which are continually creating collisions and nodes for themselves in
+dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them.  Their
+susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently
+quiet.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX.
+
+    "A child forsaken, waking suddenly,
+     Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove,
+     And seeth only that it cannot see
+     The meeting eyes of love."
+
+
+Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a
+handsome apartment in the Via Sistina.
+
+I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment
+to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled
+by pride on her own account and thoughtfulness for others will
+sometimes allow herself when she feels securely alone.  And Mr.
+Casaubon was certain to remain away for some time at the Vatican.
+
+Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state
+even to herself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion,
+the mental act that was struggling forth into clearness was a
+self-accusing cry that her feeling of desolation was the fault of her
+own spiritual poverty.  She had married the man of her choice, and with
+the advantage over most girls that she had contemplated her marriage
+chiefly as the beginning of new duties: from the very first she had
+thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so much above her own, that he
+must often be claimed by studies which she could not entirely share;
+moreover, after the brief narrow experience of her girlhood she was
+beholding Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole
+hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral
+images and trophies gathered from afar.
+
+But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dreamlike
+strangeness of her bridal life.  Dorothea had now been five weeks in
+Rome, and in the kindly mornings when autumn and winter seemed to go
+hand in hand like a happy aged couple one of whom would presently
+survive in chiller loneliness, she had driven about at first with Mr.
+Casaubon, but of late chiefly with Tantripp and their experienced
+courier.  She had been led through the best galleries, had been taken
+to the chief points of view, had been shown the grandest ruins and the
+most glorious churches, and she had ended by oftenest choosing to drive
+out to the Campagna where she could feel alone with the earth and sky,
+away-from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too
+seemed to become a masque with enigmatical costumes.
+
+To those who have looked at Rome with the quickening power of a
+knowledge which breathes a growing soul into all historic shapes, and
+traces out the suppressed transitions which unite all contrasts, Rome
+may still be the spiritual centre and interpreter of the world.  But
+let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken
+revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the
+notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss
+Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of
+the hand-screen sort; a girl whose ardent nature turned all her small
+allowance of knowledge into principles, fusing her actions into their
+mould, and whose quick emotions gave the most abstract things the
+quality of a pleasure or a pain; a girl who had lately become a wife,
+and from the enthusiastic acceptance of untried duty found herself
+plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot.  The weight
+of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to whom it
+formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign society;
+but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions.  Ruins and
+basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present,
+where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep
+degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but
+yet eager Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the
+long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the
+monotonous light of an alien world: all this vast wreck of ambitious
+ideals, sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of
+breathing forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an
+electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache
+belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.
+Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense, and
+fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking of them,
+preparing strange associations which remained through her after-years.
+Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other
+like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of
+dull forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of
+St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy, the excited intention in the
+attitudes and garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics
+above, and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading
+itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.
+
+Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea's was anything very
+exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled out among
+incongruities and left to "find their feet" among them, while their
+elders go about their business.  Nor can I suppose that when Mrs.
+Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks after her wedding,
+the situation will be regarded as tragic.  Some discouragement, some
+faintness of heart at the new real future which replaces the imaginary,
+is not unusual, and we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what
+is not unusual.  That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of
+frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of
+mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it.  If we
+had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be
+like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel's heart beat, and we
+should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.  As it
+is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
+
+However, Dorothea was crying, and if she had been required to state the
+cause, she could only have done so in some such general words as I have
+already used: to have been driven to be more particular would have been
+like trying to give a history of the lights and shadows, for that new
+real future which was replacing the imaginary drew its material from
+the endless minutiae by which her view of Mr. Casaubon and her wifely
+relation, now that she was married to him, was gradually changing with
+the secret motion of a watch-hand from what it had been in her maiden
+dream.  It was too early yet for her fully to recognize or at least
+admit the change, still more for her to have readjusted that
+devotedness which was so necessary a part of her mental life that she
+was almost sure sooner or later to recover it.  Permanent rebellion,
+the disorder of a life without some loving reverent resolve, was not
+possible to her; but she was now in an interval when the very force of
+her nature heightened its confusion.  In this way, the early months of
+marriage often are times of critical tumult--whether that of a
+shrimp-pool or of deeper waters--which afterwards subsides into
+cheerful peace.
+
+But was not Mr. Casaubon just as learned as before?  Had his forms of
+expression changed, or his sentiments become less laudable?  Oh
+waywardness of womanhood! did his chronology fail him, or his ability
+to state not only a theory but the names of those who held it; or his
+provision for giving the heads of any subject on demand?  And was not
+Rome the place in all the world to give free play to such
+accomplishments?  Besides, had not Dorothea's enthusiasm especially
+dwelt on the prospect of relieving the weight and perhaps the sadness
+with which great tasks lie on him who has to achieve them?--  And that
+such weight pressed on Mr. Casaubon was only plainer than before.
+
+All these are crushing questions; but whatever else remained the same,
+the light had changed, and you cannot find the pearly dawn at noonday.
+The fact is unalterable, that a fellow-mortal with whose nature you are
+acquainted solely through the brief entrances and exits of a few
+imaginative weeks called courtship, may, when seen in the continuity of
+married companionship, be disclosed as something better or worse than
+what you have preconceived, but will certainly not appear altogether
+the same.  And it would be astonishing to find how soon the change is
+felt if we had no kindred changes to compare with it.  To share
+lodgings with a brilliant dinner-companion, or to see your favorite
+politician in the Ministry, may bring about changes quite as rapid: in
+these cases too we begin by knowing little and believing much, and we
+sometimes end by inverting the quantities.
+
+Still, such comparisons might mislead, for no man was more incapable of
+flashy make-believe than Mr. Casaubon: he was as genuine a character as
+any ruminant animal, and he had not actively assisted in creating any
+illusions about himself.  How was it that in the weeks since her
+marriage, Dorothea had not distinctly observed but felt with a stifling
+depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she had
+dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms and
+winding passages which seemed to lead nowhither?  I suppose it was that
+in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and preliminary, and
+the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken to guarantee
+delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will reveal.  But
+the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is concentrated on
+the present.  Having once embarked on your marital voyage, it is
+impossible not to be aware that you make no way and that the sea is not
+within sight--that, in fact, you are exploring an enclosed basin.
+
+In their conversation before marriage, Mr. Casaubon had often dwelt on
+some explanation or questionable detail of which Dorothea did not see
+the bearing; but such imperfect coherence seemed due to the brokenness
+of their intercourse, and, supported by her faith in their future, she
+had listened with fervid patience to a recitation of possible arguments
+to be brought against Mr. Casaubon's entirely new view of the
+Philistine god Dagon and other fish-deities, thinking that hereafter
+she should see this subject which touched him so nearly from the same
+high ground whence doubtless it had become so important to him.  Again,
+the matter-of-course statement and tone of dismissal with which he
+treated what to her were the most stirring thoughts, was easily
+accounted for as belonging to the sense of haste and preoccupation in
+which she herself shared during their engagement.  But now, since they
+had been in Rome, with all the depths of her emotion roused to
+tumultuous activity, and with life made a new problem by new elements,
+she had been becoming more and more aware, with a certain terror, that
+her mind was continually sliding into inward fits of anger and
+repulsion, or else into forlorn weariness.  How far the judicious
+Hooker or any other hero of erudition would have been the same at Mr.
+Casaubon's time of life, she had no means of knowing, so that he could
+not have the advantage of comparison; but her husband's way of
+commenting on the strangely impressive objects around them had begun to
+affect her with a sort of mental shiver: he had perhaps the best
+intention of acquitting himself worthily, but only of acquitting
+himself.  What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; and such
+capacity of thought and feeling as had ever been stimulated in him by
+the general life of mankind had long shrunk to a sort of dried
+preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge.
+
+When he said, "Does this interest you, Dorothea?  Shall we stay a
+little longer?  I am ready to stay if you wish it,"--it seemed to her
+as if going or staying were alike dreary.  Or, "Should you like to go
+to the Farnesina, Dorothea?  It contains celebrated frescos designed or
+painted by Raphael, which most persons think it worth while to visit."
+
+"But do you care about them?" was always Dorothea's question.
+
+"They are, I believe, highly esteemed.  Some of them represent the
+fable of Cupid and Psyche, which is probably the romantic invention of
+a literary period, and cannot, I think, be reckoned as a genuine
+mythical product.  But if you like these wall-paintings we can easily
+drive thither; and you will then, I think, have seen the chief works of
+Raphael, any of which it were a pity to omit in a visit to Rome.  He is
+the painter who has been held to combine the most complete grace of
+form with sublimity of expression.  Such at least I have gathered to be
+the opinion of cognoscenti."
+
+This kind of answer given in a measured official tone, as of a
+clergyman reading according to the rubric, did not help to justify the
+glories of the Eternal City, or to give her the hope that if she knew
+more about them the world would be joyously illuminated for her.  There
+is hardly any contact more depressing to a young ardent creature than
+that of a mind in which years full of knowledge seem to have issued in
+a blank absence of interest or sympathy.
+
+On other subjects indeed Mr. Casaubon showed a tenacity of occupation
+and an eagerness which are usually regarded as the effect of
+enthusiasm, and Dorothea was anxious to follow this spontaneous
+direction of his thoughts, instead of being made to feel that she
+dragged him away from it.  But she was gradually ceasing to expect with
+her former delightful confidence that she should see any wide opening
+where she followed him.  Poor Mr. Casaubon himself was lost among small
+closets and winding stairs, and in an agitated dimness about the
+Cabeiri, or in an exposure of other mythologists' ill-considered
+parallels, easily lost sight of any purpose which had prompted him to
+these labors.  With his taper stuck before him he forgot the absence of
+windows, and in bitter manuscript remarks on other men's notions about
+the solar deities, he had become indifferent to the sunlight.
+
+These characteristics, fixed and unchangeable as bone in Mr. Casaubon,
+might have remained longer unfelt by Dorothea if she had been
+encouraged to pour forth her girlish and womanly feeling--if he would
+have held her hands between his and listened with the delight of
+tenderness and understanding to all the little histories which made up
+her experience, and would have given her the same sort of intimacy in
+return, so that the past life of each could be included in their mutual
+knowledge and affection--or if she could have fed her affection with
+those childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman, who
+has begun by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll,
+creating a happy soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own
+love.  That was Dorothea's bent.  With all her yearning to know what
+was afar from her and to be widely benignant, she had ardor enough for
+what was near, to have kissed Mr. Casaubon's coat-sleeve, or to have
+caressed his shoe-latchet, if he would have made any other sign of
+acceptance than pronouncing her, with his unfailing propriety, to be of
+a most affectionate and truly feminine nature, indicating at the same
+time by politely reaching a chair for her that he regarded these
+manifestations as rather crude and startling.  Having made his clerical
+toilet with due care in the morning, he was prepared only for those
+amenities of life which were suited to the well-adjusted stiff cravat
+of the period, and to a mind weighted with unpublished matter.
+
+And by a sad contradiction Dorothea's ideas and resolves seemed like
+melting ice floating and lost in the warm flood of which they had been
+but another form.  She was humiliated to find herself a mere victim of
+feeling, as if she could know nothing except through that medium: all
+her strength was scattered in fits of agitation, of struggle, of
+despondency, and then again in visions of more complete renunciation,
+transforming all hard conditions into duty.  Poor Dorothea! she was
+certainly troublesome--to herself chiefly; but this morning for the
+first time she had been troublesome to Mr. Casaubon.
+
+She had begun, while they were taking coffee, with a determination to
+shake off what she inwardly called her selfishness, and turned a face
+all cheerful attention to her husband when he said, "My dear Dorothea,
+we must now think of all that is yet left undone, as a preliminary to
+our departure.  I would fain have returned home earlier that we might
+have been at Lowick for the Christmas; but my inquiries here have been
+protracted beyond their anticipated period.  I trust, however, that the
+time here has not been passed unpleasantly to you.  Among the sights of
+Europe, that of Rome has ever been held one of the most striking and in
+some respects edifying.  I well remember that I considered it an epoch
+in my life when I visited it for the first time; after the fall of
+Napoleon, an event which opened the Continent to travellers.  Indeed I
+think it is one among several cities to which an extreme hyperbole has
+been applied--'See Rome and die:' but in your case I would propose an
+emendation and say, See Rome as a bride, and live henceforth as a happy
+wife."
+
+Mr. Casaubon pronounced this little speech with the most conscientious
+intention, blinking a little and swaying his head up and down, and
+concluding with a smile.  He had not found marriage a rapturous state,
+but he had no idea of being anything else than an irreproachable
+husband, who would make a charming young woman as happy as she deserved
+to be.
+
+"I hope you are thoroughly satisfied with our stay--I mean, with the
+result so far as your studies are concerned," said Dorothea, trying to
+keep her mind fixed on what most affected her husband.
+
+"Yes," said Mr. Casaubon, with that peculiar pitch of voice which makes
+the word half a negative.  "I have been led farther than I had
+foreseen, and various subjects for annotation have presented themselves
+which, though I have no direct need of them, I could not pretermit.
+The task, notwithstanding the assistance of my amanuensis, has been a
+somewhat laborious one, but your society has happily prevented me from
+that too continuous prosecution of thought beyond the hours of study
+which has been the snare of my solitary life."
+
+"I am very glad that my presence has made any difference to you," said
+Dorothea, who had a vivid memory of evenings in which she had supposed
+that Mr. Casaubon's mind had gone too deep during the day to be able to
+get to the surface again.  I fear there was a little temper in her
+reply.  "I hope when we get to Lowick, I shall be more useful to you,
+and be able to enter a little more into what interests you."
+
+"Doubtless, my dear," said Mr. Casaubon, with a slight bow.  "The notes
+I have here made will want sifting, and you can, if you please, extract
+them under my direction."
+
+"And all your notes," said Dorothea, whose heart had already burned
+within her on this subject, so that now she could not help speaking
+with her tongue.  "All those rows of volumes--will you not now do what
+you used to speak of?--will you not make up your mind what part of them
+you will use, and begin to write the book which will make your vast
+knowledge useful to the world?  I will write to your dictation, or I
+will copy and extract what you tell me: I can be of no other use."
+Dorothea, in a most unaccountable, darkly feminine manner, ended with a
+slight sob and eyes full of tears.
+
+The excessive feeling manifested would alone have been highly
+disturbing to Mr. Casaubon, but there were other reasons why Dorothea's
+words were among the most cutting and irritating to him that she could
+have been impelled to use.  She was as blind to his inward troubles as
+he to hers: she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her
+husband which claim our pity.  She had not yet listened patiently to
+his heartbeats, but only felt that her own was beating violently.  In
+Mr. Casaubon's ear, Dorothea's voice gave loud emphatic iteration to
+those muffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible to
+explain as mere fancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness:
+always when such suggestions are unmistakably repeated from without,
+they are resisted as cruel and unjust.  We are angered even by the full
+acceptance of our humiliating confessions--how much more by hearing in
+hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer, those
+confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive against as if
+they were the oncoming of numbness!  And this cruel outward accuser was
+there in the shape of a wife--nay, of a young bride, who, instead of
+observing his abundant pen-scratches and amplitude of paper with the
+uncritical awe of an elegant-minded canary-bird, seemed to present
+herself as a spy watching everything with a malign power of inference.
+Here, towards this particular point of the compass, Mr. Casaubon had a
+sensitiveness to match Dorothea's, and an equal quickness to imagine
+more than the fact.  He had formerly observed with approbation her
+capacity for worshipping the right object; he now foresaw with sudden
+terror that this capacity might be replaced by presumption, this
+worship by the most exasperating of all criticism,--that which sees
+vaguely a great many fine ends, and has not the least notion what it
+costs to reach them.
+
+For the first time since Dorothea had known him, Mr. Casaubon's face
+had a quick angry flush upon it.
+
+"My love," he said, with irritation reined in by propriety, "you may
+rely upon me for knowing the times and the seasons, adapted to the
+different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the facile
+conjectures of ignorant onlookers.  It had been easy for me to gain a
+temporary effect by a mirage of baseless opinion; but it is ever the
+trial of the scrupulous explorer to be saluted with the impatient scorn
+of chatterers who attempt only the smallest achievements, being indeed
+equipped for no other.  And it were well if all such could be
+admonished to discriminate judgments of which the true subject-matter
+lies entirely beyond their reach, from those of which the elements may
+be compassed by a narrow and superficial survey."
+
+This speech was delivered with an energy and readiness quite unusual
+with Mr. Casaubon.  It was not indeed entirely an improvisation, but
+had taken shape in inward colloquy, and rushed out like the round
+grains from a fruit when sudden heat cracks it.  Dorothea was not only
+his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which
+surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.
+
+Dorothea was indignant in her turn.  Had she not been repressing
+everything in herself except the desire to enter into some fellowship
+with her husband's chief interests?
+
+"My judgment _was_ a very superficial one--such as I am capable of
+forming," she answered, with a prompt resentment, that needed no
+rehearsal.  "You showed me the rows of notebooks--you have often spoken
+of them--you have often said that they wanted digesting.  But I never
+heard you speak of the writing that is to be published.  Those were
+very simple facts, and my judgment went no farther.  I only begged you
+to let me be of some good to you."
+
+Dorothea rose to leave the table and Mr. Casaubon made no reply, taking
+up a letter which lay beside him as if to reperuse it.  Both were
+shocked at their mutual situation--that each should have betrayed anger
+towards the other.  If they had been at home, settled at Lowick in
+ordinary life among their neighbors, the clash would have been less
+embarrassing: but on a wedding journey, the express object of which is
+to isolate two people on the ground that they are all the world to each
+other, the sense of disagreement is, to say the least, confounding and
+stultifying.  To have changed your longitude extensively and placed
+yourselves in a moral solitude in order to have small explosions, to
+find conversation difficult and to hand a glass of water without
+looking, can hardly be regarded as satisfactory fulfilment even to the
+toughest minds.  To Dorothea's inexperienced sensitiveness, it seemed
+like a catastrophe, changing all prospects; and to Mr. Casaubon it was
+a new pain, he never having been on a wedding journey before, or found
+himself in that close union which was more of a subjection than he had
+been able to imagine, since this charming young bride not only obliged
+him to much consideration on her behalf (which he had sedulously
+given), but turned out to be capable of agitating him cruelly just
+where he most needed soothing.  Instead of getting a soft fence against
+the cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life, had he only given
+it a more substantial presence?
+
+Neither of them felt it possible to speak again at present.  To have
+reversed a previous arrangement and declined to go out would have been
+a show of persistent anger which Dorothea's conscience shrank from,
+seeing that she already began to feel herself guilty.  However just her
+indignation might be, her ideal was not to claim justice, but to give
+tenderness.  So when the carriage came to the door, she drove with Mr.
+Casaubon to the Vatican, walked with him through the stony avenue of
+inscriptions, and when she parted with him at the entrance to the
+Library, went on through the Museum out of mere listlessness as to what
+was around her.  She had not spirit to turn round and say that she
+would drive anywhere.  It was when Mr. Casaubon was quitting her that
+Naumann had first seen her, and he had entered the long gallery of
+sculpture at the same time with her; but here Naumann had to await
+Ladislaw with whom he was to settle a bet of champagne about an
+enigmatical mediaeval-looking figure there.  After they had examined
+the figure, and had walked on finishing their dispute, they had parted,
+Ladislaw lingering behind while Naumann had gone into the Hall of
+Statues where he again saw Dorothea, and saw her in that brooding
+abstraction which made her pose remarkable.  She did not really see the
+streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues: she was
+inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the
+English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads; and feeling that
+the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not
+so clear to her as it had been.  But in Dorothea's mind there was a
+current into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to
+flow--the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the
+fullest truth, the least partial good.  There was clearly something
+better than anger and despondency.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI.
+
+    "Hire facounde eke full womanly and plain,
+     No contrefeted termes had she
+     To semen wise."
+                        --CHAUCER.
+
+
+It was in that way Dorothea came to be sobbing as soon as she was
+securely alone.  But she was presently roused by a knock at the door,
+which made her hastily dry her eyes before saying, "Come in." Tantripp
+had brought a card, and said that there was a gentleman waiting in the
+lobby.  The courier had told him that only Mrs. Casaubon was at home,
+but he said he was a relation of Mr. Casaubon's: would she see him?
+
+"Yes," said Dorothea, without pause; "show him into the salon." Her
+chief impressions about young Ladislaw were that when she had seen him
+at Lowick she had been made aware of Mr. Casaubon's generosity towards
+him, and also that she had been interested in his own hesitation about
+his career.  She was alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for
+active sympathy, and at this moment it seemed as if the visit had come
+to shake her out of her self-absorbed discontent--to remind her of her
+husband's goodness, and make her feel that she had now the right to be
+his helpmate in all kind deeds.  She waited a minute or two, but when
+she passed into the next room there were just signs enough that she had
+been crying to make her open face look more youthful and appealing than
+usual.  She met Ladislaw with that exquisite smile of good-will which
+is unmixed with vanity, and held out her hand to him.  He was the elder
+by several years, but at that moment he looked much the younger, for
+his transparent complexion flushed suddenly, and he spoke with a
+shyness extremely unlike the ready indifference of his manner with his
+male companion, while Dorothea became all the calmer with a wondering
+desire to put him at ease.
+
+"I was not aware that you and Mr. Casaubon were in Rome, until this
+morning, when I saw you in the Vatican Museum," he said.  "I knew you
+at once--but--I mean, that I concluded Mr. Casaubon's address would be
+found at the Poste Restante, and I was anxious to pay my respects to
+him and you as early as possible."
+
+"Pray sit down.  He is not here now, but he will be glad to hear of
+you, I am sure," said Dorothea, seating herself unthinkingly between
+the fire and the light of the tall window, and pointing to a chair
+opposite, with the quietude of a benignant matron.  The signs of
+girlish sorrow in her face were only the more striking.  "Mr. Casaubon
+is much engaged; but you will leave your address--will you not?--and
+he will write to you."
+
+"You are very good," said Ladislaw, beginning to lose his diffidence in
+the interest with which he was observing the signs of weeping which had
+altered her face.  "My address is on my card.  But if you will allow me
+I will call again to-morrow at an hour when Mr. Casaubon is likely to
+be at home."
+
+"He goes to read in the Library of the Vatican every day, and you can
+hardly see him except by an appointment.  Especially now.  We are about
+to leave Rome, and he is very busy.  He is usually away almost from
+breakfast till dinner.  But I am sure he will wish you to dine with us."
+
+Will Ladislaw was struck mute for a few moments.  He had never been
+fond of Mr. Casaubon, and if it had not been for the sense of
+obligation, would have laughed at him as a Bat of erudition.  But the
+idea of this dried-up pedant, this elaborator of small explanations
+about as important as the surplus stock of false antiquities kept in a
+vendor's back chamber, having first got this adorable young creature to
+marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after
+his mouldy futilities (Will was given to hyperbole)--this sudden
+picture stirred him with a sort of comic disgust: he was divided
+between the impulse to laugh aloud and the equally unseasonable impulse
+to burst into scornful invective.
+
+For an instant he felt that the struggle, was causing a queer
+contortion of his mobile features, but with a good effort he resolved
+it into nothing more offensive than a merry smile.
+
+Dorothea wondered; but the smile was irresistible, and shone back from
+her face too.  Will Ladislaw's smile was delightful, unless you were
+angry with him beforehand: it was a gush of inward light illuminating
+the transparent skin as well as the eyes, and playing about every curve
+and line as if some Ariel were touching them with a new charm, and
+banishing forever the traces of moodiness.  The reflection of that
+smile could not but have a little merriment in it too, even under dark
+eyelashes still moist, as Dorothea said inquiringly, "Something amuses
+you?"
+
+"Yes," said Will, quick in finding resources.  "I am thinking of the
+sort of figure I cut the first time I saw you, when you annihilated my
+poor sketch with your criticism."
+
+"My criticism?" said Dorothea, wondering still more.  "Surely not.  I
+always feel particularly ignorant about painting."
+
+"I suspected you of knowing so much, that you knew how to say just what
+was most cutting.  You said--I dare say you don't remember it as I
+do--that the relation of my sketch to nature was quite hidden from you.
+At least, you implied that."  Will could laugh now as well as smile.
+
+"That was really my ignorance," said Dorothea, admiring
+Will's good-humor. "I must have said so only because I never could see
+any beauty in the pictures which my uncle told me all judges thought
+very fine.  And I have gone about with just the same ignorance in Rome.
+There are comparatively few paintings that I can really enjoy.  At
+first when I enter a room where the walls are covered with frescos, or
+with rare pictures, I feel a kind of awe--like a child present at great
+ceremonies where there are grand robes and processions; I feel myself
+in the presence of some higher life than my own.  But when I begin to
+examine the pictures one by one the life goes out of them, or else is
+something violent and strange to me.  It must be my own dulness.  I am
+seeing so much all at once, and not understanding half of it.  That
+always makes one feel stupid.  It is painful to be told that anything
+is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine--something like
+being blind, while people talk of the sky."
+
+"Oh, there is a great deal in the feeling for art which must be
+acquired," said Will.  (It was impossible now to doubt the directness
+of Dorothea's confession.) "Art is an old language with a great many
+artificial affected styles, and sometimes the chief pleasure one gets
+out of knowing them is the mere sense of knowing.  I enjoy the art of
+all sorts here immensely; but I suppose if I could pick my enjoyment to
+pieces I should find it made up of many different threads.  There is
+something in daubing a little one's self, and having an idea of the
+process."
+
+"You mean perhaps to be a painter?" said Dorothea, with a new direction
+of interest.  "You mean to make painting your profession?  Mr. Casaubon
+will like to hear that you have chosen a profession."
+
+"No, oh no," said Will, with some coldness.  "I have quite made up my
+mind against it.  It is too one-sided a life.  I have been seeing a
+great deal of the German artists here: I travelled from Frankfort with
+one of them.  Some are fine, even brilliant fellows--but I should not
+like to get into their way of looking at the world entirely from the
+studio point of view."
+
+"That I can understand," said Dorothea, cordially.  "And in Rome it
+seems as if there were so many things which are more wanted in the
+world than pictures.  But if you have a genius for painting, would it
+not be right to take that as a guide?  Perhaps you might do better
+things than these--or different, so that there might not be so many
+pictures almost all alike in the same place."
+
+There was no mistaking this simplicity, and Will was won by it into
+frankness.  "A man must have a very rare genius to make changes of that
+sort.  I am afraid mine would not carry me even to the pitch of doing
+well what has been done already, at least not so well as to make it
+worth while.  And I should never succeed in anything by dint of
+drudgery.  If things don't come easily to me I never get them."
+
+"I have heard Mr. Casaubon say that he regrets your want of patience,"
+said Dorothea, gently.  She was rather shocked at this mode of taking
+all life as a holiday.
+
+"Yes, I know Mr. Casaubon's opinion.  He and I differ."
+
+The slight streak of contempt in this hasty reply offended Dorothea.
+She was all the more susceptible about Mr. Casaubon because of her
+morning's trouble.
+
+"Certainly you differ," she said, rather proudly.  "I did not think of
+comparing you: such power of persevering devoted labor as Mr.
+Casaubon's is not common."
+
+Will saw that she was offended, but this only gave an additional
+impulse to the new irritation of his latent dislike towards Mr.
+Casaubon.  It was too intolerable that Dorothea should be worshipping
+this husband: such weakness in a woman is pleasant to no man but the
+husband in question.  Mortals are easily tempted to pinch the life out
+of their neighbor's buzzing glory, and think that such killing is no
+murder.
+
+"No, indeed," he answered, promptly.  "And therefore it is a pity that
+it should be thrown away, as so much English scholarship is, for want
+of knowing what is being done by the rest of the world.  If Mr.
+Casaubon read German he would save himself a great deal of trouble."
+
+"I do not understand you," said Dorothea, startled and anxious.
+
+"I merely mean," said Will, in an offhand way, "that the Germans have
+taken the lead in historical inquiries, and they laugh at results which
+are got by groping about in woods with a pocket-compass while they have
+made good roads.  When I was with Mr. Casaubon I saw that he deafened
+himself in that direction: it was almost against his will that he read
+a Latin treatise written by a German.  I was very sorry."
+
+Will only thought of giving a good pinch that would annihilate that
+vaunted laboriousness, and was unable to imagine the mode in which
+Dorothea would be wounded.  Young Mr. Ladislaw was not at all deep
+himself in German writers; but very little achievement is required in
+order to pity another man's shortcomings.
+
+Poor Dorothea felt a pang at the thought that the labor of her
+husband's life might be void, which left her no energy to spare for the
+question whether this young relative who was so much obliged to him
+ought not to have repressed his observation.  She did not even speak,
+but sat looking at her hands, absorbed in the piteousness of that
+thought.
+
+Will, however, having given that annihilating pinch, was rather
+ashamed, imagining from Dorothea's silence that he had offended her
+still more; and having also a conscience about plucking the
+tail-feathers from a benefactor.
+
+"I regretted it especially," he resumed, taking the usual course from
+detraction to insincere eulogy, "because of my gratitude and respect
+towards my cousin.  It would not signify so much in a man whose talents
+and character were less distinguished."
+
+Dorothea raised her eyes, brighter than usual with excited feeling, and
+said in her saddest recitative, "How I wish I had learned German when I
+was at Lausanne!  There were plenty of German teachers.  But now I can
+be of no use."
+
+There was a new light, but still a mysterious light, for Will in
+Dorothea's last words.  The question how she had come to accept Mr.
+Casaubon--which he had dismissed when he first saw her by saying that
+she must be disagreeable in spite of appearances--was not now to be
+answered on any such short and easy method.  Whatever else she might
+be, she was not disagreeable.  She was not coldly clever and indirectly
+satirical, but adorably simple and full of feeling.  She was an angel
+beguiled.  It would be a unique delight to wait and watch for the
+melodious fragments in which her heart and soul came forth so directly
+and ingenuously.  The Aeolian harp again came into his mind.
+
+She must have made some original romance for herself in this marriage.
+And if Mr. Casaubon had been a dragon who had carried her off to his
+lair with his talons simply and without legal forms, it would have been
+an unavoidable feat of heroism to release her and fall at her feet.
+But he was something more unmanageable than a dragon: he was a
+benefactor with collective society at his back, and he was at that
+moment entering the room in all the unimpeachable correctness of his
+demeanor, while Dorothea was looking animated with a newly roused alarm
+and regret, and Will was looking animated with his admiring speculation
+about her feelings.
+
+Mr. Casaubon felt a surprise which was quite unmixed with pleasure, but
+he did not swerve from his usual politeness of greeting, when Will rose
+and explained his presence.  Mr. Casaubon was less happy than usual,
+and this perhaps made him look all the dimmer and more faded; else, the
+effect might easily have been produced by the contrast of his young
+cousin's appearance.  The first impression on seeing Will was one of
+sunny brightness, which added to the uncertainty of his changing
+expression.  Surely, his very features changed their form, his jaw
+looked sometimes large and sometimes small; and the little ripple in
+his nose was a preparation for metamorphosis.  When he turned his head
+quickly his hair seemed to shake out light, and some persons thought
+they saw decided genius in this coruscation.  Mr. Casaubon, on the
+contrary, stood rayless.
+
+As Dorothea's eyes were turned anxiously on her husband she was perhaps
+not insensible to the contrast, but it was only mingled with other
+causes in making her more conscious of that new alarm on his behalf
+which was the first stirring of a pitying tenderness fed by the
+realities of his lot and not by her own dreams.  Yet it was a source of
+greater freedom to her that Will was there; his young equality was
+agreeable, and also perhaps his openness to conviction.  She felt an
+immense need of some one to speak to, and she had never before seen any
+one who seemed so quick and pliable, so likely to understand everything.
+
+Mr. Casaubon gravely hoped that Will was passing his time profitably as
+well as pleasantly in Rome--had thought his intention was to remain in
+South Germany--but begged him to come and dine to-morrow, when he could
+converse more at large: at present he was somewhat weary.  Ladislaw
+understood, and accepting the invitation immediately took his leave.
+
+Dorothea's eyes followed her husband anxiously, while he sank down
+wearily at the end of a sofa, and resting his elbow supported his head
+and looked on the floor.  A little flushed, and with bright eyes, she
+seated herself beside him, and said--
+
+"Forgive me for speaking so hastily to you this morning.  I was wrong.
+I fear I hurt you and made the day more burdensome."
+
+"I am glad that you feel that, my dear," said Mr. Casaubon.  He spoke
+quietly and bowed his head a little, but there was still an uneasy
+feeling in his eyes as he looked at her.
+
+"But you do forgive me?" said Dorothea, with a quick sob.  In her need
+for some manifestation of feeling she was ready to exaggerate her own
+fault.  Would not love see returning penitence afar off, and fall on
+its neck and kiss it?
+
+"My dear Dorothea--'who with repentance is not satisfied, is not of
+heaven nor earth:'--you do not think me worthy to be banished by that
+severe sentence," said Mr. Casaubon, exerting himself to make a strong
+statement, and also to smile faintly.
+
+Dorothea was silent, but a tear which had come up with the sob would
+insist on falling.
+
+"You are excited, my dear. And I also am feeling some unpleasant
+consequences of too much mental disturbance," said Mr. Casaubon.  In
+fact, he had it in his thought to tell her that she ought not to have
+received young Ladislaw in his absence: but he abstained, partly from
+the sense that it would be ungracious to bring a new complaint in the
+moment of her penitent acknowledgment, partly because he wanted to
+avoid further agitation of himself by speech, and partly because he was
+too proud to betray that jealousy of disposition which was not so
+exhausted on his scholarly compeers that there was none to spare in
+other directions.  There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little
+fire: it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp
+despondency of uneasy egoism.
+
+"I think it is time for us to dress," he added, looking at his watch.
+They both rose, and there was never any further allusion between them
+to what had passed on this day.
+
+But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we
+all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies,
+or some new motive is born.  Today she had begun to see that she had
+been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from
+Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there
+might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on
+his side as on her own.
+
+We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder
+to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from
+that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she
+would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his
+strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is
+no longer reflection but feeling--an idea wrought back to the
+directness of sense, like the solidity of objects--that he had an
+equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always
+fall with a certain difference.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII.
+
+    "Nous câusames longtemps; elle était simple et bonne.
+     Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien;
+     Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l'aumône,
+     Et tout en écoutant comme le coeur se donne,
+     Sans oser y penser je lui donnai le mien;
+     Elle emporta ma vie, et n'en sut jamais rien."
+                                         --ALFRED DE MUSSET.
+
+
+Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day, and
+gave no opportunity for Mr. Casaubon to show disapprobation.  On the
+contrary it seemed to Dorothea that Will had a happier way of drawing
+her husband into conversation and of deferentially listening to him
+than she had ever observed in any one before.  To be sure, the
+listeners about Tipton were not highly gifted!  Will talked a good deal
+himself, but what he said was thrown in with such rapidity, and with
+such an unimportant air of saying something by the way, that it seemed
+a gay little chime after the great bell.  If Will was not always
+perfect, this was certainly one of his good days.  He described touches
+of incident among the poor people in Rome, only to be seen by one who
+could move about freely; he found himself in agreement with Mr.
+Casaubon as to the unsound opinions of Middleton concerning the
+relations of Judaism and Catholicism; and passed easily to a
+half-enthusiastic half-playful picture of the enjoyment he got out of
+the very miscellaneousness of Rome, which made the mind flexible with
+constant comparison, and saved you from seeing the world's ages as a
+set of box-like partitions without vital connection.  Mr. Casaubon's
+studies, Will observed, had always been of too broad a kind for that,
+and he had perhaps never felt any such sudden effect, but for himself
+he confessed that Rome had given him quite a new sense of history as a
+whole: the fragments stimulated his imagination and made him
+constructive.  Then occasionally, but not too often, he appealed to
+Dorothea, and discussed what she said, as if her sentiment were an item
+to be considered in the final judgment even of the Madonna di Foligno
+or the Laocoon.  A sense of contributing to form the world's opinion
+makes conversation particularly cheerful; and Mr. Casaubon too was not
+without his pride in his young wife, who spoke better than most women,
+as indeed he had perceived in choosing her.
+
+Since things were going on so pleasantly, Mr. Casaubon's statement that
+his labors in the Library would be suspended for a couple of days, and
+that after a brief renewal he should have no further reason for staying
+in Rome, encouraged Will to urge that Mrs. Casaubon should not go away
+without seeing a studio or two.  Would not Mr. Casaubon take her?  That
+sort of thing ought not to be missed: it was quite special: it was a
+form of life that grew like a small fresh vegetation with its
+population of insects on huge fossils.  Will would be happy to conduct
+them--not to anything wearisome, only to a few examples.
+
+Mr. Casaubon, seeing Dorothea look earnestly towards him, could not but
+ask her if she would be interested in such visits: he was now at her
+service during the whole day; and it was agreed that Will should come
+on the morrow and drive with them.
+
+Will could not omit Thorwaldsen, a living celebrity about whom even Mr.
+Casaubon inquired, but before the day was far advanced he led the way
+to the studio of his friend Adolf Naumann, whom he mentioned as one of
+the chief renovators of Christian art, one of those who had not only
+revived but expanded that grand conception of supreme events as
+mysteries at which the successive ages were spectators, and in relation
+to which the great souls of all periods became as it were
+contemporaries.  Will added that he had made himself Naumann's pupil
+for the nonce.
+
+"I have been making some oil-sketches under him," said Will.  "I hate
+copying.  I must put something of my own in.  Naumann has been painting
+the Saints drawing the Car of the Church, and I have been making a
+sketch of Marlowe's Tamburlaine Driving the Conquered Kings in his
+Chariot.  I am not so ecclesiastical as Naumann, and I sometimes twit
+him with his excess of meaning.  But this time I mean to outdo him in
+breadth of intention.  I take Tamburlaine in his chariot for the
+tremendous course of the world's physical history lashing on the
+harnessed dynasties.  In my opinion, that is a good mythical
+interpretation."  Will here looked at Mr. Casaubon, who received this
+offhand treatment of symbolism very uneasily, and bowed with a neutral
+air.
+
+"The sketch must be very grand, if it conveys so much," said Dorothea.
+"I should need some explanation even of the meaning you give.  Do you
+intend Tamburlaine to represent earthquakes and volcanoes?"
+
+"Oh yes," said Will, laughing, "and migrations of races and clearings
+of forests--and America and the steam-engine. Everything you can
+imagine!"
+
+"What a difficult kind of shorthand!" said Dorothea, smiling towards
+her husband.  "It would require all your knowledge to be able to read
+it."
+
+Mr. Casaubon blinked furtively at Will.  He had a suspicion that he was
+being laughed at.  But it was not possible to include Dorothea in the
+suspicion.
+
+They found Naumann painting industriously, but no model was present;
+his pictures were advantageously arranged, and his own plain vivacious
+person set off by a dove-colored blouse and a maroon velvet cap, so
+that everything was as fortunate as if he had expected the beautiful
+young English lady exactly at that time.
+
+The painter in his confident English gave little dissertations on his
+finished and unfinished subjects, seeming to observe Mr. Casaubon as
+much as he did Dorothea.  Will burst in here and there with ardent
+words of praise, marking out particular merits in his friend's work;
+and Dorothea felt that she was getting quite new notions as to the
+significance of Madonnas seated under inexplicable canopied thrones
+with the simple country as a background, and of saints with
+architectural models in their hands, or knives accidentally wedged in
+their skulls.  Some things which had seemed monstrous to her were
+gathering intelligibility and even a natural meaning: but all this was
+apparently a branch of knowledge in which Mr. Casaubon had not
+interested himself.
+
+"I think I would rather feel that painting is beautiful than have to
+read it as an enigma; but I should learn to understand these pictures
+sooner than yours with the very wide meaning," said Dorothea, speaking
+to Will.
+
+"Don't speak of my painting before Naumann," said Will.  "He will tell
+you, it is all pfuscherei, which is his most opprobrious word!"
+
+"Is that true?" said Dorothea, turning her sincere eyes on Naumann, who
+made a slight grimace and said--
+
+"Oh, he does not mean it seriously with painting.  His walk must be
+belles-lettres. That is wi-ide."
+
+Naumann's pronunciation of the vowel seemed to stretch the word
+satirically.  Will did not half like it, but managed to laugh: and Mr.
+Casaubon, while he felt some disgust at the artist's German accent,
+began to entertain a little respect for his judicious severity.
+
+The respect was not diminished when Naumann, after drawing Will aside
+for a moment and looking, first at a large canvas, then at Mr.
+Casaubon, came forward again and said--
+
+"My friend Ladislaw thinks you will pardon me, sir, if I say that a
+sketch of your head would be invaluable to me for the St. Thomas
+Aquinas in my picture there.  It is too much to ask; but I so seldom
+see just what I want--the idealistic in the real."
+
+"You astonish me greatly, sir," said Mr. Casaubon, his looks improved
+with a glow of delight; "but if my poor physiognomy, which I have been
+accustomed to regard as of the commonest order, can be of any use to
+you in furnishing some traits for the angelical doctor, I shall feel
+honored.  That is to say, if the operation will not be a lengthy one;
+and if Mrs. Casaubon will not object to the delay."
+
+As for Dorothea, nothing could have pleased her more, unless it had
+been a miraculous voice pronouncing Mr. Casaubon the wisest and
+worthiest among the sons of men.  In that case her tottering faith
+would have become firm again.
+
+Naumann's apparatus was at hand in wonderful completeness, and the
+sketch went on at once as well as the conversation.  Dorothea sat down
+and subsided into calm silence, feeling happier than she had done for a
+long while before.  Every one about her seemed good, and she said to
+herself that Rome, if she had only been less ignorant, would have been
+full of beauty: its sadness would have been winged with hope.  No nature
+could be less suspicious than hers: when she was a child she believed
+in the gratitude of wasps and the honorable susceptibility of sparrows,
+and was proportionately indignant when their baseness was made manifest.
+
+The adroit artist was asking Mr. Casaubon questions about English
+polities, which brought long answers, and, Will meanwhile had perched
+himself on some steps in the background overlooking all.
+
+Presently Naumann said--"Now if I could lay this by for half an hour
+and take it up again--come and look, Ladislaw--I think it is perfect so
+far."
+
+Will vented those adjuring interjections which imply that admiration is
+too strong for syntax; and Naumann said in a tone of piteous regret--
+
+"Ah--now--if I could but have had more--but you have other
+engagements--I could not ask it--or even to come again to-morrow."
+
+"Oh, let us stay!" said Dorothea.  "We have nothing to do to-day except
+go about, have we?" she added, looking entreatingly at Mr. Casaubon.
+"It would be a pity not to make the head as good as possible."
+
+"I am at your service, sir, in the matter," said Mr. Casaubon, with
+polite condescension.  "Having given up the interior of my head to
+idleness, it is as well that the exterior should work in this way."
+
+"You are unspeakably good--now I am happy!" said Naumann, and then went
+on in German to Will, pointing here and there to the sketch as if he
+were considering that.  Putting it aside for a moment, he looked round
+vaguely, as if seeking some occupation for his visitors, and afterwards
+turning to Mr. Casaubon, said--
+
+"Perhaps the beautiful bride, the gracious lady, would not be unwilling
+to let me fill up the time by trying to make a slight sketch of
+her--not, of course, as you see, for that picture--only as a single
+study."
+
+Mr. Casaubon, bowing, doubted not that Mrs. Casaubon would oblige him,
+and Dorothea said, at once, "Where shall I put myself?"
+
+Naumann was all apologies in asking her to stand, and allow him to
+adjust her attitude, to which she submitted without any of the affected
+airs and laughs frequently thought necessary on such occasions, when
+the painter said, "It is as Santa Clara that I want you to
+stand--leaning so, with your cheek against your hand--so--looking at
+that stool, please, so!"
+
+Will was divided between the inclination to fall at the Saint's feet
+and kiss her robe, and the temptation to knock Naumann down while he
+was adjusting her arm.  All this was impudence and desecration, and he
+repented that he had brought her.
+
+The artist was diligent, and Will recovering himself moved about and
+occupied Mr. Casaubon as ingeniously as he could; but he did not in the
+end prevent the time from seeming long to that gentleman, as was clear
+from his expressing a fear that Mrs. Casaubon would be tired.  Naumann
+took the hint and said--
+
+"Now, sir, if you can oblige me again; I will release the lady-wife."
+
+So Mr. Casaubon's patience held out further, and when after all it
+turned out that the head of Saint Thomas Aquinas would be more perfect
+if another sitting could be had, it was granted for the morrow.  On the
+morrow Santa Clara too was retouched more than once.  The result of all
+was so far from displeasing to Mr. Casaubon, that he arranged for the
+purchase of the picture in which Saint Thomas Aquinas sat among the
+doctors of the Church in a disputation too abstract to be represented,
+but listened to with more or less attention by an audience above.  The
+Santa Clara, which was spoken of in the second place, Naumann declared
+himself to be dissatisfied with--he could not, in conscience, engage
+to make a worthy picture of it; so about the Santa Clara the
+arrangement was conditional.
+
+I will not dwell on Naumann's jokes at the expense of Mr. Casaubon that
+evening, or on his dithyrambs about Dorothea's charm, in all which Will
+joined, but with a difference.  No sooner did Naumann mention any
+detail of Dorothea's beauty, than Will got exasperated at his
+presumption: there was grossness in his choice of the most ordinary
+words, and what business had he to talk of her lips?  She was not a
+woman to be spoken of as other women were.  Will could not say just
+what he thought, but he became irritable.  And yet, when after some
+resistance he had consented to take the Casaubons to his friend's
+studio, he had been allured by the gratification of his pride in being
+the person who could grant Naumann such an opportunity of studying her
+loveliness--or rather her divineness, for the ordinary phrases which
+might apply to mere bodily prettiness were not applicable to her.
+(Certainly all Tipton and its neighborhood, as well as Dorothea
+herself, would have been surprised at her beauty being made so much of.
+In that part of the world Miss Brooke had been only a "fine young
+woman.")
+
+"Oblige me by letting the subject drop, Naumann.  Mrs. Casaubon is not
+to be talked of as if she were a model," said Will.  Naumann stared at
+him.
+
+"Schon!  I will talk of my Aquinas.  The head is not a bad type, after
+all.  I dare say the great scholastic himself would have been flattered
+to have his portrait asked for.  Nothing like these starchy doctors for
+vanity!  It was as I thought: he cared much less for her portrait than
+his own."
+
+"He's a cursed white-blooded pedantic coxcomb," said Will, with
+gnashing impetuosity.  His obligations to Mr. Casaubon were not known
+to his hearer, but Will himself was thinking of them, and wishing that
+he could discharge them all by a check.
+
+Naumann gave a shrug and said, "It is good they go away soon, my dear.
+They are spoiling your fine temper."
+
+All Will's hope and contrivance were now concentrated on seeing
+Dorothea when she was alone.  He only wanted her to take more emphatic
+notice of him; he only wanted to be something more special in her
+remembrance than he could yet believe himself likely to be.  He was
+rather impatient under that open ardent good-will, which he saw was her
+usual state of feeling.  The remote worship of a woman throned out of
+their reach plays a great part in men's lives, but in most cases the
+worshipper longs for some queenly recognition, some approving sign by
+which his soul's sovereign may cheer him without descending from her
+high place.  That was precisely what Will wanted.  But there were
+plenty of contradictions in his imaginative demands.  It was beautiful
+to see how Dorothea's eyes turned with wifely anxiety and beseeching to
+Mr. Casaubon: she would have lost some of her halo if she had been
+without that duteous preoccupation; and yet at the next moment the
+husband's sandy absorption of such nectar was too intolerable; and
+Will's longing to say damaging things about him was perhaps not the
+less tormenting because he felt the strongest reasons for restraining
+it.
+
+Will had not been invited to dine the next day.  Hence he persuaded
+himself that he was bound to call, and that the only eligible time was
+the middle of the day, when Mr. Casaubon would not be at home.
+
+Dorothea, who had not been made aware that her former reception of Will
+had displeased her husband, had no hesitation about seeing him,
+especially as he might be come to pay a farewell visit.  When he
+entered she was looking at some cameos which she had been buying for
+Celia.  She greeted Will as if his visit were quite a matter of course,
+and said at once, having a cameo bracelet in her hand--
+
+"I am so glad you are come.  Perhaps you understand all about cameos,
+and can tell me if these are really good.  I wished to have you with us
+in choosing them, but Mr. Casaubon objected: he thought there was not
+time.  He will finish his work to-morrow, and we shall go away in three
+days.  I have been uneasy about these cameos.  Pray sit down and look
+at them."
+
+"I am not particularly knowing, but there can be no great mistake about
+these little Homeric bits: they are exquisitely neat.  And the color is
+fine: it will just suit you."
+
+"Oh, they are for my sister, who has quite a different complexion.  You
+saw her with me at Lowick: she is light-haired and very pretty--at
+least I think so.  We were never so long away from each other in our
+lives before.  She is a great pet and never was naughty in her life.  I
+found out before I came away that she wanted me to buy her some cameos,
+and I should be sorry for them not to be good--after their kind."
+Dorothea added the last words with a smile.
+
+"You seem not to care about cameos," said Will, seating himself at some
+distance from her, and observing her while she closed the cases.
+
+"No, frankly, I don't think them a great object in life," said Dorothea
+
+"I fear you are a heretic about art generally.  How is that?  I should
+have expected you to be very sensitive to the beautiful everywhere."
+
+"I suppose I am dull about many things," said Dorothea, simply.  "I
+should like to make life beautiful--I mean everybody's life.  And then
+all this immense expense of art, that seems somehow to lie outside life
+and make it no better for the world, pains one.  It spoils my enjoyment
+of anything when I am made to think that most people are shut out from
+it."
+
+"I call that the fanaticism of sympathy," said Will, impetuously.  "You
+might say the same of landscape, of poetry, of all refinement.  If you
+carried it out you ought to be miserable in your own goodness, and turn
+evil that you might have no advantage over others.  The best piety is
+to enjoy--when you can.  You are doing the most then to save the
+earth's character as an agreeable planet.  And enjoyment radiates.  It
+is of no use to try and take care of all the world; that is being taken
+care of when you feel delight--in art or in anything else.  Would you
+turn all the youth of the world into a tragic chorus, wailing and
+moralizing over misery?  I suspect that you have some false belief in
+the virtues of misery, and want to make your life a martyrdom."  Will
+had gone further than he intended, and checked himself.  But Dorothea's
+thought was not taking just the same direction as his own, and she
+answered without any special emotion--
+
+"Indeed you mistake me.  I am not a sad, melancholy creature.  I am
+never unhappy long together.  I am angry and naughty--not like Celia: I
+have a great outburst, and then all seems glorious again.  I cannot
+help believing in glorious things in a blind sort of way.  I should be
+quite willing to enjoy the art here, but there is so much that I don't
+know the reason of--so much that seems to me a consecration of ugliness
+rather than beauty.  The painting and sculpture may be wonderful, but
+the feeling is often low and brutal, and sometimes even ridiculous.
+Here and there I see what takes me at once as noble--something that I
+might compare with the Alban Mountains or the sunset from the Pincian
+Hill; but that makes it the greater pity that there is so little of the
+best kind among all that mass of things over which men have toiled so."
+
+"Of course there is always a great deal of poor work: the rarer things
+want that soil to grow in."
+
+"Oh dear," said Dorothea, taking up that thought into the chief current
+of her anxiety; "I see it must be very difficult to do anything good.
+I have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives
+would look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures, if they
+could be put on the wall."
+
+Dorothea parted her lips again as if she were going to say more, but
+changed her mind and paused.
+
+"You are too young--it is an anachronism for you to have such
+thoughts," said Will, energetically, with a quick shake of the head
+habitual to him.  "You talk as if you had never known any youth.  It is
+monstrous--as if you had had a vision of Hades in your childhood, like
+the boy in the legend.  You have been brought up in some of those
+horrible notions that choose the sweetest women to devour--like
+Minotaurs. And now you will go and be shut up in that stone prison at
+Lowick: you will be buried alive.  It makes me savage to think of it!
+I would rather never have seen you than think of you with such a
+prospect."
+
+Will again feared that he had gone too far; but the meaning we attach
+to words depends on our feeling, and his tone of angry regret had so
+much kindness in it for Dorothea's heart, which had always been giving
+out ardor and had never been fed with much from the living beings
+around her, that she felt a new sense of gratitude and answered with a
+gentle smile--
+
+"It is very good of you to be anxious about me.  It is because you did
+not like Lowick yourself: you had set your heart on another kind of
+life.  But Lowick is my chosen home."
+
+The last sentence was spoken with an almost solemn cadence, and Will
+did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him to
+embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her: it was
+clear that she required nothing of the sort; and they were both silent
+for a moment or two, when Dorothea began again with an air of saying at
+last what had been in her mind beforehand.
+
+"I wanted to ask you again about something you said the other day.
+Perhaps it was half of it your lively way of speaking: I notice that
+you like to put things strongly; I myself often exaggerate when I speak
+hastily."
+
+"What was it?" said Will, observing that she spoke with a timidity
+quite new in her.  "I have a hyperbolical tongue: it catches fire as it
+goes.  I dare say I shall have to retract."
+
+"I mean what you said about the necessity of knowing German--I mean,
+for the subjects that Mr. Casaubon is engaged in.  I have been thinking
+about it; and it seems to me that with Mr. Casaubon's learning he must
+have before him the same materials as German scholars--has he not?"
+Dorothea's timidity was due to an indistinct consciousness that she was
+in the strange situation of consulting a third person about the
+adequacy of Mr. Casaubon's learning.
+
+"Not exactly the same materials," said Will, thinking that he would be
+duly reserved.  "He is not an Orientalist, you know.  He does not
+profess to have more than second-hand knowledge there."
+
+"But there are very valuable books about antiquities which were written
+a long while ago by scholars who knew nothing about these modern
+things; and they are still used.  Why should Mr. Casaubon's not be
+valuable, like theirs?" said Dorothea, with more remonstrant energy.
+She was impelled to have the argument aloud, which she had been having
+in her own mind.
+
+"That depends on the line of study taken," said Will, also getting a
+tone of rejoinder.  "The subject Mr. Casaubon has chosen is as changing
+as chemistry: new discoveries are constantly making new points of view.
+Who wants a system on the basis of the four elements, or a book to
+refute Paracelsus?  Do you not see that it is no use now to be crawling
+a little way after men of the last century--men like Bryant--and
+correcting their mistakes?--living in a lumber-room and furbishing up
+broken-legged theories about Chus and Mizraim?"
+
+"How can you bear to speak so lightly?" said Dorothea, with a look
+between sorrow and anger.  "If it were as you say, what could be sadder
+than so much ardent labor all in vain?  I wonder it does not affect you
+more painfully, if you really think that a man like Mr. Casaubon, of so
+much goodness, power, and learning, should in any way fail in what has
+been the labor of his best years." She was beginning to be shocked that
+she had got to such a point of supposition, and indignant with Will for
+having led her to it.
+
+"You questioned me about the matter of fact, not of feeling," said
+Will.  "But if you wish to punish me for the fact, I submit.  I am not
+in a position to express my feeling toward Mr. Casaubon: it would be at
+best a pensioner's eulogy."
+
+"Pray excuse me," said Dorothea, coloring deeply.  "I am aware, as you
+say, that I am in fault in having introduced the subject.  Indeed, I am
+wrong altogether.  Failure after long perseverance is much grander than
+never to have a striving good enough to be called a failure."
+
+"I quite agree with you," said Will, determined to change the
+situation--"so much so that I have made up my mind not to run that
+risk of never attaining a failure.  Mr. Casaubon's generosity has
+perhaps been dangerous to me, and I mean to renounce the liberty it has
+given me.  I mean to go back to England shortly and work my own
+way--depend on nobody else than myself."
+
+"That is fine--I respect that feeling," said Dorothea, with returning
+kindness.  "But Mr. Casaubon, I am sure, has never thought of anything
+in the matter except what was most for your welfare."
+
+"She has obstinacy and pride enough to serve instead of love, now she
+has married him," said Will to himself.  Aloud he said, rising--
+
+"I shall not see you again."
+
+"Oh, stay till Mr. Casaubon comes," said Dorothea, earnestly.  "I am so
+glad we met in Rome.  I wanted to know you."
+
+"And I have made you angry," said Will.  "I have made you think ill of
+me."
+
+"Oh no.  My sister tells me I am always angry with people who do not
+say just what I like.  But I hope I am not given to think ill of them.
+In the end I am usually obliged to think ill of myself for being so
+impatient."
+
+"Still, you don't like me; I have made myself an unpleasant thought to
+you."
+
+"Not at all," said Dorothea, with the most open kindness.  "I like you
+very much."
+
+Will was not quite contented, thinking that he would apparently have
+been of more importance if he had been disliked.  He said nothing, but
+looked dull, not to say sulky.
+
+"And I am quite interested to see what you will do," Dorothea went on
+cheerfully.  "I believe devoutly in a natural difference of vocation.
+If it were not for that belief, I suppose I should be very narrow--there
+are so many things, besides painting, that I am quite ignorant
+of.  You would hardly believe how little I have taken in of music and
+literature, which you know so much of.  I wonder what your vocation
+will turn out to be: perhaps you will be a poet?"
+
+"That depends.  To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern that
+no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment
+is but a hand playing with finely ordered variety on the chords of
+emotion--a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling,
+and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.  One may have
+that condition by fits only."
+
+"But you leave out the poems," said Dorothea.  "I think they are wanted
+to complete the poet.  I understand what you mean about knowledge
+passing into feeling, for that seems to be just what I experience.  But
+I am sure I could never produce a poem."
+
+"You _are_ a poem--and that is to be the best part of a poet--what
+makes up the poet's consciousness in his best moods," said Will,
+showing such originality as we all share with the morning and the
+spring-time and other endless renewals.
+
+"I am very glad to hear it," said Dorothea, laughing out her words in a
+bird-like modulation, and looking at Will with playful gratitude in her
+eyes.  "What very kind things you say to me!"
+
+"I wish I could ever do anything that would be what you call kind--that
+I could ever be of the slightest service to you. I fear I shall never
+have the opportunity."  Will spoke with fervor.
+
+"Oh yes," said Dorothea, cordially.  "It will come; and I shall
+remember how well you wish me.  I quite hoped that we should be friends
+when I first saw you--because of your relationship to Mr. Casaubon."
+There was a certain liquid brightness in her eyes, and Will was
+conscious that his own were obeying a law of nature and filling too.
+The allusion to Mr. Casaubon would have spoiled all if anything at that
+moment could have spoiled the subduing power, the sweet dignity, of her
+noble unsuspicious inexperience.
+
+"And there is one thing even now that you can do," said Dorothea,
+rising and walking a little way under the strength of a recurring
+impulse.  "Promise me that you will not again, to any one, speak of
+that subject--I mean about Mr. Casaubon's writings--I mean in that
+kind of way.  It was I who led to it.  It was my fault.  But promise
+me."
+
+She had returned from her brief pacing and stood opposite Will, looking
+gravely at him.
+
+"Certainly, I will promise you," said Will, reddening however.  If he
+never said a cutting word about Mr. Casaubon again and left off
+receiving favors from him, it would clearly be permissible to hate him
+the more.  The poet must know how to hate, says Goethe; and Will was at
+least ready with that accomplishment.  He said that he must go now
+without waiting for Mr. Casaubon, whom he would come to take leave of
+at the last moment.  Dorothea gave him her hand, and they exchanged a
+simple "Good-by."
+
+But going out of the porte cochere he met Mr. Casaubon, and that
+gentleman, expressing the best wishes for his cousin, politely waived
+the pleasure of any further leave-taking on the morrow, which would be
+sufficiently crowded with the preparations for departure.
+
+"I have something to tell you about our cousin Mr. Ladislaw, which I
+think will heighten your opinion of him," said Dorothea to her husband
+in the coarse of the evening.  She had mentioned immediately on his
+entering that Will had just gone away, and would come again, but Mr.
+Casaubon had said, "I met him outside, and we made our final adieux, I
+believe," saying this with the air and tone by which we imply that any
+subject, whether private or public, does not interest us enough to wish
+for a further remark upon it.  So Dorothea had waited.
+
+"What is that, my love?" said Mr Casaubon (he always said "my love"
+when his manner was the coldest).
+
+"He has made up his mind to leave off wandering at once, and to give up
+his dependence on your generosity.  He means soon to go back to
+England, and work his own way.  I thought you would consider that a
+good sign," said Dorothea, with an appealing look into her husband's
+neutral face.
+
+"Did he mention the precise order of occupation to which he would
+addict himself?"
+
+"No. But he said that he felt the danger which lay for him in your
+generosity.  Of course he will write to you about it.  Do you not think
+better of him for his resolve?"
+
+"I shall await his communication on the subject," said Mr. Casaubon.
+
+"I told him I was sure that the thing you considered in all you did for
+him was his own welfare.  I remembered your goodness in what you said
+about him when I first saw him at Lowick," said Dorothea, putting her
+hand on her husband's.
+
+"I had a duty towards him," said Mr. Casaubon, laying his other hand on
+Dorothea's in conscientious acceptance of her caress, but with a glance
+which he could not hinder from being uneasy.  "The young man, I
+confess, is not otherwise an object of interest to me, nor need we, I
+think, discuss his future course, which it is not ours to determine
+beyond the limits which I have sufficiently indicated." Dorothea did
+not mention Will again.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III.
+
+
+
+
+
+WAITING FOR DEATH.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII.
+
+    "Your horses of the Sun," he said,
+    "And first-rate whip Apollo!
+     Whate'er they be, I'll eat my head,
+     But I will beat them hollow."
+
+
+Fred Vincy, we have seen, had a debt on his mind, and though no such
+immaterial burthen could depress that buoyant-hearted young gentleman
+for many hours together, there were circumstances connected with this
+debt which made the thought of it unusually importunate.  The creditor
+was Mr. Bambridge a horse-dealer of the neighborhood, whose company was
+much sought in Middlemarch by young men understood to be "addicted to
+pleasure."  During the vacations Fred had naturally required more
+amusements than he had ready money for, and Mr. Bambridge had been
+accommodating enough not only to trust him for the hire of horses and
+the accidental expense of ruining a fine hunter, but also to make a
+small advance by which he might be able to meet some losses at
+billiards.  The total debt was a hundred and sixty pounds.  Bambridge
+was in no alarm about his money, being sure that young Vincy had
+backers; but he had required something to show for it, and Fred had at
+first given a bill with his own signature.  Three months later he had
+renewed this bill with the signature of Caleb Garth.  On both occasions
+Fred had felt confident that he should meet the bill himself, having
+ample funds at disposal in his own hopefulness.  You will hardly demand
+that his confidence should have a basis in external facts; such
+confidence, we know, is something less coarse and materialistic: it is
+a comfortable disposition leading us to expect that the wisdom of
+providence or the folly of our friends, the mysteries of luck or the
+still greater mystery of our high individual value in the universe,
+will bring about agreeable issues, such as are consistent with our good
+taste in costume, and our general preference for the best style of
+thing.  Fred felt sure that he should have a present from his uncle,
+that he should have a run of luck, that by dint of "swapping" he should
+gradually metamorphose a horse worth forty pounds into a horse that
+would fetch a hundred at any moment--"judgment" being always equivalent
+to an unspecified sum in hard cash.  And in any case, even supposing
+negations which only a morbid distrust could imagine, Fred had always
+(at that time) his father's pocket as a last resource, so that his
+assets of hopefulness had a sort of gorgeous superfluity about them.
+Of what might be the capacity of his father's pocket, Fred had only a
+vague notion: was not trade elastic?  And would not the deficiencies of
+one year be made up for by the surplus of another?  The Vincys lived in
+an easy profuse way, not with any new ostentation, but according to the
+family habits and traditions, so that the children had no standard of
+economy, and the elder ones retained some of their infantine notion
+that their father might pay for anything if he would.  Mr. Vincy
+himself had expensive Middlemarch habits--spent money on coursing, on
+his cellar, and on dinner-giving, while mamma had those running
+accounts with tradespeople, which give a cheerful sense of getting
+everything one wants without any question of payment.  But it was in
+the nature of fathers, Fred knew, to bully one about expenses: there
+was always a little storm over his extravagance if he had to disclose a
+debt, and Fred disliked bad weather within doors.  He was too filial to
+be disrespectful to his father, and he bore the thunder with the
+certainty that it was transient; but in the mean time it was
+disagreeable to see his mother cry, and also to be obliged to look
+sulky instead of having fun; for Fred was so good-tempered that if he
+looked glum under scolding, it was chiefly for propriety's sake.  The
+easier course plainly, was to renew the bill with a friend's signature.
+Why not? With the superfluous securities of hope at his command, there
+was no reason why he should not have increased other people's
+liabilities to any extent, but for the fact that men whose names were
+good for anything were usually pessimists, indisposed to believe that
+the universal order of things would necessarily be agreeable to an
+agreeable young gentleman.
+
+With a favor to ask we review our list of friends, do justice to their
+more amiable qualities, forgive their little offenses, and concerning
+each in turn, try to arrive at the conclusion that he will be eager to
+oblige us, our own eagerness to be obliged being as communicable as
+other warmth.  Still there is always a certain number who are dismissed
+as but moderately eager until the others have refused; and it happened
+that Fred checked off all his friends but one, on the ground that
+applying to them would be disagreeable; being implicitly convinced that
+he at least (whatever might be maintained about mankind generally) had
+a right to be free from anything disagreeable.  That he should ever
+fall into a thoroughly unpleasant position--wear trousers shrunk with
+washing, eat cold mutton, have to walk for want of a horse, or to "duck
+under" in any sort of way--was an absurdity irreconcilable with those
+cheerful intuitions implanted in him by nature.  And Fred winced under
+the idea of being looked down upon as wanting funds for small debts.
+Thus it came to pass that the friend whom he chose to apply to was at
+once the poorest and the kindest--namely, Caleb Garth.
+
+The Garths were very fond of Fred, as he was of them; for when he and
+Rosamond were little ones, and the Garths were better off, the slight
+connection between the two families through Mr. Featherstone's double
+marriage (the first to Mr. Garth's sister, and the second to Mrs.
+Vincy's) had led to an acquaintance which was carried on between the
+children rather than the parents: the children drank tea together out
+of their toy teacups, and spent whole days together in play.  Mary was
+a little hoyden, and Fred at six years old thought her the nicest girl
+in the world, making her his wife with a brass ring which he had cut
+from an umbrella.  Through all the stages of his education he had kept
+his affection for the Garths, and his habit of going to their house as
+a second home, though any intercourse between them and the elders of
+his family had long ceased.  Even when Caleb Garth was prosperous, the
+Vincys were on condescending terms with him and his wife, for there
+were nice distinctions of rank in Middlemarch; and though old
+manufacturers could not any more than dukes be connected with none but
+equals, they were conscious of an inherent social superiority which was
+defined with great nicety in practice, though hardly expressible
+theoretically.  Since then Mr. Garth had failed in the building
+business, which he had unfortunately added to his other avocations of
+surveyor, valuer, and agent, had conducted that business for a time
+entirely for the benefit of his assignees, and had been living
+narrowly, exerting himself to the utmost that he might after all pay
+twenty shillings in the pound.  He had now achieved this, and from all
+who did not think it a bad precedent, his honorable exertions had won
+him due esteem; but in no part of the world is genteel visiting founded
+on esteem, in the absence of suitable furniture and complete
+dinner-service.  Mrs. Vincy had never been at her ease with Mrs. Garth,
+and frequently spoke of her as a woman who had had to work for her
+bread--meaning that Mrs. Garth had been a teacher before her marriage;
+in which case an intimacy with Lindley Murray and Mangnall's Questions
+was something like a draper's discrimination of calico trademarks, or a
+courier's acquaintance with foreign countries: no woman who was better
+off needed that sort of thing.  And since Mary had been keeping Mr.
+Featherstone's house, Mrs. Vincy's want of liking for the Garths had
+been converted into something more positive, by alarm lest Fred should
+engage himself to this plain girl, whose parents "lived in such a small
+way."  Fred, being aware of this, never spoke at home of his visits to
+Mrs. Garth, which had of late become more frequent, the increasing
+ardor of his affection for Mary inclining him the more towards those
+who belonged to her.
+
+Mr. Garth had a small office in the town, and to this Fred went with
+his request.  He obtained it without much difficulty, for a large
+amount of painful experience had not sufficed to make Caleb Garth
+cautious about his own affairs, or distrustful of his fellow-men when
+they had not proved themselves untrustworthy; and he had the highest
+opinion of Fred, was "sure the lad would turn out well--an open
+affectionate fellow, with a good bottom to his character--you might
+trust him for anything." Such was Caleb's psychological argument.  He
+was one of those rare men who are rigid to themselves and indulgent to
+others.  He had a certain shame about his neighbors' errors, and never
+spoke of them willingly; hence he was not likely to divert his mind
+from the best mode of hardening timber and other ingenious devices in
+order to preconceive those errors.  If he had to blame any one, it was
+necessary for him to move all the papers within his reach, or describe
+various diagrams with his stick, or make calculations with the odd
+money in his pocket, before he could begin; and he would rather do
+other men's work than find fault with their doing.  I fear he was a bad
+disciplinarian.
+
+When Fred stated the circumstances of his debt, his wish to meet it
+without troubling his father, and the certainty that the money would be
+forthcoming so as to cause no one any inconvenience, Caleb pushed his
+spectacles upward, listened, looked into his favorite's clear young
+eyes, and believed him, not distinguishing confidence about the future
+from veracity about the past; but he felt that it was an occasion for a
+friendly hint as to conduct, and that before giving his signature he
+must give a rather strong admonition.  Accordingly, he took the paper
+and lowered his spectacles, measured the space at his command, reached
+his pen and examined it, dipped it in the ink and examined it again,
+then pushed the paper a little way from him, lifted up his spectacles
+again, showed a deepened depression in the outer angle of his bushy
+eyebrows, which gave his face a peculiar mildness (pardon these details
+for once--you would have learned to love them if you had known Caleb
+Garth), and said in a comfortable tone--
+
+"It was a misfortune, eh, that breaking the horse's knees?  And then,
+these exchanges, they don't answer when you have 'cute jockeys to deal
+with.  You'll be wiser another time, my boy."
+
+Whereupon Caleb drew down his spectacles, and proceeded to write his
+signature with the care which he always gave to that performance; for
+whatever he did in the way of business he did well.  He contemplated
+the large well-proportioned letters and final flourish, with his head a
+trifle on one side for an instant, then handed it to Fred, said
+"Good-by," and returned forthwith to his absorption in a plan for Sir
+James Chettam's new farm-buildings.
+
+Either because his interest in this work thrust the incident of the
+signature from his memory, or for some reason of which Caleb was more
+conscious, Mrs. Garth remained ignorant of the affair.
+
+Since it occurred, a change had come over Fred's sky, which altered his
+view of the distance, and was the reason why his uncle Featherstone's
+present of money was of importance enough to make his color come and
+go, first with a too definite expectation, and afterwards with a
+proportionate disappointment.  His failure in passing his examination,
+had made his accumulation of college debts the more unpardonable by his
+father, and there had been an unprecedented storm at home.  Mr. Vincy
+had sworn that if he had anything more of that sort to put up with,
+Fred should turn out and get his living how he could; and he had never
+yet quite recovered his good-humored tone to his son, who had
+especially enraged him by saying at this stage of things that he did
+not want to be a clergyman, and would rather not "go on with that."
+Fred was conscious that he would have been yet more severely dealt with
+if his family as well as himself had not secretly regarded him as Mr.
+Featherstone's heir; that old gentleman's pride in him, and apparent
+fondness for him, serving in the stead of more exemplary conduct--just
+as when a youthful nobleman steals jewellery we call the act
+kleptomania, speak of it with a philosophical smile, and never think of
+his being sent to the house of correction as if he were a ragged boy
+who had stolen turnips.  In fact, tacit expectations of what would be
+done for him by uncle Featherstone determined the angle at which most
+people viewed Fred Vincy in Middlemarch; and in his own consciousness,
+what uncle Featherstone would do for him in an emergency, or what he
+would do simply as an incorporated luck, formed always an immeasurable
+depth of aerial perspective.  But that present of bank-notes, once
+made, was measurable, and being applied to the amount of the debt,
+showed a deficit which had still to be filled up either by Fred's
+"judgment" or by luck in some other shape.  For that little episode of
+the alleged borrowing, in which he had made his father the agent in
+getting the Bulstrode certificate, was a new reason against going to
+his father for money towards meeting his actual debt.  Fred was keen
+enough to foresee that anger would confuse distinctions, and that his
+denial of having borrowed expressly on the strength of his uncle's will
+would be taken as a falsehood.  He had gone to his father and told him
+one vexatious affair, and he had left another untold: in such cases the
+complete revelation always produces the impression of a previous
+duplicity.  Now Fred piqued himself on keeping clear of lies, and even
+fibs; he often shrugged his shoulders and made a significant grimace at
+what he called Rosamond's fibs (it is only brothers who can associate
+such ideas with a lovely girl); and rather than incur the accusation of
+falsehood he would even incur some trouble and self-restraint.  It was
+under strong inward pressure of this kind that Fred had taken the wise
+step of depositing the eighty pounds with his mother.  It was a pity
+that he had not at once given them to Mr. Garth; but he meant to make
+the sum complete with another sixty, and with a view to this, he had
+kept twenty pounds in his own pocket as a sort of seed-corn, which,
+planted by judgment, and watered by luck, might yield more than
+threefold--a very poor rate of multiplication when the field is a young
+gentleman's infinite soul, with all the numerals at command.
+
+Fred was not a gambler: he had not that specific disease in which the
+suspension of the whole nervous energy on a chance or risk becomes as
+necessary as the dram to the drunkard; he had only the tendency to that
+diffusive form of gambling which has no alcoholic intensity, but is
+carried on with the healthiest chyle-fed blood, keeping up a joyous
+imaginative activity which fashions events according to desire, and
+having no fears about its own weather, only sees the advantage there
+must be to others in going aboard with it.  Hopefulness has a pleasure
+in making a throw of any kind, because the prospect of success is
+certain; and only a more generous pleasure in offering as many as
+possible a share in the stake.  Fred liked play, especially billiards,
+as he liked hunting or riding a steeple-chase; and he only liked it the
+better because he wanted money and hoped to win.  But the twenty
+pounds' worth of seed-corn had been planted in vain in the seductive
+green plot--all of it at least which had not been dispersed by the
+roadside--and Fred found himself close upon the term of payment with no
+money at command beyond the eighty pounds which he had deposited with
+his mother.  The broken-winded horse which he rode represented a
+present which had been made to him a long while ago by his uncle
+Featherstone: his father always allowed him to keep a horse, Mr.
+Vincy's own habits making him regard this as a reasonable demand even
+for a son who was rather exasperating.  This horse, then, was Fred's
+property, and in his anxiety to meet the imminent bill he determined to
+sacrifice a possession without which life would certainly be worth
+little.  He made the resolution with a sense of heroism--heroism forced
+on him by the dread of breaking his word to Mr. Garth, by his love for
+Mary and awe of her opinion.  He would start for Houndsley horse-fair
+which was to be held the next morning, and--simply sell his horse,
+bringing back the money by coach?--Well, the horse would hardly fetch
+more than thirty pounds, and there was no knowing what might happen; it
+would be folly to balk himself of luck beforehand.  It was a hundred to
+one that some good chance would fall in his way; the longer he thought
+of it, the less possible it seemed that he should not have a good
+chance, and the less reasonable that he should not equip himself with
+the powder and shot for bringing it down.  He would ride to Houndsley
+with Bambridge and with Horrock "the vet," and without asking them
+anything expressly, he should virtually get the benefit of their
+opinion.  Before he set out, Fred got the eighty pounds from his mother.
+
+Most of those who saw Fred riding out of Middlemarch in company with
+Bambridge and Horrock, on his way of course to Houndsley horse-fair,
+thought that young Vincy was pleasure-seeking as usual; and but for an
+unwonted consciousness of grave matters on hand, he himself would have
+had a sense of dissipation, and of doing what might be expected of a
+gay young fellow.  Considering that Fred was not at all coarse, that he
+rather looked down on the manners and speech of young men who had not
+been to the university, and that he had written stanzas as pastoral and
+unvoluptuous as his flute-playing, his attraction towards Bambridge and
+Horrock was an interesting fact which even the love of horse-flesh
+would not wholly account for without that mysterious influence of
+Naming which determinates so much of mortal choice.  Under any other
+name than "pleasure" the society of Messieurs Bambridge and Horrock
+must certainly have been regarded as monotonous; and to arrive with
+them at Houndsley on a drizzling afternoon, to get down at the Red Lion
+in a street shaded with coal-dust, and dine in a room furnished with a
+dirt-enamelled map of the county, a bad portrait of an anonymous horse
+in a stable, His Majesty George the Fourth with legs and cravat, and
+various leaden spittoons, might have seemed a hard business, but for
+the sustaining power of nomenclature which determined that the pursuit
+of these things was "gay."
+
+In Mr. Horrock there was certainly an apparent unfathomableness which
+offered play to the imagination.  Costume, at a glance, gave him a
+thrilling association with horses (enough to specify the hat-brim which
+took the slightest upward angle just to escape the suspicion of bending
+downwards), and nature had given him a face which by dint of Mongolian
+eyes, and a nose, mouth, and chin seeming to follow his hat-brim in a
+moderate inclination upwards, gave the effect of a subdued unchangeable
+sceptical smile, of all expressions the most tyrannous over a
+susceptible mind, and, when accompanied by adequate silence, likely to
+create the reputation of an invincible understanding, an infinite fund
+of humor--too dry to flow, and probably in a state of immovable
+crust,--and a critical judgment which, if you could ever be fortunate
+enough to know it, would be _the_ thing and no other.  It is a
+physiognomy seen in all vocations, but perhaps it has never been more
+powerful over the youth of England than in a judge of horses.
+
+Mr. Horrock, at a question from Fred about his horse's fetlock, turned
+sideways in his saddle, and watched the horse's action for the space of
+three minutes, then turned forward, twitched his own bridle, and
+remained silent with a profile neither more nor less sceptical than it
+had been.
+
+The part thus played in dialogue by Mr. Horrock was terribly effective.
+A mixture of passions was excited in Fred--a mad desire to thrash
+Horrock's opinion into utterance, restrained by anxiety to retain the
+advantage of his friendship.  There was always the chance that Horrock
+might say something quite invaluable at the right moment.
+
+Mr. Bambridge had more open manners, and appeared to give forth his
+ideas without economy.  He was loud, robust, and was sometimes spoken
+of as being "given to indulgence"--chiefly in swearing, drinking, and
+beating his wife.  Some people who had lost by him called him a vicious
+man; but he regarded horse-dealing as the finest of the arts, and might
+have argued plausibly that it had nothing to do with morality.  He was
+undeniably a prosperous man, bore his drinking better than others bore
+their moderation, and, on the whole, flourished like the green
+bay-tree. But his range of conversation was limited, and like the fine
+old tune, "Drops of brandy," gave you after a while a sense of
+returning upon itself in a way that might make weak heads dizzy.  But a
+slight infusion of Mr. Bambridge was felt to give tone and character to
+several circles in Middlemarch; and he was a distinguished figure in
+the bar and billiard-room at the Green Dragon.  He knew some anecdotes
+about the heroes of the turf, and various clever tricks of Marquesses
+and Viscounts which seemed to prove that blood asserted its
+pre-eminence even among black-legs; but the minute retentiveness of his
+memory was chiefly shown about the horses he had himself bought and
+sold; the number of miles they would trot you in no time without
+turning a hair being, after the lapse of years, still a subject of
+passionate asseveration, in which he would assist the imagination of
+his hearers by solemnly swearing that they never saw anything like it.
+In short, Mr. Bambridge was a man of pleasure and a gay companion.
+
+Fred was subtle, and did not tell his friends that he was going to
+Houndsley bent on selling his horse: he wished to get indirectly at
+their genuine opinion of its value, not being aware that a genuine
+opinion was the last thing likely to be extracted from such eminent
+critics.  It was not Mr. Bambridge's weakness to be a gratuitous
+flatterer.  He had never before been so much struck with the fact that
+this unfortunate bay was a roarer to a degree which required the
+roundest word for perdition to give you any idea of it.
+
+"You made a bad hand at swapping when you went to anybody but me,
+Vincy!  Why, you never threw your leg across a finer horse than that
+chestnut, and you gave him for this brute.  If you set him cantering,
+he goes on like twenty sawyers.  I never heard but one worse roarer in
+my life, and that was a roan: it belonged to Pegwell, the corn-factor;
+he used to drive him in his gig seven years ago, and he wanted me to
+take him, but I said, 'Thank you, Peg, I don't deal in
+wind-instruments.' That was what I said.  It went the round of the
+country, that joke did.  But, what the hell! the horse was a penny
+trumpet to that roarer of yours."
+
+"Why, you said just now his was worse than mine," said Fred, more
+irritable than usual.
+
+"I said a lie, then," said Mr. Bambridge, emphatically.  "There wasn't
+a penny to choose between 'em."
+
+Fred spurred his horse, and they trotted on a little way.  When they
+slackened again, Mr. Bambridge said--
+
+"Not but what the roan was a better trotter than yours."
+
+"I'm quite satisfied with his paces, I know," said Fred, who required
+all the consciousness of being in gay company to support him; "I say
+his trot is an uncommonly clean one, eh, Horrock?"
+
+Mr. Horrock looked before him with as complete a neutrality as if he
+had been a portrait by a great master.
+
+Fred gave up the fallacious hope of getting a genuine opinion; but on
+reflection he saw that Bambridge's depreciation and Horrock's silence
+were both virtually encouraging, and indicated that they thought better
+of the horse than they chose to say.
+
+That very evening, indeed, before the fair had set in, Fred thought he
+saw a favorable opening for disposing advantageously of his horse, but
+an opening which made him congratulate himself on his foresight in
+bringing with him his eighty pounds.  A young farmer, acquainted with
+Mr. Bambridge, came into the Red Lion, and entered into conversation
+about parting with a hunter, which he introduced at once as Diamond,
+implying that it was a public character.  For himself he only wanted a
+useful hack, which would draw upon occasion; being about to marry and
+to give up hunting.  The hunter was in a friend's stable at some little
+distance; there was still time for gentlemen to see it before dark.
+The friend's stable had to be reached through a back street where you
+might as easily have been poisoned without expense of drugs as in any
+grim street of that unsanitary period.  Fred was not fortified against
+disgust by brandy, as his companions were, but the hope of having at
+last seen the horse that would enable him to make money was
+exhilarating enough to lead him over the same ground again the first
+thing in the morning.  He felt sure that if he did not come to a
+bargain with the farmer, Bambridge would; for the stress of
+circumstances, Fred felt, was sharpening his acuteness and endowing him
+with all the constructive power of suspicion.  Bambridge had run down
+Diamond in a way that he never would have done (the horse being a
+friend's) if he had not thought of buying it; every one who looked at
+the animal--even Horrock--was evidently impressed with its merit.  To
+get all the advantage of being with men of this sort, you must know how
+to draw your inferences, and not be a spoon who takes things literally.
+The color of the horse was a dappled gray, and Fred happened to know
+that Lord Medlicote's man was on the look-out for just such a horse.
+After all his running down, Bambridge let it out in the course of the
+evening, when the farmer was absent, that he had seen worse horses go
+for eighty pounds.  Of course he contradicted himself twenty times
+over, but when you know what is likely to be true you can test a man's
+admissions.  And Fred could not but reckon his own judgment of a horse
+as worth something.  The farmer had paused over Fred's respectable
+though broken-winded steed long enough to show that he thought it worth
+consideration, and it seemed probable that he would take it, with
+five-and-twenty pounds in addition, as the equivalent of Diamond.  In
+that case Fred, when he had parted with his new horse for at least
+eighty pounds, would be fifty-five pounds in pocket by the transaction,
+and would have a hundred and thirty-five pounds towards meeting the
+bill; so that the deficit temporarily thrown on Mr. Garth would at the
+utmost be twenty-five pounds.  By the time he was hurrying on his
+clothes in the morning, he saw so clearly the importance of not losing
+this rare chance, that if Bambridge and Horrock had both dissuaded him,
+he would not have been deluded into a direct interpretation of their
+purpose: he would have been aware that those deep hands held something
+else than a young fellow's interest.  With regard to horses, distrust
+was your only clew.  But scepticism, as we know, can never be
+thoroughly applied, else life would come to a standstill: something we
+must believe in and do, and whatever that something may be called, it
+is virtually our own judgment, even when it seems like the most slavish
+reliance on another.  Fred believed in the excellence of his bargain,
+and even before the fair had well set in, had got possession of the
+dappled gray, at the price of his old horse and thirty pounds in
+addition--only five pounds more than he had expected to give.
+
+But he felt a little worried and wearied, perhaps with mental debate,
+and without waiting for the further gayeties of the horse-fair, he set
+out alone on his fourteen miles' journey, meaning to take it very
+quietly and keep his horse fresh.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV.
+
+    "The offender's sorrow brings but small relief
+     To him who wears the strong offence's cross."
+                                        --SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.
+
+
+I am sorry to say that only the third day after the propitious events
+at Houndsley Fred Vincy had fallen into worse spirits than he had known
+in his life before.  Not that he had been disappointed as to the
+possible market for his horse, but that before the bargain could be
+concluded with Lord Medlicote's man, this Diamond, in which hope to the
+amount of eighty pounds had been invested, had without the slightest
+warning exhibited in the stable a most vicious energy in kicking, had
+just missed killing the groom, and had ended in laming himself severely
+by catching his leg in a rope that overhung the stable-board. There was
+no more redress for this than for the discovery of bad temper after
+marriage--which of course old companions were aware of before the
+ceremony.  For some reason or other, Fred had none of his usual
+elasticity under this stroke of ill-fortune: he was simply aware that
+he had only fifty pounds, that there was no chance of his getting any
+more at present, and that the bill for a hundred and sixty would be
+presented in five days.  Even if he had applied to his father on the
+plea that Mr. Garth should be saved from loss, Fred felt smartingly
+that his father would angrily refuse to rescue Mr. Garth from the
+consequence of what he would call encouraging extravagance and deceit.
+He was so utterly downcast that he could frame no other project than to
+go straight to Mr. Garth and tell him the sad truth, carrying with him
+the fifty pounds, and getting that sum at least safely out of his own
+hands.  His father, being at the warehouse, did not yet know of the
+accident: when he did, he would storm about the vicious brute being
+brought into his stable; and before meeting that lesser annoyance Fred
+wanted to get away with all his courage to face the greater.  He took
+his father's nag, for he had made up his mind that when he had told Mr.
+Garth, he would ride to Stone Court and confess all to Mary.  In fact,
+it is probable that but for Mary's existence and Fred's love for her,
+his conscience would have been much less active both in previously
+urging the debt on his thought and impelling him not to spare himself
+after his usual fashion by deferring an unpleasant task, but to act as
+directly and simply as he could.  Even much stronger mortals than Fred
+Vincy hold half their rectitude in the mind of the being they love
+best.  "The theatre of all my actions is fallen," said an antique
+personage when his chief friend was dead; and they are fortunate who
+get a theatre where the audience demands their best.  Certainly it
+would have made a considerable difference to Fred at that time if Mary
+Garth had had no decided notions as to what was admirable in character.
+
+Mr. Garth was not at the office, and Fred rode on to his house, which
+was a little way outside the town--a homely place with an orchard in
+front of it, a rambling, old-fashioned, half-timbered building, which
+before the town had spread had been a farm-house, but was now
+surrounded with the private gardens of the townsmen.  We get the fonder
+of our houses if they have a physiognomy of their own, as our friends
+have.  The Garth family, which was rather a large one, for Mary had
+four brothers and one sister, were very fond of their old house, from
+which all the best furniture had long been sold.  Fred liked it too,
+knowing it by heart even to the attic which smelt deliciously of apples
+and quinces, and until to-day he had never come to it without pleasant
+expectations; but his heart beat uneasily now with the sense that he
+should probably have to make his confession before Mrs. Garth, of whom
+he was rather more in awe than of her husband.  Not that she was
+inclined to sarcasm and to impulsive sallies, as Mary was.  In her
+present matronly age at least, Mrs. Garth never committed herself by
+over-hasty speech; having, as she said, borne the yoke in her youth,
+and learned self-control. She had that rare sense which discerns what
+is unalterable, and submits to it without murmuring.  Adoring her
+husband's virtues, she had very early made up her mind to his
+incapacity of minding his own interests, and had met the consequences
+cheerfully.  She had been magnanimous enough to renounce all pride in
+teapots or children's frilling, and had never poured any pathetic
+confidences into the ears of her feminine neighbors concerning Mr.
+Garth's want of prudence and the sums he might have had if he had been
+like other men.  Hence these fair neighbors thought her either proud or
+eccentric, and sometimes spoke of her to their husbands as "your fine
+Mrs. Garth." She was not without her criticism of them in return, being
+more accurately instructed than most matrons in Middlemarch, and--where
+is the blameless woman?--apt to be a little severe towards her own sex,
+which in her opinion was framed to be entirely subordinate.  On the
+other hand, she was disproportionately indulgent towards the failings
+of men, and was often heard to say that these were natural.  Also, it
+must be admitted that Mrs. Garth was a trifle too emphatic in her
+resistance to what she held to be follies: the passage from governess
+into housewife had wrought itself a little too strongly into her
+consciousness, and she rarely forgot that while her grammar and accent
+were above the town standard, she wore a plain cap, cooked the family
+dinner, and darned all the stockings.  She had sometimes taken pupils
+in a peripatetic fashion, making them follow her about in the kitchen
+with their book or slate.  She thought it good for them to see that she
+could make an excellent lather while she corrected their blunders
+"without looking,"--that a woman with her sleeves tucked up above her
+elbows might know all about the Subjunctive Mood or the Torrid
+Zone--that, in short, she might possess "education" and other good
+things ending in "tion," and worthy to be pronounced emphatically,
+without being a useless doll.  When she made remarks to this edifying
+effect, she had a firm little frown on her brow, which yet did not
+hinder her face from looking benevolent, and her words which came forth
+like a procession were uttered in a fervid agreeable contralto.
+Certainly, the exemplary Mrs. Garth had her droll aspects, but her
+character sustained her oddities, as a very fine wine sustains a flavor
+of skin.
+
+Towards Fred Vincy she had a motherly feeling, and had always been
+disposed to excuse his errors, though she would probably not have
+excused Mary for engaging herself to him, her daughter being included
+in that more rigorous judgment which she applied to her own sex.  But
+this very fact of her exceptional indulgence towards him made it the
+harder to Fred that he must now inevitably sink in her opinion.  And
+the circumstances of his visit turned out to be still more unpleasant
+than he had expected; for Caleb Garth had gone out early to look at
+some repairs not far off.  Mrs. Garth at certain hours was always in
+the kitchen, and this morning she was carrying on several occupations
+at once there--making her pies at the well-scoured deal table on one
+side of that airy room, observing Sally's movements at the oven and
+dough-tub through an open door, and giving lessons to her youngest boy
+and girl, who were standing opposite to her at the table with their
+books and slates before them.  A tub and a clothes-horse at the other
+end of the kitchen indicated an intermittent wash of small things also
+going on.
+
+Mrs. Garth, with her sleeves turned above her elbows, deftly handling
+her pastry--applying her rolling-pin and giving ornamental pinches,
+while she expounded with grammatical fervor what were the right views
+about the concord of verbs and pronouns with "nouns of multitude or
+signifying many," was a sight agreeably amusing.  She was of the same
+curly-haired, square-faced type as Mary, but handsomer, with more
+delicacy of feature, a pale skin, a solid matronly figure, and a
+remarkable firmness of glance.  In her snowy-frilled cap she reminded
+one of that delightful Frenchwoman whom we have all seen marketing,
+basket on arm.  Looking at the mother, you might hope that the daughter
+would become like her, which is a prospective advantage equal to a
+dowry--the mother too often standing behind the daughter like a
+malignant prophecy--"Such as I am, she will shortly be."
+
+"Now let us go through that once more," said Mrs. Garth, pinching an
+apple-puff which seemed to distract Ben, an energetic young male with a
+heavy brow, from due attention to the lesson.  "'Not without regard to
+the import of the word as conveying unity or plurality of idea'--tell
+me again what that means, Ben."
+
+(Mrs. Garth, like more celebrated educators, had her favorite ancient
+paths, and in a general wreck of society would have tried to hold her
+"Lindley Murray" above the waves.)
+
+"Oh--it means--you must think what you mean," said Ben, rather
+peevishly.  "I hate grammar.  What's the use of it?"
+
+"To teach you to speak and write correctly, so that you can be
+understood," said Mrs. Garth, with severe precision.  "Should you like
+to speak as old Job does?"
+
+"Yes," said Ben, stoutly; "it's funnier.  He says, 'Yo goo'--that's
+just as good as 'You go.'"
+
+"But he says, 'A ship's in the garden,' instead of 'a sheep,'" said
+Letty, with an air of superiority.  "You might think he meant a ship
+off the sea."
+
+"No, you mightn't, if you weren't silly," said Ben.  "How could a ship
+off the sea come there?"
+
+"These things belong only to pronunciation, which is the least part of
+grammar," said Mrs. Garth.  "That apple-peel is to be eaten by the
+pigs, Ben; if you eat it, I must give them your piece of pasty.  Job
+has only to speak about very plain things.  How do you think you would
+write or speak about anything more difficult, if you knew no more of
+grammar than he does?  You would use wrong words, and put words in the
+wrong places, and instead of making people understand you, they would
+turn away from you as a tiresome person.  What would you do then?"
+
+"I shouldn't care, I should leave off," said Ben, with a sense that
+this was an agreeable issue where grammar was concerned.
+
+"I see you are getting tired and stupid, Ben," said Mrs. Garth,
+accustomed to these obstructive arguments from her male offspring.
+Having finished her pies, she moved towards the clothes-horse, and
+said, "Come here and tell me the story I told you on Wednesday, about
+Cincinnatus."
+
+"I know! he was a farmer," said Ben.
+
+"Now, Ben, he was a Roman--let _me_ tell," said Letty, using her elbow
+contentiously.
+
+"You silly thing, he was a Roman farmer, and he was ploughing."
+
+"Yes, but before that--that didn't come first--people wanted him," said
+Letty.
+
+"Well, but you must say what sort of a man he was first," insisted Ben.
+"He was a wise man, like my father, and that made the people want his
+advice.  And he was a brave man, and could fight.  And so could my
+father--couldn't he, mother?"
+
+"Now, Ben, let me tell the story straight on, as mother told it us,"
+said Letty, frowning.  "Please, mother, tell Ben not to speak."
+
+"Letty, I am ashamed of you," said her mother, wringing out the caps
+from the tub.  "When your brother began, you ought to have waited to
+see if he could not tell the story.  How rude you look, pushing and
+frowning, as if you wanted to conquer with your elbows!  Cincinnatus, I
+am sure, would have been sorry to see his daughter behave so."  (Mrs.
+Garth delivered this awful sentence with much majesty of enunciation,
+and Letty felt that between repressed volubility and general disesteem,
+that of the Romans inclusive, life was already a painful affair.) "Now,
+Ben."
+
+"Well--oh--well--why, there was a great deal of fighting, and they were
+all blockheads, and--I can't tell it just how you told it--but they
+wanted a man to be captain and king and everything--"
+
+"Dictator, now," said Letty, with injured looks, and not without a wish
+to make her mother repent.
+
+"Very well, dictator!" said Ben, contemptuously.  "But that isn't a
+good word: he didn't tell them to write on slates."
+
+"Come, come, Ben, you are not so ignorant as that," said Mrs. Garth,
+carefully serious.  "Hark, there is a knock at the door!  Run, Letty,
+and open it."
+
+The knock was Fred's; and when Letty said that her father was not in
+yet, but that her mother was in the kitchen, Fred had no alternative.
+He could not depart from his usual practice of going to see Mrs. Garth
+in the kitchen if she happened to be at work there.  He put his arm
+round Letty's neck silently, and led her into the kitchen without his
+usual jokes and caresses.
+
+Mrs. Garth was surprised to see Fred at this hour, but surprise was not
+a feeling that she was given to express, and she only said, quietly
+continuing her work--
+
+"You, Fred, so early in the day?  You look quite pale.  Has anything
+happened?"
+
+"I want to speak to Mr. Garth," said Fred, not yet ready to say
+more--"and to you also," he added, after a little pause, for he had no
+doubt that Mrs. Garth knew everything about the bill, and he must in the
+end speak of it before her, if not to her solely.
+
+"Caleb will be in again in a few minutes," said Mrs. Garth, who
+imagined some trouble between Fred and his father.  "He is sure not to
+be long, because he has some work at his desk that must be done this
+morning.  Do you mind staying with me, while I finish my matters here?"
+
+"But we needn't go on about Cincinnatus, need we?" said Ben, who had
+taken Fred's whip out of his hand, and was trying its efficiency on the
+cat.
+
+"No, go out now.  But put that whip down.  How very mean of you to whip
+poor old Tortoise!  Pray take the whip from him, Fred."
+
+"Come, old boy, give it me," said Fred, putting out his hand.
+
+"Will you let me ride on your horse to-day?" said Ben, rendering up the
+whip, with an air of not being obliged to do it.
+
+"Not to-day--another time.  I am not riding my own horse."
+
+"Shall you see Mary to-day?"
+
+"Yes, I think so," said Fred, with an unpleasant twinge.
+
+"Tell her to come home soon, and play at forfeits, and make fun."
+
+"Enough, enough, Ben! run away," said Mrs. Garth, seeing that Fred was
+teased. . .
+
+"Are Letty and Ben your only pupils now, Mrs. Garth?" said Fred, when
+the children were gone and it was needful to say something that would
+pass the time.  He was not yet sure whether he should wait for Mr.
+Garth, or use any good opportunity in conversation to confess to Mrs.
+Garth herself, give her the money and ride away.
+
+"One--only one.  Fanny Hackbutt comes at half past eleven.  I am not
+getting a great income now," said Mrs. Garth, smiling.  "I am at a low
+ebb with pupils.  But I have saved my little purse for Alfred's
+premium: I have ninety-two pounds.  He can go to Mr. Hanmer's now; he
+is just at the right age."
+
+This did not lead well towards the news that Mr. Garth was on the brink
+of losing ninety-two pounds and more.  Fred was silent.  "Young
+gentlemen who go to college are rather more costly than that," Mrs.
+Garth innocently continued, pulling out the edging on a cap-border.
+"And Caleb thinks that Alfred will turn out a distinguished engineer:
+he wants to give the boy a good chance.  There he is!  I hear him
+coming in.  We will go to him in the parlor, shall we?"
+
+When they entered the parlor Caleb had thrown down his hat and was
+seated at his desk.
+
+"What!  Fred, my boy!" he said, in a tone of mild surprise, holding his
+pen still undipped; "you are here betimes."  But missing the usual
+expression of cheerful greeting in Fred's face, he immediately added,
+"Is there anything up at home?--anything the matter?"
+
+"Yes, Mr. Garth, I am come to tell something that I am afraid will give
+you a bad opinion of me.  I am come to tell you and Mrs. Garth that I
+can't keep my word.  I can't find the money to meet the bill after all.
+I have been unfortunate; I have only got these fifty pounds towards the
+hundred and sixty."
+
+While Fred was speaking, he had taken out the notes and laid them on
+the desk before Mr. Garth.  He had burst forth at once with the plain
+fact, feeling boyishly miserable and without verbal resources.  Mrs.
+Garth was mutely astonished, and looked at her husband for an
+explanation.  Caleb blushed, and after a little pause said--
+
+"Oh, I didn't tell you, Susan: I put my name to a bill for Fred; it was
+for a hundred and sixty pounds.  He made sure he could meet it himself."
+
+There was an evident change in Mrs. Garth's face, but it was like a
+change below the surface of water which remains smooth.  She fixed her
+eyes on Fred, saying--
+
+"I suppose you have asked your father for the rest of the money and he
+has refused you."
+
+"No," said Fred, biting his lip, and speaking with more difficulty;
+"but I know it will be of no use to ask him; and unless it were of use,
+I should not like to mention Mr. Garth's name in the matter."
+
+"It has come at an unfortunate time," said Caleb, in his hesitating
+way, looking down at the notes and nervously fingering the paper,
+"Christmas upon us--I'm rather hard up just now.  You see, I have to
+cut out everything like a tailor with short measure.  What can we do,
+Susan?  I shall want every farthing we have in the bank.  It's a
+hundred and ten pounds, the deuce take it!"
+
+"I must give you the ninety-two pounds that I have put by for Alfred's
+premium," said Mrs. Garth, gravely and decisively, though a nice ear
+might have discerned a slight tremor in some of the words.  "And I have
+no doubt that Mary has twenty pounds saved from her salary by this
+time.  She will advance it."
+
+Mrs. Garth had not again looked at Fred, and was not in the least
+calculating what words she should use to cut him the most effectively.
+Like the eccentric woman she was, she was at present absorbed in
+considering what was to be done, and did not fancy that the end could
+be better achieved by bitter remarks or explosions.  But she had made
+Fred feel for the first time something like the tooth of remorse.
+Curiously enough, his pain in the affair beforehand had consisted
+almost entirely in the sense that he must seem dishonorable, and sink
+in the opinion of the Garths: he had not occupied himself with the
+inconvenience and possible injury that his breach might occasion them,
+for this exercise of the imagination on other people's needs is not
+common with hopeful young gentlemen.  Indeed we are most of us brought
+up in the notion that the highest motive for not doing a wrong is
+something irrespective of the beings who would suffer the wrong.  But
+at this moment he suddenly saw himself as a pitiful rascal who was
+robbing two women of their savings.
+
+"I shall certainly pay it all, Mrs. Garth--ultimately," he stammered
+out.
+
+"Yes, ultimately," said Mrs. Garth, who having a special dislike to
+fine words on ugly occasions, could not now repress an epigram.  "But
+boys cannot well be apprenticed ultimately: they should be apprenticed
+at fifteen."  She had never been so little inclined to make excuses for
+Fred.
+
+"I was the most in the wrong, Susan," said Caleb.  "Fred made sure of
+finding the money.  But I'd no business to be fingering bills.  I
+suppose you have looked all round and tried all honest means?" he
+added, fixing his merciful gray eyes on Fred.  Caleb was too delicate,
+to specify Mr. Featherstone.
+
+"Yes, I have tried everything--I really have.  I should have had a
+hundred and thirty pounds ready but for a misfortune with a horse which
+I was about to sell.  My uncle had given me eighty pounds, and I paid
+away thirty with my old horse in order to get another which I was going
+to sell for eighty or more--I meant to go without a horse--but now it
+has turned out vicious and lamed itself.  I wish I and the horses too
+had been at the devil, before I had brought this on you.  There's no
+one else I care so much for: you and Mrs. Garth have always been so
+kind to me.  However, it's no use saying that.  You will always think
+me a rascal now."
+
+Fred turned round and hurried out of the room, conscious that he was
+getting rather womanish, and feeling confusedly that his being sorry
+was not of much use to the Garths.  They could see him mount, and
+quickly pass through the gate.
+
+"I am disappointed in Fred Vincy," said Mrs. Garth.  "I would not have
+believed beforehand that he would have drawn you into his debts.  I
+knew he was extravagant, but I did not think that he would be so mean
+as to hang his risks on his oldest friend, who could the least afford
+to lose."
+
+"I was a fool, Susan:"
+
+"That you were," said the wife, nodding and smiling.  "But I should not
+have gone to publish it in the market-place. Why should you keep such
+things from me?  It is just so with your buttons: you let them burst
+off without telling me, and go out with your wristband hanging.  If I
+had only known I might have been ready with some better plan."
+
+"You are sadly cut up, I know, Susan," said Caleb, looking feelingly at
+her.  "I can't abide your losing the money you've scraped together for
+Alfred."
+
+"It is very well that I _had_ scraped it together; and it is you who
+will have to suffer, for you must teach the boy yourself.  You must
+give up your bad habits.  Some men take to drinking, and you have taken
+to working without pay.  You must indulge yourself a little less in
+that.  And you must ride over to Mary, and ask the child what money she
+has."
+
+Caleb had pushed his chair back, and was leaning forward, shaking his
+head slowly, and fitting his finger-tips together with much nicety.
+
+"Poor Mary!" he said.  "Susan," he went on in a lowered tone, "I'm
+afraid she may be fond of Fred."
+
+"Oh no!  She always laughs at him; and he is not likely to think of her
+in any other than a brotherly way."
+
+Caleb made no rejoinder, but presently lowered his spectacles, drew up
+his chair to the desk, and said, "Deuce take the bill--I wish it was
+at Hanover!  These things are a sad interruption to business!"
+
+The first part of this speech comprised his whole store of maledictory
+expression, and was uttered with a slight snarl easy to imagine.  But
+it would be difficult to convey to those who never heard him utter the
+word "business," the peculiar tone of fervid veneration, of religious
+regard, in which he wrapped it, as a consecrated symbol is wrapped in
+its gold-fringed linen.
+
+Caleb Garth often shook his head in meditation on the value, the
+indispensable might of that myriad-headed, myriad-handed labor by which
+the social body is fed, clothed, and housed.  It had laid hold of his
+imagination in boyhood.  The echoes of the great hammer where roof or
+keel were a-making, the signal-shouts of the workmen, the roar of the
+furnace, the thunder and plash of the engine, were a sublime music to
+him; the felling and lading of timber, and the huge trunk vibrating
+star-like in the distance along the highway, the crane at work on the
+wharf, the piled-up produce in warehouses, the precision and variety of
+muscular effort wherever exact work had to be turned out,--all these
+sights of his youth had acted on him as poetry without the aid of the
+poets, had made a philosophy for him without the aid of philosophers,
+a religion without the aid of theology.  His early ambition had been to
+have as effective a share as possible in this sublime labor, which was
+peculiarly dignified by him with the name of "business;" and though he
+had only been a short time under a surveyor, and had been chiefly his
+own teacher, he knew more of land, building, and mining than most of
+the special men in the county.
+
+His classification of human employments was rather crude, and, like the
+categories of more celebrated men, would not be acceptable in these
+advanced times.  He divided them into "business, politics, preaching,
+learning, and amusement."  He had nothing to say against the last four;
+but he regarded them as a reverential pagan regarded other gods than
+his own.  In the same way, he thought very well of all ranks, but he
+would not himself have liked to be of any rank in which he had not such
+close contact with "business" as to get often honorably decorated with
+marks of dust and mortar, the damp of the engine, or the sweet soil of
+the woods and fields.  Though he had never regarded himself as other
+than an orthodox Christian, and would argue on prevenient grace if the
+subject were proposed to him, I think his virtual divinities were good
+practical schemes, accurate work, and the faithful completion of
+undertakings: his prince of darkness was a slack workman.  But there
+was no spirit of denial in Caleb, and the world seemed so wondrous to
+him that he was ready to accept any number of systems, like any number
+of firmaments, if they did not obviously interfere with the best
+land-drainage, solid building, correct measuring, and judicious boring
+(for coal). In fact, he had a reverential soul with a strong practical
+intelligence.  But he could not manage finance: he knew values well,
+but he had no keenness of imagination for monetary results in the shape
+of profit and loss: and having ascertained this to his cost, he
+determined to give up all forms of his beloved "business" which
+required that talent.  He gave himself up entirely to the many kinds of
+work which he could do without handling capital, and was one of those
+precious men within his own district whom everybody would choose to
+work for them, because he did his work well, charged very little, and
+often declined to charge at all.  It is no wonder, then, that the
+Garths were poor, and "lived in a small way."  However, they did not
+mind it.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV.
+
+    "Love seeketh not itself to please,
+       Nor for itself hath any care
+     But for another gives its ease
+       And builds a heaven in hell's despair.
+          .    .    .    .    .    .    .
+     Love seeketh only self to please,
+       To bind another to its delight,
+     Joys in another's loss of ease,
+       And builds a hell in heaven's despite."
+                       --W. BLAKE: Songs of Experience
+
+
+Fred Vincy wanted to arrive at Stone Court when Mary could not expect
+him, and when his uncle was not down-stairs in that case she might be
+sitting alone in the wainscoted parlor.  He left his horse in the yard
+to avoid making a noise on the gravel in front, and entered the parlor
+without other notice than the noise of the door-handle. Mary was in her
+usual corner, laughing over Mrs. Piozzi's recollections of Johnson, and
+looked up with the fun still in her face.  It gradually faded as she
+saw Fred approach her without speaking, and stand before her with his
+elbow on the mantel-piece, looking ill.  She too was silent, only
+raising her eyes to him inquiringly.
+
+"Mary," he began, "I am a good-for-nothing blackguard."
+
+"I should think one of those epithets would do at a time," said Mary,
+trying to smile, but feeling alarmed.
+
+"I know you will never think well of me any more.  You will think me a
+liar.  You will think me dishonest.  You will think I didn't care for
+you, or your father and mother.  You always do make the worst of me, I
+know."
+
+"I cannot deny that I shall think all that of you, Fred, if you give me
+good reasons.  But please to tell me at once what you have done.  I
+would rather know the painful truth than imagine it."
+
+"I owed money--a hundred and sixty pounds.  I asked your father to put
+his name to a bill.  I thought it would not signify to him.  I made
+sure of paying the money myself, and I have tried as hard as I could.
+And now, I have been so unlucky--a horse has turned out badly--I can
+only pay fifty pounds.  And I can't ask my father for the money: he
+would not give me a farthing.  And my uncle gave me a hundred a little
+while ago.  So what can I do?  And now your father has no ready money
+to spare, and your mother will have to pay away her ninety-two pounds
+that she has saved, and she says your savings must go too.  You see
+what a--"
+
+"Oh, poor mother, poor father!" said Mary, her eyes filling with tears,
+and a little sob rising which she tried to repress.  She looked
+straight before her and took no notice of Fred, all the consequences at
+home becoming present to her.  He too remained silent for some moments,
+feeling more miserable than ever.  "I wouldn't have hurt you for the
+world, Mary," he said at last.  "You can never forgive me."
+
+"What does it matter whether I forgive you?" said Mary, passionately.
+"Would that make it any better for my mother to lose the money she has
+been earning by lessons for four years, that she might send Alfred to
+Mr. Hanmer's? Should you think all that pleasant enough if I forgave
+you?"
+
+"Say what you like, Mary.  I deserve it all."
+
+"I don't want to say anything," said Mary, more quietly, "and my anger
+is of no use."  She dried her eyes, threw aside her book, rose and
+fetched her sewing.
+
+Fred followed her with his eyes, hoping that they would meet hers, and
+in that way find access for his imploring penitence.  But no!  Mary
+could easily avoid looking upward.
+
+"I do care about your mother's money going," he said, when she was
+seated again and sewing quickly.  "I wanted to ask you, Mary--don't
+you think that Mr. Featherstone--if you were to tell him--tell him, I
+mean, about apprenticing Alfred--would advance the money?"
+
+"My family is not fond of begging, Fred.  We would rather work for our
+money.  Besides, you say that Mr. Featherstone has lately given you a
+hundred pounds.  He rarely makes presents; he has never made presents
+to us.  I am sure my father will not ask him for anything; and even if
+I chose to beg of him, it would be of no use."
+
+"I am so miserable, Mary--if you knew how miserable I am, you would be
+sorry for me."
+
+"There are other things to be more sorry for than that.  But selfish
+people always think their own discomfort of more importance than
+anything else in the world.  I see enough of that every day."
+
+"It is hardly fair to call me selfish.  If you knew what things other
+young men do, you would think me a good way off the worst."
+
+"I know that people who spend a great deal of money on themselves
+without knowing how they shall pay, must be selfish.  They are always
+thinking of what they can get for themselves, and not of what other
+people may lose."
+
+"Any man may be unfortunate, Mary, and find himself unable to pay when
+he meant it.  There is not a better man in the world than your father,
+and yet he got into trouble."
+
+"How dare you make any comparison between my father and you, Fred?"
+said Mary, in a deep tone of indignation.  "He never got into trouble
+by thinking of his own idle pleasures, but because he was always
+thinking of the work he was doing for other people.  And he has fared
+hard, and worked hard to make good everybody's loss."
+
+"And you think that I shall never try to make good anything, Mary.  It
+is not generous to believe the worst of a man.  When you have got any
+power over him, I think you might try and use it to make him better;
+but that is what you never do.  However, I'm going," Fred ended,
+languidly.  "I shall never speak to you about anything again.  I'm very
+sorry for all the trouble I've caused--that's all."
+
+Mary had dropped her work out of her hand and looked up.  There is
+often something maternal even in a girlish love, and Mary's hard
+experience had wrought her nature to an impressibility very different
+from that hard slight thing which we call girlishness.  At Fred's last
+words she felt an instantaneous pang, something like what a mother
+feels at the imagined sobs or cries of her naughty truant child, which
+may lose itself and get harm.  And when, looking up, her eyes met his
+dull despairing glance, her pity for him surmounted her anger and all
+her other anxieties.
+
+"Oh, Fred, how ill you look!  Sit down a moment.  Don't go yet.  Let me
+tell uncle that you are here.  He has been wondering that he has not
+seen you for a whole week."  Mary spoke hurriedly, saying the words
+that came first without knowing very well what they were, but saying
+them in a half-soothing half-beseeching tone, and rising as if to go
+away to Mr. Featherstone.  Of course Fred felt as if the clouds had
+parted and a gleam had come: he moved and stood in her way.
+
+"Say one word, Mary, and I will do anything.  Say you will not think
+the worst of me--will not give me up altogether."
+
+"As if it were any pleasure to me to think ill of you," said Mary, in a
+mournful tone.  "As if it were not very painful to me to see you an
+idle frivolous creature.  How can you bear to be so contemptible, when
+others are working and striving, and there are so many things to be
+done--how can you bear to be fit for nothing in the world that is
+useful?  And with so much good in your disposition, Fred,--you might
+be worth a great deal."
+
+"I will try to be anything you like, Mary, if you will say that you
+love me."
+
+"I should be ashamed to say that I loved a man who must always be
+hanging on others, and reckoning on what they would do for him.  What
+will you be when you are forty?  Like Mr. Bowyer, I suppose--just as
+idle, living in Mrs. Beck's front parlor--fat and shabby, hoping
+somebody will invite you to dinner--spending your morning in learning a
+comic song--oh no! learning a tune on the flute."
+
+Mary's lips had begun to curl with a smile as soon as she had asked
+that question about Fred's future (young souls are mobile), and before
+she ended, her face had its full illumination of fun.  To him it was
+like the cessation of an ache that Mary could laugh at him, and with a
+passive sort of smile he tried to reach her hand; but she slipped away
+quickly towards the door and said, "I shall tell uncle.  You _must_ see
+him for a moment or two."
+
+Fred secretly felt that his future was guaranteed against the
+fulfilment of Mary's sarcastic prophecies, apart from that "anything"
+which he was ready to do if she would define it. He never dared in
+Mary's presence to approach the subject of his expectations from Mr.
+Featherstone, and she always ignored them, as if everything depended on
+himself.  But if ever he actually came into the property, she must
+recognize the change in his position.  All this passed through his mind
+somewhat languidly, before he went up to see his uncle.  He stayed but
+a little while, excusing himself on the ground that he had a cold; and
+Mary did not reappear before he left the house.  But as he rode home,
+he began to be more conscious of being ill, than of being melancholy.
+
+When Caleb Garth arrived at Stone Court soon after dusk, Mary was not
+surprised, although he seldom had leisure for paying her a visit, and
+was not at all fond of having to talk with Mr. Featherstone.  The old
+man, on the other hand, felt himself ill at ease with a brother-in-law
+whom he could not annoy, who did not mind about being considered poor,
+had nothing to ask of him, and understood all kinds of farming and
+mining business better than he did.  But Mary had felt sure that her
+parents would want to see her, and if her father had not come, she
+would have obtained leave to go home for an hour or two the next day.
+After discussing prices during tea with Mr. Featherstone Caleb rose to
+bid him good-by, and said, "I want to speak to you, Mary."
+
+She took a candle into another large parlor, where there was no fire,
+and setting down the feeble light on the dark mahogany table, turned
+round to her father, and putting her arms round his neck kissed him
+with childish kisses which he delighted in,--the expression of his
+large brows softening as the expression of a great beautiful dog
+softens when it is caressed.  Mary was his favorite child, and whatever
+Susan might say, and right as she was on all other subjects, Caleb
+thought it natural that Fred or any one else should think Mary more
+lovable than other girls.
+
+"I've got something to tell you, my dear," said Caleb in his hesitating
+way.  "No very good news; but then it might be worse."
+
+"About money, father?  I think I know what it is."
+
+"Ay? how can that be?  You see, I've been a bit of a fool again, and
+put my name to a bill, and now it comes to paying; and your mother has
+got to part with her savings, that's the worst of it, and even they
+won't quite make things even.  We wanted a hundred and ten pounds: your
+mother has ninety-two, and I have none to spare in the bank; and she
+thinks that you have some savings."
+
+"Oh yes; I have more than four-and-twenty pounds.  I thought you would
+come, father, so I put it in my bag.  See! beautiful white notes and
+gold."
+
+Mary took out the folded money from her reticule and put it into her
+father's hand.
+
+"Well, but how--we only want eighteen--here, put the rest back,
+child,--but how did you know about it?" said Caleb, who, in his
+unconquerable indifference to money, was beginning to be chiefly
+concerned about the relation the affair might have to Mary's affections.
+
+"Fred told me this morning."
+
+"Ah!  Did he come on purpose?"
+
+"Yes, I think so.  He was a good deal distressed."
+
+"I'm afraid Fred is not to be trusted, Mary," said the father, with
+hesitating tenderness.  "He means better than he acts, perhaps.  But I
+should think it a pity for any body's happiness to be wrapped up in
+him, and so would your mother."
+
+"And so should I, father," said Mary, not looking up, but putting the
+back of her father's hand against her cheek.
+
+"I don't want to pry, my dear.  But I was afraid there might be
+something between you and Fred, and I wanted to caution you.  You see,
+Mary"--here Caleb's voice became more tender; he had been pushing his
+hat about on the table and looking at it, but finally he turned his
+eyes on his daughter--"a woman, let her be as good as she may, has got
+to put up with the life her husband makes for her.  Your mother has had
+to put up with a good deal because of me."
+
+Mary turned the back of her father's hand to her lips and smiled at him.
+
+"Well, well, nobody's perfect, but"--here Mr. Garth shook his head to
+help out the inadequacy of words--"what I am thinking of is--what it
+must be for a wife when she's never sure of her husband, when he hasn't
+got a principle in him to make him more afraid of doing the wrong thing
+by others than of getting his own toes pinched.  That's the long and
+the short of it, Mary.  Young folks may get fond of each other before
+they know what life is, and they may think it all holiday if they can
+only get together; but it soon turns into working day, my dear.
+However, you have more sense than most, and you haven't been kept in
+cotton-wool: there may be no occasion for me to say this, but a father
+trembles for his daughter, and you are all by yourself here."
+
+"Don't fear for me, father," said Mary, gravely meeting her father's
+eyes; "Fred has always been very good to me; he is kind-hearted and
+affectionate, and not false, I think, with all his self-indulgence. But
+I will never engage myself to one who has no manly independence, and
+who goes on loitering away his time on the chance that others will
+provide for him.  You and my mother have taught me too much pride for
+that."
+
+"That's right--that's right.  Then I am easy," said Mr. Garth, taking
+up his hat.  "But it's hard to run away with your earnings, eh child."
+
+"Father!" said Mary, in her deepest tone of remonstrance.  "Take
+pocketfuls of love besides to them all at home," was her last word
+before he closed the outer door on himself.
+
+"I suppose your father wanted your earnings," said old Mr.
+Featherstone, with his usual power of unpleasant surmise, when Mary
+returned to him.  "He makes but a tight fit, I reckon.  You're of age
+now; you ought to be saving for yourself."
+
+"I consider my father and mother the best part of myself, sir," said
+Mary, coldly.
+
+Mr. Featherstone grunted: he could not deny that an ordinary sort of
+girl like her might be expected to be useful, so he thought of another
+rejoinder, disagreeable enough to be always apropos.  "If Fred Vincy
+comes to-morrow, now, don't you keep him chattering: let him come up to
+me."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI.
+
+    "He beats me and I rail at him: O worthy satisfaction!
+    would it were otherwise--that I could beat him while
+    he railed at me.--"
+                                    --Troilus and Cressida.
+
+
+But Fred did not go to Stone Court the next day, for reasons that were
+quite peremptory.  From those visits to unsanitary Houndsley streets in
+search of Diamond, he had brought back not only a bad bargain in
+horse-flesh, but the further misfortune of some ailment which for a day
+or two had deemed mere depression and headache, but which got so much
+worse when he returned from his visit to Stone Court that, going into
+the dining-room, he threw himself on the sofa, and in answer to his
+mother's anxious question, said, "I feel very ill: I think you must
+send for Wrench."
+
+Wrench came, but did not apprehend anything serious, spoke of a "slight
+derangement," and did not speak of coming again on the morrow.  He had
+a due value for the Vincys' house, but the wariest men are apt to be
+dulled by routine, and on worried mornings will sometimes go through
+their business with the zest of the daily bell-ringer.  Mr. Wrench was
+a small, neat, bilious man, with a well-dressed wig: he had a laborious
+practice, an irascible temper, a lymphatic wife and seven children; and
+he was already rather late before setting out on a four-miles drive to
+meet Dr. Minchin on the other side of Tipton, the decease of Hicks, a
+rural practitioner, having increased Middlemarch practice in that
+direction.  Great statesmen err, and why not small medical men?  Mr.
+Wrench did not neglect sending the usual white parcels, which this time
+had black and drastic contents.  Their effect was not alleviating to
+poor Fred, who, however, unwilling as he said to believe that he was
+"in for an illness," rose at his usual easy hour the next morning and
+went down-stairs meaning to breakfast, but succeeded in nothing but in
+sitting and shivering by the fire.  Mr. Wrench was again sent for, but
+was gone on his rounds, and Mrs. Vincy seeing her darling's changed
+looks and general misery, began to cry and said she would send for Dr.
+Sprague.
+
+"Oh, nonsense, mother!  It's nothing," said Fred, putting out his hot
+dry hand to her, "I shall soon be all right.  I must have taken cold in
+that nasty damp ride."
+
+"Mamma!" said Rosamond, who was seated near the window (the dining-room
+windows looked on that highly respectable street called Lowick Gate),
+"there is Mr. Lydgate, stopping to speak to some one.  If I were you I
+would call him in.  He has cured Ellen Bulstrode.  They say he cures
+every one."
+
+Mrs. Vincy sprang to the window and opened it in an instant, thinking
+only of Fred and not of medical etiquette.  Lydgate was only two yards
+off on the other side of some iron palisading, and turned round at the
+sudden sound of the sash, before she called to him.  In two minutes he
+was in the room, and Rosamond went out, after waiting just long enough
+to show a pretty anxiety conflicting with her sense of what was
+becoming.
+
+Lydgate had to hear a narrative in which Mrs. Vincy's mind insisted
+with remarkable instinct on every point of minor importance, especially
+on what Mr. Wrench had said and had not said about coming again.  That
+there might be an awkward affair with Wrench, Lydgate saw at once; but
+the case was serious enough to make him dismiss that consideration: he
+was convinced that Fred was in the pink-skinned stage of typhoid fever,
+and that he had taken just the wrong medicines.  He must go to bed
+immediately, must have a regular nurse, and various appliances and
+precautions must be used, about which Lydgate was particular.  Poor
+Mrs. Vincy's terror at these indications of danger found vent in such
+words as came most easily.  She thought it "very ill usage on the part
+of Mr. Wrench, who had attended their house so many years in preference
+to Mr. Peacock, though Mr. Peacock was equally a friend.  Why Mr.
+Wrench should neglect her children more than others, she could not for
+the life of her understand.  He had not neglected Mrs. Larcher's when
+they had the measles, nor indeed would Mrs. Vincy have wished that he
+should.  And if anything should happen--"
+
+Here poor Mrs. Vincy's spirit quite broke down, and her Niobe throat
+and good-humored face were sadly convulsed.  This was in the hall out
+of Fred's hearing, but Rosamond had opened the drawing-room door, and
+now came forward anxiously.  Lydgate apologized for Mr. Wrench, said
+that the symptoms yesterday might have been disguising, and that this
+form of fever was very equivocal in its beginnings: he would go
+immediately to the druggist's and have a prescription made up in order
+to lose no time, but he would write to Mr. Wrench and tell him what had
+been done.
+
+"But you must come again--you must go on attending Fred.  I can't have
+my boy left to anybody who may come or not.  I bear nobody ill-will,
+thank God, and Mr. Wrench saved me in the pleurisy, but he'd better
+have let me die--if--if--"
+
+"I will meet Mr. Wrench here, then, shall I?" said Lydgate, really
+believing that Wrench was not well prepared to deal wisely with a case
+of this kind.
+
+"Pray make that arrangement, Mr. Lydgate," said Rosamond, coming to her
+mother's aid, and supporting her arm to lead her away.
+
+When Mr. Vincy came home he was very angry with Wrench, and did not
+care if he never came into his house again.  Lydgate should go on now,
+whether Wrench liked it or not.  It was no joke to have fever in the
+house.  Everybody must be sent to now, not to come to dinner on
+Thursday.  And Pritchard needn't get up any wine: brandy was the best
+thing against infection.  "I shall drink brandy," added Mr. Vincy,
+emphatically--as much as to say, this was not an occasion for firing
+with blank-cartridges. "He's an uncommonly unfortunate lad, is Fred.
+He'd need have--some luck by-and-by to make up for all this--else I
+don't know who'd have an eldest son."
+
+"Don't say so, Vincy," said the mother, with a quivering lip, "if you
+don't want him to be taken from me."
+
+"It will worret you to death, Lucy; _that_ I can see," said Mr. Vincy,
+more mildly.  "However, Wrench shall know what I think of the matter."
+(What Mr. Vincy thought confusedly was, that the fever might somehow
+have been hindered if Wrench had shown the proper solicitude about
+his--the Mayor's--family.) "I'm the last man to give in to the cry
+about new doctors, or new parsons either--whether they're Bulstrode's
+men or not.  But Wrench shall know what I think, take it as he will."
+
+Wrench did not take it at all well.  Lydgate was as polite as he could
+be in his offhand way, but politeness in a man who has placed you at a
+disadvantage is only an additional exasperation, especially if he
+happens to have been an object of dislike beforehand.  Country
+practitioners used to be an irritable species, susceptible on the point
+of honor; and Mr. Wrench was one of the most irritable among them.  He
+did not refuse to meet Lydgate in the evening, but his temper was
+somewhat tried on the occasion.  He had to hear Mrs. Vincy say--
+
+"Oh, Mr. Wrench, what have I ever done that you should use me so?--  To
+go away, and never to come again!  And my boy might have been stretched
+a corpse!"
+
+Mr. Vincy, who had been keeping up a sharp fire on the enemy Infection,
+and was a good deal heated in consequence, started up when he heard
+Wrench come in, and went into the hall to let him know what he thought.
+
+"I'll tell you what, Wrench, this is beyond a joke," said the Mayor,
+who of late had had to rebuke offenders with an official air, and how
+broadened himself by putting his thumbs in his armholes.--  "To let
+fever get unawares into a house like this.  There are some things that
+ought to be actionable, and are not so-- that's my opinion."
+
+But irrational reproaches were easier to bear than the sense of being
+instructed, or rather the sense that a younger man, like Lydgate,
+inwardly considered him in need of instruction, for "in point of fact,"
+Mr. Wrench afterwards said, Lydgate paraded flighty, foreign notions,
+which would not wear.  He swallowed his ire for the moment, but he
+afterwards wrote to decline further attendance in the case.  The house
+might be a good one, but Mr. Wrench was not going to truckle to anybody
+on a professional matter.  He reflected, with much probability on his
+side, that Lydgate would by-and-by be caught tripping too, and that his
+ungentlemanly attempts to discredit the sale of drugs by his
+professional brethren, would by-and-by recoil on himself.  He threw out
+biting remarks on Lydgate's tricks, worthy only of a quack, to get
+himself a factitious reputation with credulous people.  That cant about
+cures was never got up by sound practitioners.
+
+This was a point on which Lydgate smarted as much as Wrench could
+desire.  To be puffed by ignorance was not only humiliating, but
+perilous, and not more enviable than the reputation of the
+weather-prophet.  He was impatient of the foolish expectations amidst
+which all work must be carried on, and likely enough to damage himself
+as much as Mr. Wrench could wish, by an unprofessional openness.
+
+However, Lydgate was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys, and
+the event was a subject of general conversation in Middlemarch.  Some
+said, that the Vincys had behaved scandalously, that Mr. Vincy had
+threatened Wrench, and that Mrs. Vincy had accused him of poisoning her
+son.  Others were of opinion that Mr. Lydgate's passing by was
+providential, that he was wonderfully clever in fevers, and that
+Bulstrode was in the right to bring him forward.  Many people believed
+that Lydgate's coming to the town at all was really due to Bulstrode;
+and Mrs. Taft, who was always counting stitches and gathered her
+information in misleading fragments caught between the rows of her
+knitting, had got it into her head that Mr. Lydgate was a natural son
+of Bulstrode's, a fact which seemed to justify her suspicions of
+evangelical laymen.
+
+She one day communicated this piece of knowledge to Mrs. Farebrother,
+who did not fail to tell her son of it, observing--
+
+"I should not be surprised at anything in Bulstrode, but I should be
+sorry to think it of Mr. Lydgate."
+
+"Why, mother," said Mr. Farebrother, after an explosive laugh, "you
+know very well that Lydgate is of a good family in the North.  He never
+heard of Bulstrode before he came here."
+
+"That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Lydgate is concerned, Camden," said
+the old lady, with an air of precision.--"But as to Bulstrode--the
+report may be true of some other son."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII.
+
+    Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian:
+    We are but mortals, and must sing of man.
+
+
+An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly
+furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me
+this pregnant little fact.  Your pier-glass or extensive surface of
+polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and
+multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a
+lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo! the scratches will
+seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round
+that little sun.  It is demonstrable that the scratches are going
+everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the
+flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with
+an exclusive optical selection.  These things are a parable.  The
+scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now
+absent--of Miss Vincy, for example.  Rosamond had a Providence of her
+own who had kindly made her more charming than other girls, and who
+seemed to have arranged Fred's illness and Mr. Wrench's mistake in
+order to bring her and Lydgate within effective proximity.  It would
+have been to contravene these arrangements if Rosamond had consented to
+go away to Stone Court or elsewhere, as her parents wished her to do,
+especially since Mr. Lydgate thought the precaution needless.
+Therefore, while Miss Morgan and the children were sent away to a
+farmhouse the morning after Fred's illness had declared itself,
+Rosamond refused to leave papa and mamma.
+
+Poor mamma indeed was an object to touch any creature born of woman;
+and Mr. Vincy, who doted on his wife, was more alarmed on her account
+than on Fred's. But for his insistence she would have taken no rest:
+her brightness was all bedimmed; unconscious of her costume which had
+always been so fresh and gay, she was like a sick bird with languid eye
+and plumage ruffled, her senses dulled to the sights and sounds that
+used most to interest her.  Fred's delirium, in which he seemed to be
+wandering out of her reach, tore her heart.  After her first outburst
+against Mr. Wrench she went about very quietly: her one low cry was to
+Lydgate.  She would follow him out of the room and put her hand on his
+arm moaning out, "Save my boy."  Once she pleaded, "He has always been
+good to me, Mr. Lydgate: he never had a hard word for his mother,"--as
+if poor Fred's suffering were an accusation against him.  All the
+deepest fibres of the mother's memory were stirred, and the young man
+whose voice took a gentler tone when he spoke to her, was one with the
+babe whom she had loved, with a love new to her, before he was born.
+
+"I have good hope, Mrs. Vincy," Lydgate would say.  "Come down with me
+and let us talk about the food."  In that way he led her to the parlor
+where Rosamond was, and made a change for her, surprising her into
+taking some tea or broth which had been prepared for her.  There was a
+constant understanding between him and Rosamond on these matters.  He
+almost always saw her before going to the sickroom, and she appealed to
+him as to what she could do for mamma.  Her presence of mind and
+adroitness in carrying out his hints were admirable, and it is not
+wonderful that the idea of seeing Rosamond began to mingle itself with
+his interest in the case.  Especially when the critical stage was
+passed, and he began to feel confident of Fred's recovery.  In the more
+doubtful time, he had advised calling in Dr. Sprague (who, if he could,
+would rather have remained neutral on Wrench's account); but after two
+consultations, the conduct of the case was left to Lydgate, and there
+was every reason to make him assiduous.  Morning and evening he was at
+Mr. Vincy's, and gradually the visits became cheerful as Fred became
+simply feeble, and lay not only in need of the utmost petting but
+conscious of it, so that Mrs. Vincy felt as if, after all, the illness
+had made a festival for her tenderness.
+
+Both father and mother held it an added reason for good spirits, when
+old Mr. Featherstone sent messages by Lydgate, saying that Fred must
+make haste and get well, as he, Peter Featherstone, could not do
+without him, and missed his visits sadly.  The old man himself was
+getting bedridden.  Mrs. Vincy told these messages to Fred when he
+could listen, and he turned towards her his delicate, pinched face,
+from which all the thick blond hair had been cut away, and in which the
+eyes seemed to have got larger, yearning for some word about
+Mary--wondering what she felt about his illness.  No word passed his
+lips; but "to hear with eyes belongs to love's rare wit," and the
+mother in the fulness of her heart not only divined Fred's longing, but
+felt ready for any sacrifice in order to satisfy him.
+
+"If I can only see my boy strong again," she said, in her loving folly;
+"and who knows?--perhaps master of Stone Court! and he can marry
+anybody he likes then."
+
+"Not if they won't have me, mother," said Fred.  The illness had made
+him childish, and tears came as he spoke.
+
+"Oh, take a bit of jelly, my dear," said Mrs. Vincy, secretly
+incredulous of any such refusal.
+
+She never left Fred's side when her husband was not in the house, and
+thus Rosamond was in the unusual position of being much alone.
+Lydgate, naturally, never thought of staying long with her, yet it
+seemed that the brief impersonal conversations they had together were
+creating that peculiar intimacy which consists in shyness.  They were
+obliged to look at each other in speaking, and somehow the looking
+could not be carried through as the matter of course which it really
+was.  Lydgate began to feel this sort of consciousness unpleasant and
+one day looked down, or anywhere, like an ill-worked puppet.  But this
+turned out badly: the next day, Rosamond looked down, and the
+consequence was that when their eyes met again, both were more
+conscious than before.  There was no help for this in science, and as
+Lydgate did not want to flirt, there seemed to be no help for it in
+folly.  It was therefore a relief when neighbors no longer considered
+the house in quarantine, and when the chances of seeing Rosamond alone
+were very much reduced.
+
+But that intimacy of mutual embarrassment, in which each feels that the
+other is feeling something, having once existed, its effect is not to
+be done away with.  Talk about the weather and other well-bred topics
+is apt to seem a hollow device, and behavior can hardly become easy
+unless it frankly recognizes a mutual fascination--which of course need
+not mean anything deep or serious.  This was the way in which Rosamond
+and Lydgate slid gracefully into ease, and made their intercourse
+lively again.  Visitors came and went as usual, there was once more
+music in the drawing-room, and all the extra hospitality of Mr. Vincy's
+mayoralty returned.  Lydgate, whenever he could, took his seat by
+Rosamond's side, and lingered to hear her music, calling himself her
+captive--meaning, all the while, not to be her captive.  The
+preposterousness of the notion that he could at once set up a
+satisfactory establishment as a married man was a sufficient guarantee
+against danger.  This play at being a little in love was agreeable, and
+did not interfere with graver pursuits.  Flirtation, after all, was not
+necessarily a singeing process.  Rosamond, for her part, had never
+enjoyed the days so much in her life before: she was sure of being
+admired by some one worth captivating, and she did not distinguish
+flirtation from love, either in herself or in another.  She seemed to
+be sailing with a fair wind just whither she would go, and her thoughts
+were much occupied with a handsome house in Lowick Gate which she hoped
+would by-and-by be vacant.  She was quite determined, when she was
+married, to rid herself adroitly of all the visitors who were not
+agreeable to her at her father's; and she imagined the drawing-room in
+her favorite house with various styles of furniture.
+
+Certainly her thoughts were much occupied with Lydgate himself; he
+seemed to her almost perfect: if he had known his notes so that his
+enchantment under her music had been less like an emotional elephant's,
+and if he had been able to discriminate better the refinements of her
+taste in dress, she could hardly have mentioned a deficiency in him.
+How different he was from young Plymdale or Mr. Caius Larcher!  Those
+young men had not a notion of French, and could speak on no subject
+with striking knowledge, except perhaps the dyeing and carrying trades,
+which of course they were ashamed to mention; they were Middlemarch
+gentry, elated with their silver-headed whips and satin stocks, but
+embarrassed in their manners, and timidly jocose: even Fred was above
+them, having at least the accent and manner of a university man.
+Whereas Lydgate was always listened to, bore himself with the careless
+politeness of conscious superiority, and seemed to have the right
+clothes on by a certain natural affinity, without ever having to think
+about them.  Rosamond was proud when he entered the room, and when he
+approached her with a distinguishing smile, she had a delicious sense
+that she was the object of enviable homage.  If Lydgate had been aware
+of all the pride he excited in that delicate bosom, he might have been
+just as well pleased as any other man, even the most densely ignorant
+of humoral pathology or fibrous tissue: he held it one of the prettiest
+attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre-eminence without
+too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in.  But Rosamond was not
+one of those helpless girls who betray themselves unawares, and whose
+behavior is awkwardly driven by their impulses, instead of being
+steered by wary grace and propriety.  Do you imagine that her rapid
+forecast and rumination concerning house-furniture and society were
+ever discernible in her conversation, even with her mamma?  On the
+contrary, she would have expressed the prettiest surprise and
+disapprobation if she had heard that another young lady had been
+detected in that immodest prematureness--indeed, would probably have
+disbelieved in its possibility.  For Rosamond never showed any
+unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct
+sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private
+album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the
+irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date.  Think no unfair
+evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or
+mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something
+necessary which other people would always provide.  She was not in the
+habit of devising falsehoods, and if her statements were no direct clew
+to fact, why, they were not intended in that light--they were among
+her elegant accomplishments, intended to please.  Nature had inspired
+many arts in finishing Mrs. Lemon's favorite pupil, who by general
+consent (Fred's excepted) was a rare compound of beauty, cleverness,
+and amiability.
+
+Lydgate found it more and more agreeable to be with her, and there was
+no constraint now, there was a delightful interchange of influence in
+their eyes, and what they said had that superfluity of meaning for
+them, which is observable with some sense of flatness by a third
+person; still they had no interviews or asides from which a third
+person need have been excluded.  In fact, they flirted; and Lydgate was
+secure in the belief that they did nothing else.  If a man could not
+love and be wise, surely he could flirt and be wise at the same time?
+Really, the men in Middlemarch, except Mr. Farebrother, were great
+bores, and Lydgate did not care about commercial politics or cards:
+what was he to do for relaxation?  He was often invited to the
+Bulstrodes'; but the girls there were hardly out of the schoolroom; and
+Mrs. Bulstrode's _naive_ way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the
+nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, the
+consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a
+sufficient relief from the weight of her husband's invariable
+seriousness.  The Vincys' house, with all its faults, was the
+pleasanter by contrast; besides, it nourished Rosamond--sweet to look
+at as a half-opened blush-rose, and adorned with accomplishments for
+the refined amusement of man.
+
+But he made some enemies, other than medical, by his success with Miss
+Vincy.  One evening he came into the drawing-room rather late, when
+several other visitors were there.  The card-table had drawn off the
+elders, and Mr. Ned Plymdale (one of the good matches in Middlemarch,
+though not one of its leading minds) was in tete-a-tete with Rosamond.
+He had brought the last "Keepsake," the gorgeous watered-silk
+publication which marked modern progress at that time; and he
+considered himself very fortunate that he could be the first to look
+over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and gentlemen with shiny
+copper-plate cheeks and copper-plate smiles, and pointing to comic
+verses as capital and sentimental stories as interesting.  Rosamond was
+gracious, and Mr. Ned was satisfied that he had the very best thing in
+art and literature as a medium for "paying addresses"--the very thing
+to please a nice girl.  He had also reasons, deep rather than
+ostensible, for being satisfied with his own appearance.  To
+superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as
+if it were being gradually reabsorbed.  And it did indeed cause him
+some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were
+at that time useful.
+
+"I think the Honorable Mrs. S. is something like you," said Mr. Ned.
+He kept the book open at the bewitching portrait, and looked at it
+rather languishingly.
+
+"Her back is very large; she seems to have sat for that," said
+Rosamond, not meaning any satire, but thinking how red young Plymdale's
+hands were, and wondering why Lydgate did not come.  She went on with
+her tatting all the while.
+
+"I did not say she was as beautiful as you are," said Mr. Ned,
+venturing to look from the portrait to its rival.
+
+"I suspect you of being an adroit flatterer," said Rosamond, feeling
+sure that she should have to reject this young gentleman a second time.
+
+But now Lydgate came in; the book was closed before he reached
+Rosamond's corner, and as he took his seat with easy confidence on the
+other side of her, young Plymdale's jaw fell like a barometer towards
+the cheerless side of change.  Rosamond enjoyed not only Lydgate's
+presence but its effect: she liked to excite jealousy.
+
+"What a late comer you are!" she said, as they shook hands.  "Mamma had
+given you up a little while ago.  How do you find Fred?"
+
+"As usual; going on well, but slowly.  I want him to go away--to Stone
+Court, for example.  But your mamma seems to have some objection."
+
+"Poor fellow!" said Rosamond, prettily.  "You will see Fred so
+changed," she added, turning to the other suitor; "we have looked to
+Mr. Lydgate as our guardian angel during this illness."
+
+Mr. Ned smiled nervously, while Lydgate, drawing the "Keepsake" towards
+him and opening it, gave a short scornful laugh and tossed up his
+chin, as if in wonderment at human folly.
+
+"What are you laughing at so profanely?" said Rosamond, with bland
+neutrality.
+
+"I wonder which would turn out to be the silliest--the engravings or
+the writing here," said Lydgate, in his most convinced tone, while he
+turned over the pages quickly, seeming to see all through the book in
+no time, and showing his large white hands to much advantage, as
+Rosamond thought.  "Do look at this bridegroom coming out of church:
+did you ever see such a 'sugared invention'--as the Elizabethans used
+to say?  Did any haberdasher ever look so smirking?  Yet I will answer
+for it the story makes him one of the first gentlemen in the land."
+
+"You are so severe, I am frightened at you," said Rosamond, keeping her
+amusement duly moderate.  Poor young Plymdale had lingered with
+admiration over this very engraving, and his spirit was stirred.
+
+"There are a great many celebrated people writing in the 'Keepsake,' at
+all events," he said, in a tone at once piqued and timid.  "This is the
+first time I have heard it called silly."
+
+"I think I shall turn round on you and accuse you of being a Goth,"
+said Rosamond, looking at Lydgate with a smile.  "I suspect you know
+nothing about Lady Blessington and L. E. L." Rosamond herself was not
+without relish for these writers, but she did not readily commit
+herself by admiration, and was alive to the slightest hint that
+anything was not, according to Lydgate, in the very highest taste.
+
+"But Sir Walter Scott--I suppose Mr. Lydgate knows him," said young
+Plymdale, a little cheered by this advantage.
+
+"Oh, I read no literature now," said Lydgate, shutting the book, and
+pushing it away.  "I read so much when I was a lad, that I suppose it
+will last me all my life.  I used to know Scott's poems by heart."
+
+"I should like to know when you left off," said Rosamond, "because then
+I might be sure that I knew something which you did not know."
+
+"Mr. Lydgate would say that was not worth knowing," said Mr. Ned,
+purposely caustic.
+
+"On the contrary," said Lydgate, showing no smart; but smiling with
+exasperating confidence at Rosamond.  "It would be worth knowing by the
+fact that Miss Vincy could tell it me."
+
+Young Plymdale soon went to look at the whist-playing, thinking that
+Lydgate was one of the most conceited, unpleasant fellows it had ever
+been his ill-fortune to meet.
+
+"How rash you are!" said Rosamond, inwardly delighted.  "Do you see
+that you have given offence?"
+
+"What! is it Mr. Plymdale's book?  I am sorry.  I didn't think about
+it."
+
+"I shall begin to admit what you said of yourself when you first came
+here--that you are a bear, and want teaching by the birds."
+
+"Well, there is a bird who can teach me what she will.  Don't I listen
+to her willingly?"
+
+To Rosamond it seemed as if she and Lydgate were as good as engaged.
+That they were some time to be engaged had long been an idea in her
+mind; and ideas, we know, tend to a more solid kind of existence, the
+necessary materials being at hand.  It is true, Lydgate had the
+counter-idea of remaining unengaged; but this was a mere negative, a
+shadow cast by other resolves which themselves were capable of
+shrinking.  Circumstance was almost sure to be on the side of
+Rosamond's idea, which had a shaping activity and looked through
+watchful blue eyes, whereas Lydgate's lay blind and unconcerned as a
+jelly-fish which gets melted without knowing it.
+
+That evening when he went home, he looked at his phials to see how a
+process of maceration was going on, with undisturbed interest; and he
+wrote out his daily notes with as much precision as usual.  The
+reveries from which it was difficult for him to detach himself were
+ideal constructions of something else than Rosamond's virtues, and the
+primitive tissue was still his fair unknown.  Moreover, he was
+beginning to feel some zest for the growing though half-suppressed feud
+between him and the other medical men, which was likely to become more
+manifest, now that Bulstrode's method of managing the new hospital was
+about to be declared; and there were various inspiriting signs that his
+non-acceptance by some of Peacock's patients might be counterbalanced
+by the impression he had produced in other quarters.  Only a few days
+later, when he had happened to overtake Rosamond on the Lowick road and
+had got down from his horse to walk by her side until he had quite
+protected her from a passing drove, he had been stopped by a servant on
+horseback with a message calling him in to a house of some importance
+where Peacock had never attended; and it was the second instance of
+this kind.  The servant was Sir James Chettam's, and the house was
+Lowick Manor.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII.
+
+    1st Gent.  All times are good to seek your wedded home
+                   Bringing a mutual delight.
+
+    2d Gent.                          Why, true.
+                   The calendar hath not an evil day
+                   For souls made one by love, and even death
+                   Were sweetness, if it came like rolling waves
+                   While they two clasped each other, and foresaw
+                   No life apart.
+
+
+Mr. and Mrs. Casaubon, returning from their wedding journey, arrived at
+Lowick Manor in the middle of January.  A light snow was falling as
+they descended at the door, and in the morning, when Dorothea passed
+from her dressing-room avenue the blue-green boudoir that we know of,
+she saw the long avenue of limes lifting their trunks from a white
+earth, and spreading white branches against the dun and motionless sky.
+The distant flat shrank in uniform whiteness and low-hanging uniformity
+of cloud.  The very furniture in the room seemed to have shrunk since
+she saw it before: the stag in the tapestry looked more like a ghost in
+his ghostly blue-green world; the volumes of polite literature in the
+bookcase looked more like immovable imitations of books.  The bright
+fire of dry oak-boughs burning on the logs seemed an incongruous
+renewal of life and glow--like the figure of Dorothea herself as she
+entered carrying the red-leather cases containing the cameos for Celia.
+
+She was glowing from her morning toilet as only healthful youth can
+glow: there was gem-like brightness on her coiled hair and in her hazel
+eyes; there was warm red life in her lips; her throat had a breathing
+whiteness above the differing white of the fur which itself seemed to
+wind about her neck and cling down her blue-gray pelisse with a
+tenderness gathered from her own, a sentient commingled innocence which
+kept its loveliness against the crystalline purity of the outdoor snow.
+As she laid the cameo-cases on the table in the bow-window, she
+unconsciously kept her hands on them, immediately absorbed in looking
+out on the still, white enclosure which made her visible world.
+
+Mr. Casaubon, who had risen early complaining of palpitation, was in
+the library giving audience to his curate Mr. Tucker.  By-and-by Celia
+would come in her quality of bridesmaid as well as sister, and through
+the next weeks there would be wedding visits received and given; all in
+continuance of that transitional life understood to correspond with the
+excitement of bridal felicity, and keeping up the sense of busy
+ineffectiveness, as of a dream which the dreamer begins to suspect.
+The duties of her married life, contemplated as so great beforehand,
+seemed to be shrinking with the furniture and the white vapor-walled
+landscape.  The clear heights where she expected to walk in full
+communion had become difficult to see even in her imagination; the
+delicious repose of the soul on a complete superior had been shaken
+into uneasy effort and alarmed with dim presentiment.  When would the
+days begin of that active wifely devotion which was to strengthen her
+husband's life and exalt her own?  Never perhaps, as she had
+preconceived them; but somehow--still somehow.  In this solemnly
+pledged union of her life, duty would present itself in some new form
+of inspiration and give a new meaning to wifely love.
+
+Meanwhile there was the snow and the low arch of dun vapor--there was
+the stifling oppression of that gentlewoman's world, where everything
+was done for her and none asked for her aid--where the sense of
+connection with a manifold pregnant existence had to be kept up
+painfully as an inward vision, instead of coming from without in claims
+that would have shaped her energies.--  "What shall I do?"  "Whatever you
+please, my dear:" that had been her brief history since she had left
+off learning morning lessons and practising silly rhythms on the hated
+piano.  Marriage, which was to bring guidance into worthy and
+imperative occupation, had not yet freed her from the gentlewoman's
+oppressive liberty: it had not even filled her leisure with the
+ruminant joy of unchecked tenderness.  Her blooming full-pulsed youth
+stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the
+chill, colorless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the
+never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that
+seemed to be vanishing from the daylight.
+
+In the first minutes when Dorothea looked out she felt nothing but the
+dreary oppression; then came a keen remembrance, and turning away from
+the window she walked round the room.  The ideas and hopes which were
+living in her mind when she first saw this room nearly three months
+before were present now only as memories: she judged them as we judge
+transient and departed things.  All existence seemed to beat with a
+lower pulse than her own, and her religious faith was a solitary cry,
+the struggle out of a nightmare in which every object was withering and
+shrinking away from her.  Each remembered thing in the room was
+disenchanted, was deadened as an unlit transparency, till her wandering
+gaze came to the group of miniatures, and there at last she saw
+something which had gathered new breath and meaning: it was the
+miniature of Mr. Casaubon's aunt Julia, who had made the unfortunate
+marriage--of Will Ladislaw's grandmother.  Dorothea could fancy that
+it was alive now--the delicate woman's face which yet had a headstrong
+look, a peculiarity difficult to interpret.  Was it only her friends
+who thought her marriage unfortunate? or did she herself find it out to
+be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears in the
+merciful silence of the night?  What breadths of experience Dorothea
+seemed to have passed over since she first looked at this miniature!
+She felt a new companionship with it, as if it had an ear for her and
+could see how she was looking at it.  Here was a woman who had known
+some difficulty about marriage.  Nay, the colors deepened, the lips and
+chin seemed to get larger, the hair and eyes seemed to be sending out
+light, the face was masculine and beamed on her with that full gaze
+which tells her on whom it falls that she is too interesting for the
+slightest movement of her eyelid to pass unnoticed and uninterpreted.
+The vivid presentation came like a pleasant glow to Dorothea: she felt
+herself smiling, and turning from the miniature sat down and looked up
+as if she were again talking to a figure in front of her.  But the
+smile disappeared as she went on meditating, and at last she said
+aloud--
+
+"Oh, it was cruel to speak so!  How sad--how dreadful!"
+
+She rose quickly and went out of the room, hurrying along the corridor,
+with the irresistible impulse to go and see her husband and inquire if
+she could do anything for him.  Perhaps Mr. Tucker was gone and Mr.
+Casaubon was alone in the library.  She felt as if all her morning's
+gloom would vanish if she could see her husband glad because of her
+presence.
+
+But when she reached the head of the dark oak there was Celia coming
+up, and below there was Mr. Brooke, exchanging welcomes and
+congratulations with Mr. Casaubon.
+
+"Dodo!" said Celia, in her quiet staccato; then kissed her sister,
+whose arms encircled her, and said no more.  I think they both cried a
+little in a furtive manner, while Dorothea ran down-stairs to greet her
+uncle.
+
+"I need not ask how you are, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, after kissing
+her forehead.  "Rome has agreed with you, I see--happiness, frescos,
+the antique--that sort of thing.  Well, it's very pleasant to have you
+back again, and you understand all about art now, eh?  But Casaubon is
+a little pale, I tell him--a little pale, you know.  Studying hard in
+his holidays is carrying it rather too far.  I overdid it at one
+time"--Mr. Brooke still held Dorothea's hand, but had turned his face
+to Mr. Casaubon--"about topography, ruins, temples--I thought I had a
+clew, but I saw it would carry me too far, and nothing might come of
+it.  You may go any length in that sort of thing, and nothing may come
+of it, you know."
+
+Dorothea's eyes also were turned up to her husband's face with some
+anxiety at the idea that those who saw him afresh after absence might
+be aware of signs which she had not noticed.
+
+"Nothing to alarm you, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, observing her
+expression.  "A little English beef and mutton will soon make a
+difference.  It was all very well to look pale, sitting for the
+portrait of Aquinas, you know--we got your letter just in time.  But
+Aquinas, now--he was a little too subtle, wasn't he?  Does anybody read
+Aquinas?"
+
+"He is not indeed an author adapted to superficial minds," said Mr.
+Casaubon, meeting these timely questions with dignified patience.
+
+"You would like coffee in your own room, uncle?" said Dorothea, coming
+to the rescue.
+
+"Yes; and you must go to Celia: she has great news to tell you, you
+know.  I leave it all to her."
+
+The blue-green boudoir looked much more cheerful when Celia was seated
+there in a pelisse exactly like her sister's, surveying the cameos with
+a placid satisfaction, while the conversation passed on to other topics.
+
+"Do you think it nice to go to Rome on a wedding journey?" said Celia,
+with her ready delicate blush which Dorothea was used to on the
+smallest occasions.
+
+"It would not suit all--not you, dear, for example," said Dorothea,
+quietly.  No one would ever know what she thought of a wedding journey
+to Rome.
+
+"Mrs. Cadwallader says it is nonsense, people going a long journey when
+they are married.  She says they get tired to death of each other, and
+can't quarrel comfortably, as they would at home.  And Lady Chettam
+says she went to Bath."  Celia's color changed again and again--seemed
+
+    "To come and go with tidings from the heart,
+     As it a running messenger had been."
+
+It must mean more than Celia's blushing usually did.
+
+"Celia! has something happened?" said Dorothea, in a tone full of
+sisterly feeling.  "Have you really any great news to tell me?"
+
+"It was because you went away, Dodo.  Then there was nobody but me for
+Sir James to talk to," said Celia, with a certain roguishness in her
+eyes.
+
+"I understand.  It is as I used to hope and believe," said Dorothea,
+taking her sister's face between her hands, and looking at her half
+anxiously.  Celia's marriage seemed more serious than it used to do.
+
+"It was only three days ago," said Celia.  "And Lady Chettam is very
+kind."
+
+"And you are very happy?"
+
+"Yes.  We are not going to be married yet.  Because every thing is to
+be got ready.  And I don't want to be married so very soon, because I
+think it is nice to be engaged.  And we shall be married all our lives
+after."
+
+"I do believe you could not marry better, Kitty.  Sir James is a good,
+honorable man," said Dorothea, warmly.
+
+"He has gone on with the cottages, Dodo.  He will tell you about them
+when he comes.  Shall you be glad to see him?"
+
+"Of course I shall.  How can you ask me?"
+
+"Only I was afraid you would be getting so learned," said Celia,
+regarding Mr. Casaubon's learning as a kind of damp which might in due
+time saturate a neighboring body.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX.
+
+    "I found that no genius in another could please me.  My
+    unfortunate paradoxes had entirely dried up that source of
+    comfort."--GOLDSMITH.
+
+
+One morning, some weeks after her arrival at Lowick, Dorothea--but why
+always Dorothea?  Was her point of view the only possible one with
+regard to this marriage?  I protest against all our interest, all our
+effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look
+blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will
+know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect.
+In spite of the blinking eyes and white moles objectionable to Celia,
+and the want of muscular curve which was morally painful to Sir James,
+Mr. Casaubon had an intense consciousness within him, and was
+spiritually a-hungered like the rest of us.  He had done nothing
+exceptional in marrying--nothing but what society sanctions, and
+considers an occasion for wreaths and bouquets.  It had occurred to him
+that he must not any longer defer his intention of matrimony, and he
+had reflected that in taking a wife, a man of good position should
+expect and carefully choose a blooming young lady--the younger the
+better, because more educable and submissive--of a rank equal to his
+own, of religious principles, virtuous disposition, and good
+understanding.  On such a young lady he would make handsome
+settlements, and he would neglect no arrangement for her happiness: in
+return, he should receive family pleasures and leave behind him that
+copy of himself which seemed so urgently required of a man--to the
+sonneteers of the sixteenth century.  Times had altered since then, and
+no sonneteer had insisted on Mr. Casaubon's leaving a copy of himself;
+moreover, he had not yet succeeded in issuing copies of his
+mythological key; but he had always intended to acquit himself by
+marriage, and the sense that he was fast leaving the years behind him,
+that the world was getting dimmer and that he felt lonely, was a reason
+to him for losing no more time in overtaking domestic delights before
+they too were left behind by the years.
+
+And when he had seen Dorothea he believed that he had found even more
+than he demanded: she might really be such a helpmate to him as would
+enable him to dispense with a hired secretary, an aid which Mr.
+Casaubon had never yet employed and had a suspicious dread of.  (Mr.
+Casaubon was nervously conscious that he was expected to manifest a
+powerful mind.)  Providence, in its kindness, had supplied him with the
+wife he needed.  A wife, a modest young lady, with the purely
+appreciative, unambitious abilities of her sex, is sure to think her
+husband's mind powerful.  Whether Providence had taken equal care of
+Miss Brooke in presenting her with Mr. Casaubon was an idea which could
+hardly occur to him.  Society never made the preposterous demand that a
+man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a
+charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy.  As
+if a man could choose not only his wife but his wife's husband!  Or as
+if he were bound to provide charms for his posterity in his own
+person!--  When Dorothea accepted him with effusion, that was only
+natural; and Mr. Casaubon believed that his happiness was going to
+begin.
+
+He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life.  To
+know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an
+enthusiastic soul.  Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame,
+and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too
+languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it
+went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking
+of its wings and never flying.  His experience was of that pitiable
+kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be
+known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough
+to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in
+small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic
+scrupulosity.  And Mr. Casaubon had many scruples: he was capable of a
+severe self-restraint; he was resolute in being a man of honor
+according to the code; he would be unimpeachable by any recognized
+opinion.  In conduct these ends had been attained; but the difficulty
+of making his Key to all Mythologies unimpeachable weighed like lead
+upon his mind; and the pamphlets--or "Parerga" as he called them--by
+which he tested his public and deposited small monumental records of
+his march, were far from having been seen in all their significance.
+He suspected the Archdeacon of not having read them; he was in painful
+doubt as to what was really thought of them by the leading minds of
+Brasenose, and bitterly convinced that his old acquaintance Carp had
+been the writer of that depreciatory recension which was kept locked in
+a small drawer of Mr. Casaubon's desk, and also in a dark closet of his
+verbal memory.  These were heavy impressions to struggle against, and
+brought that melancholy embitterment which is the consequence of all
+excessive claim: even his religious faith wavered with his wavering
+trust in his own authorship, and the consolations of the Christian hope
+in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten
+Key to all Mythologies.  For my part I am very sorry for him.  It is an
+uneasy lot at best, to be what we call highly taught and yet not to
+enjoy: to be present at this great spectacle of life and never to be
+liberated from a small hungry shivering self--never to be fully
+possessed by the glory we behold, never to have our consciousness
+rapturously transformed into the vividness of a thought, the ardor of a
+passion, the energy of an action, but always to be scholarly and
+uninspired, ambitious and timid, scrupulous and dim-sighted. Becoming a
+dean or even a bishop would make little difference, I fear, to Mr.
+Casaubon's uneasiness.  Doubtless some ancient Greek has observed that
+behind the big mask and the speaking-trumpet, there must always be our
+poor little eyes peeping as usual and our timorous lips more or less
+under anxious control.
+
+To this mental estate mapped out a quarter of a century before, to
+sensibilities thus fenced in, Mr. Casaubon had thought of annexing
+happiness with a lovely young bride; but even before marriage, as we
+have seen, he found himself under a new depression in the consciousness
+that the new bliss was not blissful to him.  Inclination yearned back
+to its old, easier custom.  And the deeper he went in domesticity the
+more did the sense of acquitting himself and acting with propriety
+predominate over any other satisfaction.  Marriage, like religion and
+erudition, nay, like authorship itself, was fated to become an outward
+requirement, and Edward Casaubon was bent on fulfilling unimpeachably
+all requirements.  Even drawing Dorothea into use in his study,
+according to his own intention before marriage, was an effort which he
+was always tempted to defer, and but for her pleading insistence it
+might never have begun.  But she had succeeded in making it a matter of
+course that she should take her place at an early hour in the library
+and have work either of reading aloud or copying assigned her.  The
+work had been easier to define because Mr. Casaubon had adopted an
+immediate intention: there was to be a new Parergon, a small monograph
+on some lately traced indications concerning the Egyptian mysteries
+whereby certain assertions of Warburton's could be corrected.
+References were extensive even here, but not altogether shoreless; and
+sentences were actually to be written in the shape wherein they would
+be scanned by Brasenose and a less formidable posterity.  These minor
+monumental productions were always exciting to Mr. Casaubon; digestion
+was made difficult by the interference of citations, or by the rivalry
+of dialectical phrases ringing against each other in his brain.  And
+from the first there was to be a Latin dedication about which
+everything was uncertain except that it was not to be addressed to
+Carp: it was a poisonous regret to Mr. Casaubon that he had once
+addressed a dedication to Carp in which he had numbered that member of
+the animal kingdom among the viros nullo aevo perituros, a mistake
+which would infallibly lay the dedicator open to ridicule in the next
+age, and might even be chuckled over by Pike and Tench in the present.
+
+Thus Mr. Casaubon was in one of his busiest epochs, and as I began to
+say a little while ago, Dorothea joined him early in the library where
+he had breakfasted alone.  Celia at this time was on a second visit to
+Lowick, probably the last before her marriage, and was in the
+drawing-room expecting Sir James.
+
+Dorothea had learned to read the signs of her husband's mood, and she
+saw that the morning had become more foggy there during the last hour.
+She was going silently to her desk when he said, in that distant tone
+which implied that he was discharging a disagreeable duty--
+
+"Dorothea, here is a letter for you, which was enclosed in one
+addressed to me."
+
+It was a letter of two pages, and she immediately looked at the
+signature.
+
+"Mr. Ladislaw!  What can he have to say to me?" she exclaimed, in a
+tone of pleased surprise.  "But," she added, looking at Mr. Casaubon,
+"I can imagine what he has written to you about."
+
+"You can, if you please, read the letter," said Mr. Casaubon, severely
+pointing to it with his pen, and not looking at her.  "But I may as
+well say beforehand, that I must decline the proposal it contains to
+pay a visit here.  I trust I may be excused for desiring an interval of
+complete freedom from such distractions as have been hitherto
+inevitable, and especially from guests whose desultory vivacity makes
+their presence a fatigue."
+
+There had been no clashing of temper between Dorothea and her husband
+since that little explosion in Rome, which had left such strong traces
+in her mind that it had been easier ever since to quell emotion than to
+incur the consequence of venting it.  But this ill-tempered
+anticipation that she could desire visits which might be disagreeable
+to her husband, this gratuitous defence of himself against selfish
+complaint on her part, was too sharp a sting to be meditated on until
+after it had been resented.  Dorothea had thought that she could have
+been patient with John Milton, but she had never imagined him behaving
+in this way; and for a moment Mr. Casaubon seemed to be stupidly
+undiscerning and odiously unjust.  Pity, that "new-born babe" which was
+by-and-by to rule many a storm within her, did not "stride the blast"
+on this occasion.  With her first words, uttered in a tone that shook
+him, she startled Mr. Casaubon into looking at her, and meeting the
+flash of her eyes.
+
+"Why do you attribute to me a wish for anything that would annoy you?
+You speak to me as if I were something you had to contend against.
+Wait at least till I appear to consult my own pleasure apart from
+yours."
+
+"Dorothea, you are hasty," answered Mr. Casaubon, nervously.
+
+Decidedly, this woman was too young to be on the formidable level of
+wifehood--unless she had been pale and featureless and taken
+everything for granted.
+
+"I think it was you who were first hasty in your false suppositions
+about my feeling," said Dorothea, in the same tone.  The fire was not
+dissipated yet, and she thought it was ignoble in her husband not to
+apologize to her.
+
+"We will, if you please, say no more on this subject, Dorothea.  I have
+neither leisure nor energy for this kind of debate."
+
+Here Mr. Casaubon dipped his pen and made as if he would return to his
+writing, though his hand trembled so much that the words seemed to be
+written in an unknown character.  There are answers which, in turning
+away wrath, only send it to the other end of the room, and to have a
+discussion coolly waived when you feel that justice is all on your own
+side is even more exasperating in marriage than in philosophy.
+
+Dorothea left Ladislaw's two letters unread on her husband's
+writing-table and went to her own place, the scorn and indignation
+within her rejecting the reading of these letters, just as we hurl away
+any trash towards which we seem to have been suspected of mean
+cupidity.  She did not in the least divine the subtle sources of her
+husband's bad temper about these letters: she only knew that they had
+caused him to offend her.  She began to work at once, and her hand did
+not tremble; on the contrary, in writing out the quotations which had
+been given to her the day before, she felt that she was forming her
+letters beautifully, and it seemed to her that she saw the construction
+of the Latin she was copying, and which she was beginning to
+understand, more clearly than usual.  In her indignation there was a
+sense of superiority, but it went out for the present in firmness of
+stroke, and did not compress itself into an inward articulate voice
+pronouncing the once "affable archangel" a poor creature.
+
+There had been this apparent quiet for half an hour, and Dorothea had
+not looked away from her own table, when she heard the loud bang of a
+book on the floor, and turning quickly saw Mr. Casaubon on the library
+steps clinging forward as if he were in some bodily distress.  She
+started up and bounded towards him in an instant: he was evidently in
+great straits for breath.  Jumping on a stool she got close to his
+elbow and said with her whole soul melted into tender alarm--
+
+"Can you lean on me, dear?"
+
+He was still for two or three minutes, which seemed endless to her,
+unable to speak or move, gasping for breath.  When at last he descended
+the three steps and fell backward in the large chair which Dorothea had
+drawn close to the foot of the ladder, he no longer gasped but seemed
+helpless and about to faint.  Dorothea rang the bell violently, and
+presently Mr. Casaubon was helped to the couch: he did not faint, and
+was gradually reviving, when Sir James Chettam came in, having been met
+in the hall with the news that Mr. Casaubon had "had a fit in the
+library."
+
+"Good God! this is just what might have been expected," was his
+immediate thought.  If his prophetic soul had been urged to
+particularize, it seemed to him that "fits" would have been the
+definite expression alighted upon.  He asked his informant, the butler,
+whether the doctor had been sent for.  The butler never knew his master
+to want the doctor before; but would it not be right to send for a
+physician?
+
+When Sir James entered the library, however, Mr. Casaubon could make
+some signs of his usual politeness, and Dorothea, who in the reaction
+from her first terror had been kneeling and sobbing by his side now
+rose and herself proposed that some one should ride off for a medical
+man.
+
+"I recommend you to send for Lydgate," said Sir James.  "My mother has
+called him in, and she has found him uncommonly clever.  She has had a
+poor opinion of the physicians since my father's death."
+
+Dorothea appealed to her husband, and he made a silent sign of
+approval.  So Mr. Lydgate was sent for and he came wonderfully soon,
+for the messenger, who was Sir James Chettam's man and knew Mr.
+Lydgate, met him leading his horse along the Lowick road and giving his
+arm to Miss Vincy.
+
+Celia, in the drawing-room, had known nothing of the trouble till Sir
+James told her of it.  After Dorothea's account, he no longer
+considered the illness a fit, but still something "of that nature."
+
+"Poor dear Dodo--how dreadful!" said Celia, feeling as much grieved as
+her own perfect happiness would allow.  Her little hands were clasped,
+and enclosed by Sir James's as a bud is enfolded by a liberal calyx.
+"It is very shocking that Mr. Casaubon should be ill; but I never did
+like him.  And I think he is not half fond enough of Dorothea; and he
+ought to be, for I am sure no one else would have had him--do you
+think they would?"
+
+"I always thought it a horrible sacrifice of your sister," said Sir
+James.
+
+"Yes.  But poor Dodo never did do what other people do, and I think she
+never will."
+
+"She is a noble creature," said the loyal-hearted Sir James.  He had
+just had a fresh impression of this kind, as he had seen Dorothea
+stretching her tender arm under her husband's neck and looking at him
+with unspeakable sorrow.  He did not know how much penitence there was
+in the sorrow.
+
+"Yes," said Celia, thinking it was very well for Sir James to say so,
+but _he_ would not have been comfortable with Dodo.  "Shall I go to
+her?  Could I help her, do you think?"
+
+"I think it would be well for you just to go and see her before Lydgate
+comes," said Sir James, magnanimously.  "Only don't stay long."
+
+While Celia was gone he walked up and down remembering what he had
+originally felt about Dorothea's engagement, and feeling a revival of
+his disgust at Mr. Brooke's indifference.  If Cadwallader--if every
+one else had regarded the affair as he, Sir James, had done, the
+marriage might have been hindered.  It was wicked to let a young girl
+blindly decide her fate in that way, without any effort to save her.
+Sir James had long ceased to have any regrets on his own account: his
+heart was satisfied with his engagement to Celia.  But he had a
+chivalrous nature (was not the disinterested service of woman among the
+ideal glories of old chivalry?): his disregarded love had not turned to
+bitterness; its death had made sweet odors--floating memories that
+clung with a consecrating effect to Dorothea.  He could remain her
+brotherly friend, interpreting her actions with generous trustfulness.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX.
+
+    "Qui veut delasser hors de propos, lasse."--PASCAL.
+
+
+Mr. Casaubon had no second attack of equal severity with the first, and
+in a few days began to recover his usual condition.  But Lydgate seemed
+to think the case worth a great deal of attention.  He not only used
+his stethoscope (which had not become a matter of course in practice at
+that time), but sat quietly by his patient and watched him.  To Mr.
+Casaubon's questions about himself, he replied that the source of the
+illness was the common error of intellectual men--a too eager and
+monotonous application: the remedy was, to be satisfied with moderate
+work, and to seek variety of relaxation.  Mr. Brooke, who sat by on one
+occasion, suggested that Mr. Casaubon should go fishing, as Cadwallader
+did, and have a turning-room, make toys, table-legs, and that kind of
+thing.
+
+"In short, you recommend me to anticipate the arrival of my second
+childhood," said poor Mr. Casaubon, with some bitterness.  "These
+things," he added, looking at Lydgate, "would be to me such relaxation
+as tow-picking is to prisoners in a house of correction."
+
+"I confess," said Lydgate, smiling, "amusement is rather an
+unsatisfactory prescription.  It is something like telling people to
+keep up their spirits.  Perhaps I had better say, that you must submit
+to be mildly bored rather than to go on working."
+
+"Yes, yes," said Mr. Brooke.  "Get Dorothea to play backgammon with you
+in the evenings.  And shuttlecock, now--I don't know a finer game than
+shuttlecock for the daytime.  I remember it all the fashion.  To be
+sure, your eyes might not stand that, Casaubon.  But you must unbend,
+you know.  Why, you might take to some light study: conchology, now: I
+always think that must be a light study.  Or get Dorothea to read you
+light things, Smollett--'Roderick Random,' 'Humphrey Clinker:'  they
+are a little broad, but she may read anything now she's married, you
+know.  I remember they made me laugh uncommonly--there's a droll bit
+about a postilion's breeches.  We have no such humor now.  I have gone
+through all these things, but they might be rather new to you."
+
+"As new as eating thistles," would have been an answer to represent Mr.
+Casaubon's feelings.  But he only bowed resignedly, with due respect to
+his wife's uncle, and observed that doubtless the works he mentioned
+had "served as a resource to a certain order of minds."
+
+"You see," said the able magistrate to Lydgate, when they were outside
+the door, "Casaubon has been a little narrow: it leaves him rather at a
+loss when you forbid him his particular work, which I believe is
+something very deep indeed--in the line of research, you know.  I would
+never give way to that; I was always versatile.  But a clergyman is
+tied a little tight.  If they would make him a bishop, now!--he did a
+very good pamphlet for Peel.  He would have more movement then, more
+show; he might get a little flesh.  But I recommend you to talk to Mrs.
+Casaubon.  She is clever enough for anything, is my niece.  Tell her,
+her husband wants liveliness, diversion: put her on amusing tactics."
+
+Without Mr. Brooke's advice, Lydgate had determined on speaking to
+Dorothea.  She had not been present while her uncle was throwing out
+his pleasant suggestions as to the mode in which life at Lowick might
+be enlivened, but she was usually by her husband's side, and the
+unaffected signs of intense anxiety in her face and voice about
+whatever touched his mind or health, made a drama which Lydgate was
+inclined to watch.  He said to himself that he was only doing right in
+telling her the truth about her husband's probable future, but he
+certainly thought also that it would be interesting to talk
+confidentially with her.  A medical man likes to make psychological
+observations, and sometimes in the pursuit of such studies is too
+easily tempted into momentous prophecy which life and death easily set
+at nought.  Lydgate had often been satirical on this gratuitous
+prediction, and he meant now to be guarded.
+
+He asked for Mrs. Casaubon, but being told that she was out walking, he
+was going away, when Dorothea and Celia appeared, both glowing from
+their struggle with the March wind.  When Lydgate begged to speak with
+her alone, Dorothea opened the library door which happened to be the
+nearest, thinking of nothing at the moment but what he might have to
+say about Mr. Casaubon.  It was the first time she had entered this
+room since her husband had been taken ill, and the servant had chosen
+not to open the shutters.  But there was light enough to read by from
+the narrow upper panes of the windows.
+
+"You will not mind this sombre light," said Dorothea, standing in the
+middle of the room.  "Since you forbade books, the library has been out
+of the question.  But Mr. Casaubon will soon be here again, I hope.  Is
+he not making progress?"
+
+"Yes, much more rapid progress than I at first expected.  Indeed, he is
+already nearly in his usual state of health."
+
+"You do not fear that the illness will return?" said Dorothea, whose
+quick ear had detected some significance in Lydgate's tone.
+
+"Such cases are peculiarly difficult to pronounce upon," said Lydgate.
+"The only point on which I can be confident is that it will be
+desirable to be very watchful on Mr. Casaubon's account, lest he should
+in any way strain his nervous power."
+
+"I beseech you to speak quite plainly," said Dorothea, in an imploring
+tone.  "I cannot bear to think that there might be something which I
+did not know, and which, if I had known it, would have made me act
+differently."  The words came out like a cry: it was evident that they
+were the voice of some mental experience which lay not very far off.
+
+"Sit down," she added, placing herself on the nearest chair, and
+throwing off her bonnet and gloves, with an instinctive discarding of
+formality where a great question of destiny was concerned.
+
+"What you say now justifies my own view," said Lydgate.  "I think it is
+one's function as a medical man to hinder regrets of that sort as far
+as possible.  But I beg you to observe that Mr. Casaubon's case is
+precisely of the kind in which the issue is most difficult to pronounce
+upon.  He may possibly live for fifteen years or more, without much
+worse health than he has had hitherto."
+
+Dorothea had turned very pale, and when Lydgate paused she said in a
+low voice, "You mean if we are very careful."
+
+"Yes--careful against mental agitation of all kinds, and against
+excessive application."
+
+"He would be miserable, if he had to give up his work," said Dorothea,
+with a quick prevision of that wretchedness.
+
+"I am aware of that.  The only course is to try by all means, direct
+and indirect, to moderate and vary his occupations.  With a happy
+concurrence of circumstances, there is, as I said, no immediate danger
+from that affection of the heart, which I believe to have been the
+cause of his late attack.  On the other hand, it is possible that the
+disease may develop itself more rapidly: it is one of those cases in
+which death is sometimes sudden.  Nothing should be neglected which
+might be affected by such an issue."
+
+There was silence for a few moments, while Dorothea sat as if she had
+been turned to marble, though the life within her was so intense that
+her mind had never before swept in brief time over an equal range of
+scenes and motives.
+
+"Help me, pray," she said, at last, in the same low voice as before.
+"Tell me what I can do."
+
+"What do you think of foreign travel?  You have been lately in Rome, I
+think."
+
+The memories which made this resource utterly hopeless were a new
+current that shook Dorothea out of her pallid immobility.
+
+"Oh, that would not do--that would be worse than anything," she said
+with a more childlike despondency, while the tears rolled down.
+"Nothing will be of any use that he does not enjoy."
+
+"I wish that I could have spared you this pain," said Lydgate, deeply
+touched, yet wondering about her marriage.  Women just like Dorothea
+had not entered into his traditions.
+
+"It was right of you to tell me.  I thank you for telling me the truth."
+
+"I wish you to understand that I shall not say anything to enlighten
+Mr. Casaubon himself.  I think it desirable for him to know nothing
+more than that he must not overwork himself, and must observe certain
+rules.  Anxiety of any kind would be precisely the most unfavorable
+condition for him."
+
+Lydgate rose, and Dorothea mechanically rose at the same time,
+unclasping her cloak and throwing it off as if it stifled her.  He was
+bowing and quitting her, when an impulse which if she had been alone
+would have turned into a prayer, made her say with a sob in her voice--
+
+"Oh, you are a wise man, are you not?  You know all about life and
+death.  Advise me.  Think what I can do.  He has been laboring all his
+life and looking forward.  He minds about nothing else.--  And I mind
+about nothing else--"
+
+For years after Lydgate remembered the impression produced in him by
+this involuntary appeal--this cry from soul to soul, without other
+consciousness than their moving with kindred natures in the same
+embroiled medium, the same troublous fitfully illuminated life.  But
+what could he say now except that he should see Mr. Casaubon again
+to-morrow?
+
+When he was gone, Dorothea's tears gushed forth, and relieved her
+stifling oppression.  Then she dried her eyes, reminded that her
+distress must not be betrayed to her husband; and looked round the room
+thinking that she must order the servant to attend to it as usual,
+since Mr. Casaubon might now at any moment wish to enter.  On his
+writing-table there were letters which had lain untouched since the
+morning when he was taken ill, and among them, as Dorothea well
+remembered, there were young Ladislaw's letters, the one addressed to
+her still unopened.  The associations of these letters had been made
+the more painful by that sudden attack of illness which she felt that
+the agitation caused by her anger might have helped to bring on: it
+would be time enough to read them when they were again thrust upon her,
+and she had had no inclination to fetch them from the library.  But now
+it occurred to her that they should be put out of her husband's sight:
+whatever might have been the sources of his annoyance about them, he
+must, if possible, not be annoyed again; and she ran her eyes first
+over the letter addressed to him to assure herself whether or not it
+would be necessary to write in order to hinder the offensive visit.
+
+Will wrote from Rome, and began by saying that his obligations to Mr.
+Casaubon were too deep for all thanks not to seem impertinent.  It was
+plain that if he were not grateful, he must be the poorest-spirited
+rascal who had ever found a generous friend.  To expand in wordy thanks
+would be like saying, "I am honest." But Will had come to perceive that
+his defects--defects which Mr. Casaubon had himself often pointed
+to--needed for their correction that more strenuous position which his
+relative's generosity had hitherto prevented from being inevitable.  He
+trusted that he should make the best return, if return were possible,
+by showing the effectiveness of the education for which he was
+indebted, and by ceasing in future to need any diversion towards
+himself of funds on which others might have a better claim.  He was
+coming to England, to try his fortune, as many other young men were
+obliged to do whose only capital was in their brains.  His friend
+Naumann had desired him to take charge of the "Dispute"--the picture
+painted for Mr. Casaubon, with whose permission, and Mrs. Casaubon's,
+Will would convey it to Lowick in person.  A letter addressed to the
+Poste Restante in Paris within the fortnight would hinder him, if
+necessary, from arriving at an inconvenient moment.  He enclosed a
+letter to Mrs. Casaubon in which he continued a discussion about art,
+begun with her in Rome.
+
+Opening her own letter Dorothea saw that it was a lively continuation
+of his remonstrance with her fanatical sympathy and her want of sturdy
+neutral delight in things as they were--an outpouring of his young
+vivacity which it was impossible to read just now.  She had immediately
+to consider what was to be done about the other letter: there was still
+time perhaps to prevent Will from coming to Lowick.  Dorothea ended by
+giving the letter to her uncle, who was still in the house, and begging
+him to let Will know that Mr. Casaubon had been ill, and that his
+health would not allow the reception of any visitors.
+
+No one more ready than Mr. Brooke to write a letter: his only
+difficulty was to write a short one, and his ideas in this case
+expanded over the three large pages and the inward foldings.  He had
+simply said to Dorothea--
+
+"To be sure, I will write, my dear.  He's a very clever young
+fellow--this young Ladislaw--I dare say will be a rising young man.
+It's a good letter--marks his sense of things, you know.  However, I
+will tell him about Casaubon."
+
+But the end of Mr. Brooke's pen was a thinking organ, evolving
+sentences, especially of a benevolent kind, before the rest of his mind
+could well overtake them.  It expressed regrets and proposed remedies,
+which, when Mr. Brooke read them, seemed felicitously
+worded--surprisingly the right thing, and determined a sequel which he
+had never before thought of.  In this case, his pen found it such a pity
+young Ladislaw should not have come into the neighborhood just at
+that time, in order that Mr. Brooke might make his acquaintance more
+fully, and that they might go over the long-neglected Italian drawings
+together--it also felt such an interest in a young man who was starting
+in life with a stock of ideas--that by the end of the second page it
+had persuaded Mr. Brooke to invite young Ladislaw, since he could not
+be received at Lowick, to come to Tipton Grange.  Why not?  They could
+find a great many things to do together, and this was a period of
+peculiar growth--the political horizon was expanding, and--in short,
+Mr. Brooke's pen went off into a little speech which it had lately
+reported for that imperfectly edited organ the "Middlemarch Pioneer."
+While Mr. Brooke was sealing this letter, he felt elated with an influx
+of dim projects:--a young man capable of putting ideas into form, the
+"Pioneer" purchased to clear the pathway for a new candidate, documents
+utilized--who knew what might come of it all?  Since Celia was going to
+marry immediately, it would be very pleasant to have a young fellow at
+table with him, at least for a time.
+
+But he went away without telling Dorothea what he had put into the
+letter, for she was engaged with her husband, and--in fact, these
+things were of no importance to her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI.
+
+    How will you know the pitch of that great bell
+    Too large for you to stir?  Let but a flute
+    Play 'neath the fine-mixed metal listen close
+    Till the right note flows forth, a silvery rill.
+    Then shall the huge bell tremble--then the mass
+    With myriad waves concurrent shall respond
+    In low soft unison.
+
+
+Lydgate that evening spoke to Miss Vincy of Mrs. Casaubon, and laid
+some emphasis on the strong feeling she appeared to have for that
+formal studious man thirty years older than herself.
+
+"Of course she is devoted to her husband," said Rosamond, implying a
+notion of necessary sequence which the scientific man regarded as the
+prettiest possible for a woman; but she was thinking at the same time
+that it was not so very melancholy to be mistress of Lowick Manor with
+a husband likely to die soon.  "Do you think her very handsome?"
+
+"She certainly is handsome, but I have not thought about it," said
+Lydgate.
+
+"I suppose it would be unprofessional," said Rosamond, dimpling.  "But
+how your practice is spreading!  You were called in before to the
+Chettams, I think; and now, the Casaubons."
+
+"Yes," said Lydgate, in a tone of compulsory admission.  "But I don't
+really like attending such people so well as the poor.  The cases are
+more monotonous, and one has to go through more fuss and listen more
+deferentially to nonsense."
+
+"Not more than in Middlemarch," said Rosamond.  "And at least you go
+through wide corridors and have the scent of rose-leaves everywhere."
+
+"That is true, Mademoiselle de Montmorenci," said Lydgate, just bending
+his head to the table and lifting with his fourth finger her delicate
+handkerchief which lay at the mouth of her reticule, as if to enjoy its
+scent, while he looked at her with a smile.
+
+But this agreeable holiday freedom with which Lydgate hovered about the
+flower of Middlemarch, could not continue indefinitely.  It was not
+more possible to find social isolation in that town than elsewhere, and
+two people persistently flirting could by no means escape from "the
+various entanglements, weights, blows, clashings, motions, by which
+things severally go on." Whatever Miss Vincy did must be remarked, and
+she was perhaps the more conspicuous to admirers and critics because
+just now Mrs. Vincy, after some struggle, had gone with Fred to stay a
+little while at Stone Court, there being no other way of at once
+gratifying old Featherstone and keeping watch against Mary Garth, who
+appeared a less tolerable daughter-in-law in proportion as Fred's
+illness disappeared.
+
+Aunt Bulstrode, for example, came a little oftener into Lowick Gate to
+see Rosamond, now she was alone.  For Mrs. Bulstrode had a true
+sisterly feeling for her brother; always thinking that he might have
+married better, but wishing well to the children.  Now Mrs. Bulstrode
+had a long-standing intimacy with Mrs. Plymdale.  They had nearly the
+same preferences in silks, patterns for underclothing, china-ware, and
+clergymen; they confided their little troubles of health and household
+management to each other, and various little points of superiority on
+Mrs. Bulstrode's side, namely, more decided seriousness, more
+admiration for mind, and a house outside the town, sometimes served to
+give color to their conversation without dividing them--well-meaning
+women both, knowing very little of their own motives.
+
+Mrs. Bulstrode, paying a morning visit to Mrs. Plymdale, happened to
+say that she could not stay longer, because she was going to see poor
+Rosamond.
+
+"Why do you say 'poor Rosamond'?" said Mrs. Plymdale, a round-eyed
+sharp little woman, like a tamed falcon.
+
+"She is so pretty, and has been brought up in such thoughtlessness.
+The mother, you know, had always that levity about her, which makes me
+anxious for the children."
+
+"Well, Harriet, if I am to speak my mind," said Mrs. Plymdale, with
+emphasis, "I must say, anybody would suppose you and Mr. Bulstrode
+would be delighted with what has happened, for you have done everything
+to put Mr. Lydgate forward."
+
+"Selina, what do you mean?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, in genuine surprise.
+
+"Not but what I am truly thankful for Ned's sake," said Mrs. Plymdale.
+"He could certainly better afford to keep such a wife than some people
+can; but I should wish him to look elsewhere.  Still a mother has
+anxieties, and some young men would take to a bad life in consequence.
+Besides, if I was obliged to speak, I should say I was not fond of
+strangers coming into a town."
+
+"I don't know, Selina," said Mrs. Bulstrode, with a little emphasis in
+her turn.  "Mr. Bulstrode was a stranger here at one time.  Abraham and
+Moses were strangers in the land, and we are told to entertain
+strangers.  And especially," she added, after a slight pause, "when
+they are unexceptionable."
+
+"I was not speaking in a religious sense, Harriet.  I spoke as a
+mother."
+
+"Selina, I am sure you have never heard me say anything against a niece
+of mine marrying your son."
+
+"Oh, it is pride in Miss Vincy--I am sure it is nothing else," said
+Mrs. Plymdale, who had never before given all her confidence to
+"Harriet" on this subject.  "No young man in Middlemarch was good
+enough for her: I have heard her mother say as much.  That is not a
+Christian spirit, I think.  But now, from all I hear, she has found a
+man as proud as herself."
+
+"You don't mean that there is anything between Rosamond and Mr.
+Lydgate?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, rather mortified at finding out her own
+ignorance.
+
+"Is it possible you don't know, Harriet?"
+
+"Oh, I go about so little; and I am not fond of gossip; I really never
+hear any.  You see so many people that I don't see.  Your circle is
+rather different from ours."
+
+"Well, but your own niece and Mr. Bulstrode's great favorite--and
+yours too, I am sure, Harriet!  I thought, at one time, you meant him
+for Kate, when she is a little older."
+
+"I don't believe there can be anything serious at present," said Mrs.
+Bulstrode.  "My brother would certainly have told me."
+
+"Well, people have different ways, but I understand that nobody can see
+Miss Vincy and Mr. Lydgate together without taking them to be engaged.
+However, it is not my business.  Shall I put up the pattern of mittens?"
+
+After this Mrs. Bulstrode drove to her niece with a mind newly
+weighted.  She was herself handsomely dressed, but she noticed with a
+little more regret than usual that Rosamond, who was just come in and
+met her in walking-dress, was almost as expensively equipped.  Mrs.
+Bulstrode was a feminine smaller edition of her brother, and had none
+of her husband's low-toned pallor.  She had a good honest glance and
+used no circumlocution.
+
+"You are alone, I see, my dear," she said, as they entered the
+drawing-room together, looking round gravely.  Rosamond felt sure that
+her aunt had something particular to say, and they sat down near each
+other.  Nevertheless, the quilling inside Rosamond's bonnet was so
+charming that it was impossible not to desire the same kind of thing
+for Kate, and Mrs. Bulstrode's eyes, which were rather fine, rolled
+round that ample quilled circuit, while she spoke.
+
+"I have just heard something about you that has surprised me very much,
+Rosamond."
+
+"What is that, aunt?"  Rosamond's eyes also were roaming over her
+aunt's large embroidered collar.
+
+"I can hardly believe it--that you should be engaged without my knowing
+it--without your father's telling me."  Here Mrs. Bulstrode's eyes
+finally rested on Rosamond's, who blushed deeply, and said--
+
+"I am not engaged, aunt."
+
+"How is it that every one says so, then--that it is the town's talk?"
+
+"The town's talk is of very little consequence, I think," said
+Rosamond, inwardly gratified.
+
+"Oh, my dear, be more thoughtful; don't despise your neighbors so.
+Remember you are turned twenty-two now, and you will have no fortune:
+your father, I am sure, will not be able to spare you anything.  Mr.
+Lydgate is very intellectual and clever; I know there is an attraction
+in that.  I like talking to such men myself; and your uncle finds him
+very useful.  But the profession is a poor one here.  To be sure, this
+life is not everything; but it is seldom a medical man has true
+religious views--there is too much pride of intellect.  And you are not
+fit to marry a poor man.
+
+"Mr. Lydgate is not a poor man, aunt.  He has very high connections."
+
+"He told me himself he was poor."
+
+"That is because he is used to people who have a high style of living."
+
+"My dear Rosamond, _you_ must not think of living in high style."
+
+Rosamond looked down and played with her reticule.  She was not a fiery
+young lady and had no sharp answers, but she meant to live as she
+pleased.
+
+"Then it is really true?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, looking very earnestly
+at her niece.  "You are thinking of Mr. Lydgate--there is some
+understanding between you, though your father doesn't know.  Be open,
+my dear Rosamond: Mr. Lydgate has really made you an offer?"
+
+Poor Rosamond's feelings were very unpleasant.  She had been quite easy
+as to Lydgate's feeling and intention, but now when her aunt put this
+question she did not like being unable to say Yes.  Her pride was hurt,
+but her habitual control of manner helped her.
+
+"Pray excuse me, aunt.  I would rather not speak on the subject."
+
+"You would not give your heart to a man without a decided prospect, I
+trust, my dear.  And think of the two excellent offers I know of that
+you have refused!--and one still within your reach, if you will not
+throw it away.  I knew a very great beauty who married badly at last,
+by doing so.  Mr. Ned Plymdale is a nice young man--some might think
+good-looking; and an only son; and a large business of that kind is
+better than a profession.  Not that marrying is everything. I would
+have you seek first the kingdom of God.  But a girl should keep her
+heart within her own power."
+
+"I should never give it to Mr. Ned Plymdale, if it were.  I have
+already refused him.  If I loved, I should love at once and without
+change," said Rosamond, with a great sense of being a romantic heroine,
+and playing the part prettily.
+
+"I see how it is, my dear," said Mrs. Bulstrode, in a melancholy voice,
+rising to go.  "You have allowed your affections to be engaged without
+return."
+
+"No, indeed, aunt," said Rosamond, with emphasis.
+
+"Then you are quite confident that Mr. Lydgate has a serious attachment
+to you?"
+
+Rosamond's cheeks by this time were persistently burning, and she felt
+much mortification.  She chose to be silent, and her aunt went away all
+the more convinced.
+
+Mr. Bulstrode in things worldly and indifferent was disposed to do what
+his wife bade him, and she now, without telling her reasons, desired
+him on the next opportunity to find out in conversation with Mr.
+Lydgate whether he had any intention of marrying soon.  The result was
+a decided negative.  Mr. Bulstrode, on being cross-questioned, showed
+that Lydgate had spoken as no man would who had any attachment that
+could issue in matrimony.  Mrs. Bulstrode now felt that she had a
+serious duty before her, and she soon managed to arrange a tete-a-tete
+with Lydgate, in which she passed from inquiries about Fred Vincy's
+health, and expressions of her sincere anxiety for her brother's large
+family, to general remarks on the dangers which lay before young people
+with regard to their settlement in life.  Young men were often wild and
+disappointing, making little return for the money spent on them, and a
+girl was exposed to many circumstances which might interfere with her
+prospects.
+
+"Especially when she has great attractions, and her parents see much
+company," said Mrs. Bulstrode "Gentlemen pay her attention, and engross
+her all to themselves, for the mere pleasure of the moment, and that
+drives off others.  I think it is a heavy responsibility, Mr. Lydgate,
+to interfere with the prospects of any girl." Here Mrs. Bulstrode fixed
+her eyes on him, with an unmistakable purpose of warning, if not of
+rebuke.
+
+"Clearly," said Lydgate, looking at her--perhaps even staring a little
+in return.  "On the other hand, a man must be a great coxcomb to go
+about with a notion that he must not pay attention to a young lady lest
+she should fall in love with him, or lest others should think she must."
+
+"Oh, Mr. Lydgate, you know well what your advantages are.  You know
+that our young men here cannot cope with you.  Where you frequent a
+house it may militate very much against a girl's making a desirable
+settlement in life, and prevent her from accepting offers even if they
+are made."
+
+Lydgate was less flattered by his advantage over the Middlemarch
+Orlandos than he was annoyed by the perception of Mrs. Bulstrode's
+meaning.  She felt that she had spoken as impressively as it was
+necessary to do, and that in using the superior word "militate" she had
+thrown a noble drapery over a mass of particulars which were still
+evident enough.
+
+Lydgate was fuming a little, pushed his hair back with one hand, felt
+curiously in his waistcoat-pocket with the other, and then stooped to
+beckon the tiny black spaniel, which had the insight to decline his
+hollow caresses.  It would not have been decent to go away, because he
+had been dining with other guests, and had just taken tea.  But Mrs.
+Bulstrode, having no doubt that she had been understood, turned the
+conversation.
+
+Solomon's Proverbs, I think, have omitted to say, that as the sore
+palate findeth grit, so an uneasy consciousness heareth innuendoes.
+The next day Mr. Farebrother, parting from Lydgate in the street,
+supposed that they should meet at Vincy's in the evening.  Lydgate
+answered curtly, no--he had work to do--he must give up going out in
+the evening.
+
+"What! you are going to get lashed to the mast, eh, and are stopping
+your ears?" said the Vicar.  "Well, if you don't mean to be won by the
+sirens, you are right to take precautions in time."
+
+A few days before, Lydgate would have taken no notice of these words as
+anything more than the Vicar's usual way of putting things.  They
+seemed now to convey an innuendo which confirmed the impression that he
+had been making a fool of himself and behaving so as to be
+misunderstood: not, he believed, by Rosamond herself; she, he felt
+sure, took everything as lightly as he intended it.  She had an
+exquisite tact and insight in relation to all points of manners; but
+the people she lived among were blunderers and busybodies.  However,
+the mistake should go no farther.  He resolved--and kept his
+resolution--that he would not go to Mr. Vincy's except on business.
+
+Rosamond became very unhappy.  The uneasiness first stirred by her
+aunt's questions grew and grew till at the end of ten days that she had
+not seen Lydgate, it grew into terror at the blank that might possibly
+come--into foreboding of that ready, fatal sponge which so cheaply
+wipes out the hopes of mortals.  The world would have a new dreariness
+for her, as a wilderness that a magician's spells had turned for a
+little while into a garden.  She felt that she was beginning to know
+the pang of disappointed love, and that no other man could be the
+occasion of such delightful aerial building as she had been enjoying
+for the last six months.  Poor Rosamond lost her appetite and felt as
+forlorn as Ariadne--as a charming stage Ariadne left behind with all
+her boxes full of costumes and no hope of a coach.
+
+There are many wonderful mixtures in the world which are all alike
+called love, and claim the privileges of a sublime rage which is an
+apology for everything (in literature and the drama).  Happily Rosamond
+did not think of committing any desperate act: she plaited her fair
+hair as beautifully as usual, and kept herself proudly calm.  Her most
+cheerful supposition was that her aunt Bulstrode had interfered in some
+way to hinder Lydgate's visits: everything was better than a
+spontaneous indifference in him.  Any one who imagines ten days too
+short a time--not for falling into leanness, lightness, or other
+measurable effects of passion, but--for the whole spiritual circuit of
+alarmed conjecture and disappointment, is ignorant of what can go on in
+the elegant leisure of a young lady's mind.
+
+On the eleventh day, however, Lydgate when leaving Stone Court was
+requested by Mrs. Vincy to let her husband know that there was a marked
+change in Mr. Featherstone's health, and that she wished him to come to
+Stone Court on that day.  Now Lydgate might have called at the
+warehouse, or might have written a message on a leaf of his pocket-book
+and left it at the door.  Yet these simple devices apparently did not
+occur to him, from which we may conclude that he had no strong
+objection to calling at the house at an hour when Mr. Vincy was not at
+home, and leaving the message with Miss Vincy.  A man may, from various
+motives, decline to give his company, but perhaps not even a sage would
+be gratified that nobody missed him.  It would be a graceful, easy way
+of piecing on the new habits to the old, to have a few playful words
+with Rosamond about his resistance to dissipation, and his firm resolve
+to take long fasts even from sweet sounds.  It must be confessed, also,
+that momentary speculations as to all the possible grounds for Mrs.
+Bulstrode's hints had managed to get woven like slight clinging hairs
+into the more substantial web of his thoughts.
+
+Miss Vincy was alone, and blushed so deeply when Lydgate came in that
+he felt a corresponding embarrassment, and instead of any playfulness,
+he began at once to speak of his reason for calling, and to beg her,
+almost formally, to deliver the message to her father.  Rosamond, who
+at the first moment felt as if her happiness were returning, was keenly
+hurt by Lydgate's manner; her blush had departed, and she assented
+coldly, without adding an unnecessary word, some trivial chain-work
+which she had in her hands enabling her to avoid looking at Lydgate
+higher than his chin.  In all failures, the beginning is certainly the
+half of the whole.  After sitting two long moments while he moved his
+whip and could say nothing, Lydgate rose to go, and Rosamond, made
+nervous by her struggle between mortification and the wish not to
+betray it, dropped her chain as if startled, and rose too,
+mechanically.  Lydgate instantaneously stooped to pick up the chain.
+When he rose he was very near to a lovely little face set on a fair
+long neck which he had been used to see turning about under the most
+perfect management of self-contented grace.  But as he raised his eyes
+now he saw a certain helpless quivering which touched him quite newly,
+and made him look at Rosamond with a questioning flash.  At this moment
+she was as natural as she had ever been when she was five years old:
+she felt that her tears had risen, and it was no use to try to do
+anything else than let them stay like water on a blue flower or let
+them fall over her cheeks, even as they would.
+
+That moment of naturalness was the crystallizing feather-touch: it
+shook flirtation into love.  Remember that the ambitious man who was
+looking at those Forget-me-nots under the water was very warm-hearted
+and rash.  He did not know where the chain went; an idea had thrilled
+through the recesses within him which had a miraculous effect in
+raising the power of passionate love lying buried there in no sealed
+sepulchre, but under the lightest, easily pierced mould.  His words
+were quite abrupt and awkward; but the tone made them sound like an
+ardent, appealing avowal.
+
+"What is the matter? you are distressed.  Tell me, pray."
+
+Rosamond had never been spoken to in such tones before.  I am not sure
+that she knew what the words were: but she looked at Lydgate and the
+tears fell over her cheeks.  There could have been no more complete
+answer than that silence, and Lydgate, forgetting everything else,
+completely mastered by the outrush of tenderness at the sudden belief
+that this sweet young creature depended on him for her joy, actually
+put his arms round her, folding her gently and protectingly--he was
+used to being gentle with the weak and suffering--and kissed each of
+the two large tears.  This was a strange way of arriving at an
+understanding, but it was a short way.  Rosamond was not angry, but she
+moved backward a little in timid happiness, and Lydgate could now sit
+near her and speak less incompletely.  Rosamond had to make her little
+confession, and he poured out words of gratitude and tenderness with
+impulsive lavishment.  In half an hour he left the house an engaged
+man, whose soul was not his own, but the woman's to whom he had bound
+himself.
+
+He came again in the evening to speak with Mr. Vincy, who, just
+returned from Stone Court, was feeling sure that it would not be long
+before he heard of Mr. Featherstone's demise.  The felicitous word
+"demise," which had seasonably occurred to him, had raised his spirits
+even above their usual evening pitch.  The right word is always a
+power, and communicates its definiteness to our action.  Considered as
+a demise, old Featherstone's death assumed a merely legal aspect, so
+that Mr. Vincy could tap his snuff-box over it and be jovial, without
+even an intermittent affectation of solemnity; and Mr. Vincy hated both
+solemnity and affectation.  Who was ever awe struck about a testator,
+or sang a hymn on the title to real property?  Mr. Vincy was inclined
+to take a jovial view of all things that evening: he even observed to
+Lydgate that Fred had got the family constitution after all, and would
+soon be as fine a fellow as ever again; and when his approbation of
+Rosamond's engagement was asked for, he gave it with astonishing
+facility, passing at once to general remarks on the desirableness of
+matrimony for young men and maidens, and apparently deducing from the
+whole the appropriateness of a little more punch.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXII.
+
+    "They'll take suggestion as a cat laps milk."
+                                --SHAKESPEARE: Tempest.
+
+
+The triumphant confidence of the Mayor founded on Mr. Featherstone's
+insistent demand that Fred and his mother should not leave him, was a
+feeble emotion compared with all that was agitating the breasts of the
+old man's blood-relations, who naturally manifested more their sense of
+the family tie and were more visibly numerous now that he had become
+bedridden.  Naturally: for when "poor Peter" had occupied his arm-chair
+in the wainscoted parlor, no assiduous beetles for whom the cook
+prepares boiling water could have been less welcome on a hearth which
+they had reasons for preferring, than those persons whose Featherstone
+blood was ill-nourished, not from penuriousness on their part, but from
+poverty.  Brother Solomon and Sister Jane were rich, and the family
+candor and total abstinence from false politeness with which they were
+always received seemed to them no argument that their brother in the
+solemn act of making his will would overlook the superior claims of
+wealth.  Themselves at least he had never been unnatural enough to
+banish from his house, and it seemed hardly eccentric that he should
+have kept away Brother Jonah, Sister Martha, and the rest, who had no
+shadow of such claims.  They knew Peter's maxim, that money was a good
+egg, and should be laid in a warm nest.
+
+But Brother Jonah, Sister Martha, and all the needy exiles, held a
+different point of view.  Probabilities are as various as the faces to
+be seen at will in fretwork or paper-hangings: every form is there,
+from Jupiter to Judy, if you only look with creative inclination.  To
+the poorer and least favored it seemed likely that since Peter had done
+nothing for them in his life, he would remember them at the last.
+Jonah argued that men liked to make a surprise of their wills, while
+Martha said that nobody need be surprised if he left the best part of
+his money to those who least expected it.  Also it was not to be
+thought but that an own brother "lying there" with dropsy in his legs
+must come to feel that blood was thicker than water, and if he didn't
+alter his will, he might have money by him.  At any rate some
+blood-relations should be on the premises and on the watch against
+those who were hardly relations at all.  Such things had been known as
+forged wills and disputed wills, which seemed to have the golden-hazy
+advantage of somehow enabling non-legatees to live out of them.  Again,
+those who were no blood-relations might be caught making away with
+things--and poor Peter "lying there" helpless!  Somebody should be on
+the watch.  But in this conclusion they were at one with Solomon and
+Jane; also, some nephews, nieces, and cousins, arguing with still
+greater subtilty as to what might be done by a man able to "will away"
+his property and give himself large treats of oddity, felt in a
+handsome sort of way that there was a family interest to be attended
+to, and thought of Stone Court as a place which it would be nothing but
+right for them to visit.  Sister Martha, otherwise Mrs. Cranch, living
+with some wheeziness in the Chalky Flats, could not undertake the
+journey; but her son, as being poor Peter's own nephew, could represent
+her advantageously, and watch lest his uncle Jonah should make an
+unfair use of the improbable things which seemed likely to happen.  In
+fact there was a general sense running in the Featherstone blood that
+everybody must watch everybody else, and that it would be well for
+everybody else to reflect that the Almighty was watching him.
+
+Thus Stone Court continually saw one or other blood-relation alighting
+or departing, and Mary Garth had the unpleasant task of carrying their
+messages to Mr. Featherstone, who would see none of them, and sent her
+down with the still more unpleasant task of telling them so.  As
+manager of the household she felt bound to ask them in good provincial
+fashion to stay and eat; but she chose to consult Mrs. Vincy on the
+point of extra down-stairs consumption now that Mr. Featherstone was
+laid up.
+
+"Oh, my dear, you must do things handsomely where there's last illness
+and a property.  God knows, I don't grudge them every ham in the
+house--only, save the best for the funeral.  Have some stuffed veal
+always, and a fine cheese in cut.  You must expect to keep open house
+in these last illnesses," said liberal Mrs. Vincy, once more of
+cheerful note and bright plumage.
+
+But some of the visitors alighted and did not depart after the handsome
+treating to veal and ham.  Brother Jonah, for example (there are such
+unpleasant people in most families; perhaps even in the highest
+aristocracy there are Brobdingnag specimens, gigantically in debt and
+bloated at greater expense)--Brother Jonah, I say, having come down in
+the world, was mainly supported by a calling which he was modest enough
+not to boast of, though it was much better than swindling either on
+exchange or turf, but which did not require his presence at Brassing so
+long as he had a good corner to sit in and a supply of food.  He chose
+the kitchen-corner, partly because he liked it best, and partly because
+he did not want to sit with Solomon, concerning whom he had a strong
+brotherly opinion.  Seated in a famous arm-chair and in his best suit,
+constantly within sight of good cheer, he had a comfortable
+consciousness of being on the premises, mingled with fleeting
+suggestions of Sunday and the bar at the Green Man; and he informed
+Mary Garth that he should not go out of reach of his brother Peter
+while that poor fellow was above ground.  The troublesome ones in a
+family are usually either the wits or the idiots.  Jonah was the wit
+among the Featherstones, and joked with the maid-servants when they
+came about the hearth, but seemed to consider Miss Garth a suspicious
+character, and followed her with cold eyes.
+
+Mary would have borne this one pair of eyes with comparative ease, but
+unfortunately there was young Cranch, who, having come all the way from
+the Chalky Flats to represent his mother and watch his uncle Jonah,
+also felt it his duty to stay and to sit chiefly in the kitchen to give
+his uncle company.  Young Cranch was not exactly the balancing point
+between the wit and the idiot,--verging slightly towards the latter
+type, and squinting so as to leave everything in doubt about his
+sentiments except that they were not of a forcible character.  When
+Mary Garth entered the kitchen and Mr. Jonah Featherstone began to
+follow her with his cold detective eyes, young Cranch turning his head
+in the same direction seemed to insist on it that she should remark how
+he was squinting, as if he did it with design, like the gypsies when
+Borrow read the New Testament to them.  This was rather too much for
+poor Mary; sometimes it made her bilious, sometimes it upset her
+gravity.  One day that she had an opportunity she could not resist
+describing the kitchen scene to Fred, who would not be hindered from
+immediately going to see it, affecting simply to pass through.  But no
+sooner did he face the four eyes than he had to rush through the
+nearest door which happened to lead to the dairy, and there under the
+high roof and among the pans he gave way to laughter which made a
+hollow resonance perfectly audible in the kitchen.  He fled by another
+doorway, but Mr. Jonah, who had not before seen Fred's white
+complexion, long legs, and pinched delicacy of face, prepared many
+sarcasms in which these points of appearance were wittily combined with
+the lowest moral attributes.
+
+"Why, Tom, _you_ don't wear such gentlemanly trousers--you haven't got
+half such fine long legs," said Jonah to his nephew, winking at the
+same time, to imply that there was something more in these statements
+than their undeniableness.  Tom looked at his legs, but left it
+uncertain whether he preferred his moral advantages to a more vicious
+length of limb and reprehensible gentility of trouser.
+
+In the large wainscoted parlor too there were constantly pairs of eyes
+on the watch, and own relatives eager to be "sitters-up." Many came,
+lunched, and departed, but Brother Solomon and the lady who had been
+Jane Featherstone for twenty-five years before she was Mrs. Waule found
+it good to be there every day for hours, without other calculable
+occupation than that of observing the cunning Mary Garth (who was so
+deep that she could be found out in nothing) and giving occasional dry
+wrinkly indications of crying--as if capable of torrents in a wetter
+season--at the thought that they were not allowed to go into Mr.
+Featherstone's room.  For the old man's dislike of his own family
+seemed to get stronger as he got less able to amuse himself by saying
+biting things to them.  Too languid to sting, he had the more venom
+refluent in his blood.
+
+Not fully believing the message sent through Mary Garth, they had
+presented themselves together within the door of the bedroom, both in
+black--Mrs. Waule having a white handkerchief partially unfolded in her
+hand--and both with faces in a sort of half-mourning purple; while Mrs.
+Vincy with her pink cheeks and pink ribbons flying was actually
+administering a cordial to their own brother, and the
+light-complexioned Fred, his short hair curling as might be expected in
+a gambler's, was lolling at his ease in a large chair.
+
+Old Featherstone no sooner caught sight of these funereal figures
+appearing in spite of his orders than rage came to strengthen him more
+successfully than the cordial.  He was propped up on a bed-rest, and
+always had his gold-headed stick lying by him.  He seized it now and
+swept it backwards and forwards in as large an area as he could,
+apparently to ban these ugly spectres, crying in a hoarse sort of
+screech--
+
+"Back, back, Mrs. Waule!  Back, Solomon!"
+
+"Oh, Brother.  Peter," Mrs. Waule began--but Solomon put his hand
+before her repressingly.  He was a large-cheeked man, nearly seventy,
+with small furtive eyes, and was not only of much blander temper but
+thought himself much deeper than his brother Peter; indeed not likely
+to be deceived in any of his fellow-men, inasmuch as they could not
+well be more greedy and deceitful than he suspected them of being.
+Even the invisible powers, he thought, were likely to be soothed by a
+bland parenthesis here and there--coming from a man of property, who
+might have been as impious as others.
+
+"Brother Peter," he said, in a wheedling yet gravely official tone,
+"It's nothing but right I should speak to you about the Three Crofts
+and the Manganese.  The Almighty knows what I've got on my mind--"
+
+"Then he knows more than I want to know," said Peter, laying down his
+stick with a show of truce which had a threat in it too, for he
+reversed the stick so as to make the gold handle a club in case of
+closer fighting, and looked hard at Solomon's bald head.
+
+"There's things you might repent of, Brother, for want of speaking to
+me," said Solomon, not advancing, however.  "I could sit up with you
+to-night, and Jane with me, willingly, and you might take your own time
+to speak, or let me speak."
+
+"Yes, I shall take my own time--you needn't offer me yours," said Peter.
+
+"But you can't take your own time to die in, Brother," began Mrs.
+Waule, with her usual woolly tone.  "And when you lie speechless you
+may be tired of having strangers about you, and you may think of me and
+my children"--but here her voice broke under the touching thought which
+she was attributing to her speechless brother; the mention of ourselves
+being naturally affecting.
+
+"No, I shan't," said old Featherstone, contradictiously.  "I shan't
+think of any of you.  I've made my will, I tell you, I've made my
+will."  Here he turned his head towards Mrs. Vincy, and swallowed some
+more of his cordial.
+
+"Some people would be ashamed to fill up a place belonging by rights to
+others," said Mrs. Waule, turning her narrow eyes in the same direction.
+
+"Oh, sister," said Solomon, with ironical softness, "you and me are not
+fine, and handsome, and clever enough: we must be humble and let smart
+people push themselves before us."
+
+Fred's spirit could not bear this: rising and looking at Mr.
+Featherstone, he said, "Shall my mother and I leave the room, sir, that
+you may be alone with your friends?"
+
+"Sit down, I tell you," said old Featherstone, snappishly.  "Stop where
+you are.  Good-by, Solomon," he added, trying to wield his stick again,
+but failing now that he had reversed the handle.  "Good-by, Mrs. Waule.
+Don't you come again."
+
+"I shall be down-stairs, Brother, whether or no," said Solomon.  "I
+shall do my duty, and it remains to be seen what the Almighty will
+allow."
+
+"Yes, in property going out of families," said Mrs. Waule, in
+continuation,--"and where there's steady young men to carry on.  But I
+pity them who are not such, and I pity their mothers.  Good-by, Brother
+Peter."
+
+"Remember, I'm the eldest after you, Brother, and prospered from the
+first, just as you did, and have got land already by the name of
+Featherstone," said Solomon, relying much on that reflection, as one
+which might be suggested in the watches of the night.  "But I bid you
+good-by for the present."
+
+Their exit was hastened by their seeing old Mr. Featherstone pull his
+wig on each side and shut his eyes with his mouth-widening grimace, as
+if he were determined to be deaf and blind.
+
+None the less they came to Stone Court daily and sat below at the post
+of duty, sometimes carrying on a slow dialogue in an undertone in which
+the observation and response were so far apart, that any one hearing
+them might have imagined himself listening to speaking automata, in
+some doubt whether the ingenious mechanism would really work, or wind
+itself up for a long time in order to stick and be silent.  Solomon and
+Jane would have been sorry to be quick: what that led to might be seen
+on the other side of the wall in the person of Brother Jonah.
+
+But their watch in the wainscoted parlor was sometimes varied by the
+presence of other guests from far or near.  Now that Peter Featherstone
+was up-stairs, his property could be discussed with all that local
+enlightenment to be found on the spot: some rural and Middlemarch
+neighbors expressed much agreement with the family and sympathy with
+their interest against the Vincys, and feminine visitors were even
+moved to tears, in conversation with Mrs. Waule, when they recalled the
+fact that they themselves had been disappointed in times past by
+codicils and marriages for spite on the part of ungrateful elderly
+gentlemen, who, it might have been supposed, had been spared for
+something better.  Such conversation paused suddenly, like an organ
+when the bellows are let drop, if Mary Garth came into the room; and
+all eyes were turned on her as a possible legatee, or one who might get
+access to iron chests.
+
+But the younger men who were relatives or connections of the family,
+were disposed to admire her in this problematic light, as a girl who
+showed much conduct, and who among all the chances that were flying
+might turn out to be at least a moderate prize.  Hence she had her
+share of compliments and polite attentions.
+
+Especially from Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, a distinguished bachelor and
+auctioneer of those parts, much concerned in the sale of land and
+cattle: a public character, indeed, whose name was seen on widely
+distributed placards, and who might reasonably be sorry for those who
+did not know of him.  He was second cousin to Peter Featherstone, and
+had been treated by him with more amenity than any other relative,
+being useful in matters of business; and in that programme of his
+funeral which the old man had himself dictated, he had been named as a
+Bearer.  There was no odious cupidity in Mr. Borthrop Trumbull--nothing
+more than a sincere sense of his own merit, which, he was aware, in
+case of rivalry might tell against competitors; so that if Peter
+Featherstone, who so far as he, Trumbull, was concerned, had
+behaved like as good a soul as ever breathed, should have done anything
+handsome by him, all he could say was, that he had never fished and
+fawned, but had advised him to the best of his experience, which now
+extended over twenty years from the time of his apprenticeship at
+fifteen, and was likely to yield a knowledge of no surreptitious kind.
+His admiration was far from being confined to himself, but was
+accustomed professionally as well as privately to delight in estimating
+things at a high rate.  He was an amateur of superior phrases, and
+never used poor language without immediately correcting himself--which
+was fortunate, as he was rather loud, and given to predominate,
+standing or walking about frequently, pulling down his waistcoat with
+the air of a man who is very much of his own opinion, trimming himself
+rapidly with his fore-finger, and marking each new series in these
+movements by a busy play with his large seals.  There was occasionally
+a little fierceness in his demeanor, but it was directed chiefly
+against false opinion, of which there is so much to correct in the
+world that a man of some reading and experience necessarily has his
+patience tried.  He felt that the Featherstone family generally was of
+limited understanding, but being a man of the world and a public
+character, took everything as a matter of course, and even went to
+converse with Mr. Jonah and young Cranch in the kitchen, not doubting
+that he had impressed the latter greatly by his leading questions
+concerning the Chalky Flats.  If anybody had observed that Mr. Borthrop
+Trumbull, being an auctioneer, was bound to know the nature of
+everything, he would have smiled and trimmed himself silently with the
+sense that he came pretty near that.  On the whole, in an auctioneering
+way, he was an honorable man, not ashamed of his business, and feeling
+that "the celebrated Peel, now Sir Robert," if introduced to him, would
+not fail to recognize his importance.
+
+"I don't mind if I have a slice of that ham, and a glass of that ale,
+Miss Garth, if you will allow me," he said, coming into the parlor at
+half-past eleven, after having had the exceptional privilege of seeing
+old Featherstone, and standing with his back to the fire between Mrs.
+Waule and Solomon.
+
+"It's not necessary for you to go out;--let me ring the bell."
+
+"Thank you," said Mary, "I have an errand."
+
+"Well, Mr. Trumbull, you're highly favored," said Mrs. Waule.
+
+"What! seeing the old man?" said the auctioneer, playing with his seals
+dispassionately. "Ah, you see he has relied on me considerably." Here
+he pressed his lips together, and frowned meditatively.
+
+"Might anybody ask what their brother has been saying?" said Solomon,
+in a soft tone of humility, in which he had a sense of luxurious
+cunning, he being a rich man and not in need of it.
+
+"Oh yes, anybody may ask," said Mr. Trumbull, with loud and
+good-humored though cutting sarcasm.  "Anybody may interrogate.  Any
+one may give their remarks an interrogative turn," he continued, his
+sonorousness rising with his style.  "This is constantly done by good
+speakers, even when they anticipate no answer.  It is what we call a
+figure of speech--speech at a high figure, as one may say." The
+eloquent auctioneer smiled at his own ingenuity.
+
+"I shouldn't be sorry to hear he'd remembered you, Mr. Trumbull," said
+Solomon.  "I never was against the deserving.  It's the undeserving I'm
+against."
+
+"Ah, there it is, you see, there it is," said Mr. Trumbull,
+significantly.  "It can't be denied that undeserving people have been
+legatees, and even residuary legatees.  It is so, with testamentary
+dispositions."  Again he pursed up his lips and frowned a little.
+
+"Do you mean to say for certain, Mr. Trumbull, that my brother has left
+his land away from our family?" said Mrs. Waule, on whom, as an
+unhopeful woman, those long words had a depressing effect.
+
+"A man might as well turn his land into charity land at once as leave
+it to some people," observed Solomon, his sister's question having
+drawn no answer.
+
+"What, Blue-Coat land?" said Mrs. Waule, again.  "Oh, Mr. Trumbull, you
+never can mean to say that.  It would be flying in the face of the
+Almighty that's prospered him."
+
+While Mrs. Waule was speaking, Mr. Borthrop Trumbull walked away from
+the fireplace towards the window, patrolling with his fore-finger round
+the inside of his stock, then along his whiskers and the curves of his
+hair.  He now walked to Miss Garth's work-table, opened a book which
+lay there and read the title aloud with pompous emphasis as if he were
+offering it for sale:
+
+"'Anne of Geierstein' (pronounced Jeersteen) or the 'Maiden of the
+Mist, by the author of Waverley.'"  Then turning the page, he began
+sonorously--"The course of four centuries has well-nigh elapsed since
+the series of events which are related in the following chapters took
+place on the Continent."  He pronounced the last truly admirable word
+with the accent on the last syllable, not as unaware of vulgar usage,
+but feeling that this novel delivery enhanced the sonorous beauty which
+his reading had given to the whole.
+
+And now the servant came in with the tray, so that the moments for
+answering Mrs. Waule's question had gone by safely, while she and
+Solomon, watching Mr. Trumbull's movements, were thinking that high
+learning interfered sadly with serious affairs.  Mr. Borthrop Trumbull
+really knew nothing about old Featherstone's will; but he could hardly
+have been brought to declare any ignorance unless he had been arrested
+for misprision of treason.
+
+"I shall take a mere mouthful of ham and a glass of ale," he said,
+reassuringly.  "As a man with public business, I take a snack when I
+can.  I will back this ham," he added, after swallowing some morsels
+with alarming haste, "against any ham in the three kingdoms.  In my
+opinion it is better than the hams at Freshitt Hall--and I think I am
+a tolerable judge."
+
+"Some don't like so much sugar in their hams," said Mrs. Waule.  "But
+my poor brother would always have sugar."
+
+"If any person demands better, he is at liberty to do so; but, God
+bless me, what an aroma!  I should be glad to buy in that quality, I
+know.  There is some gratification to a gentleman"--here Mr.
+Trumbull's voice conveyed an emotional remonstrance--"in having this
+kind of ham set on his table."
+
+He pushed aside his plate, poured out his glass of ale and drew his
+chair a little forward, profiting by the occasion to look at the inner
+side of his legs, which he stroked approvingly--Mr. Trumbull having
+all those less frivolous airs and gestures which distinguish the
+predominant races of the north.
+
+"You have an interesting work there, I see, Miss Garth," he observed,
+when Mary re-entered. "It is by the author of 'Waverley': that is Sir
+Walter Scott.  I have bought one of his works myself--a very nice
+thing, a very superior publication, entitled 'Ivanhoe.' You will not
+get any writer to beat him in a hurry, I think--he will not, in my
+opinion, be speedily surpassed.  I have just been reading a portion at
+the commencement of 'Anne of Jeersteen.' It commences well."  (Things
+never began with Mr. Borthrop Trumbull: they always commenced, both in
+private life and on his handbills.) "You are a reader, I see.  Do you
+subscribe to our Middlemarch library?"
+
+"No," said Mary.  "Mr. Fred Vincy brought this book."
+
+"I am a great bookman myself," returned Mr. Trumbull.  "I have no less
+than two hundred volumes in calf, and I flatter myself they are well
+selected.  Also pictures by Murillo, Rubens, Teniers, Titian, Vandyck,
+and others.  I shall be happy to lend you any work you like to mention,
+Miss Garth."
+
+"I am much obliged," said Mary, hastening away again, "but I have
+little time for reading."
+
+"I should say my brother has done something for _her_ in his will,"
+said Mr. Solomon, in a very low undertone, when she had shut the door
+behind her, pointing with his head towards the absent Mary.
+
+"His first wife was a poor match for him, though," said Mrs. Waule.
+"She brought him nothing: and this young woman is only her niece,--and
+very proud.  And my brother has always paid her wage."
+
+"A sensible girl though, in my opinion," said Mr. Trumbull, finishing
+his ale and starting up with an emphatic adjustment of his waistcoat.
+"I have observed her when she has been mixing medicine in drops.  She
+minds what she is doing, sir.  That is a great point in a woman, and a
+great point for our friend up-stairs, poor dear old soul.  A man whose
+life is of any value should think of his wife as a nurse: that is what
+I should do, if I married; and I believe I have lived single long
+enough not to make a mistake in that line.  Some men must marry to
+elevate themselves a little, but when I am in need of that, I hope some
+one will tell me so--I hope some individual will apprise me of the
+fact.  I wish you good morning, Mrs. Waule.  Good morning, Mr. Solomon.
+I trust we shall meet under less melancholy auspices."
+
+When Mr. Trumbull had departed with a fine bow, Solomon, leaning
+forward, observed to his sister, "You may depend, Jane, my brother has
+left that girl a lumping sum."
+
+"Anybody would think so, from the way Mr. Trumbull talks," said Jane.
+Then, after a pause, "He talks as if my daughters wasn't to be trusted
+to give drops."
+
+"Auctioneers talk wild," said Solomon.  "Not but what Trumbull has made
+money."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIII.
+
+    "Close up his eyes and draw the curtain close;
+     And let us all to meditation."
+                              --2 Henry VI.
+
+
+That night after twelve o'clock Mary Garth relieved the watch in Mr.
+Featherstone's room, and sat there alone through the small hours.  She
+often chose this task, in which she found some pleasure,
+notwithstanding the old man's testiness whenever he demanded her
+attentions.  There were intervals in which she could sit perfectly
+still, enjoying the outer stillness and the subdued light.  The red
+fire with its gently audible movement seemed like a solemn existence
+calmly independent of the petty passions, the imbecile desires, the
+straining after worthless uncertainties, which were daily moving her
+contempt.  Mary was fond of her own thoughts, and could amuse herself
+well sitting in twilight with her hands in her lap; for, having early
+had strong reason to believe that things were not likely to be arranged
+for her peculiar satisfaction, she wasted no time in astonishment and
+annoyance at that fact.  And she had already come to take life very
+much as a comedy in which she had a proud, nay, a generous resolution
+not to act the mean or treacherous part.  Mary might have become
+cynical if she had not had parents whom she honored, and a well of
+affectionate gratitude within her, which was all the fuller because she
+had learned to make no unreasonable claims.
+
+She sat to-night revolving, as she was wont, the scenes of the day, her
+lips often curling with amusement at the oddities to which her fancy
+added fresh drollery: people were so ridiculous with their illusions,
+carrying their fool's caps unawares, thinking their own lies opaque
+while everybody else's were transparent, making themselves exceptions
+to everything, as if when all the world looked yellow under a lamp they
+alone were rosy.  Yet there were some illusions under Mary's eyes which
+were not quite comic to her.  She was secretly convinced, though she
+had no other grounds than her close observation of old Featherstone's
+nature, that in spite of his fondness for having the Vincys about him,
+they were as likely to be disappointed as any of the relations whom he
+kept at a distance.  She had a good deal of disdain for Mrs. Vincy's
+evident alarm lest she and Fred should be alone together, but it did
+not hinder her from thinking anxiously of the way in which Fred would
+be affected, if it should turn out that his uncle had left him as poor
+as ever.  She could make a butt of Fred when he was present, but she
+did not enjoy his follies when he was absent.
+
+Yet she liked her thoughts: a vigorous young mind not overbalanced by
+passion, finds a good in making acquaintance with life, and watches its
+own powers with interest.  Mary had plenty of merriment within.
+
+Her thought was not veined by any solemnity or pathos about the old man
+on the bed: such sentiments are easier to affect than to feel about an
+aged creature whose life is not visibly anything but a remnant of
+vices.  She had always seen the most disagreeable side of Mr.
+Featherstone: he was not proud of her, and she was only useful to him.
+To be anxious about a soul that is always snapping at you must be left
+to the saints of the earth; and Mary was not one of them.  She had
+never returned him a harsh word, and had waited on him faithfully: that
+was her utmost.  Old Featherstone himself was not in the least anxious
+about his soul, and had declined to see Mr. Tucker on the subject.
+
+To-night he had not snapped, and for the first hour or two he lay
+remarkably still, until at last Mary heard him rattling his bunch of
+keys against the tin box which he always kept in the bed beside him.
+About three o'clock he said, with remarkable distinctness, "Missy, come
+here!"
+
+Mary obeyed, and found that he had already drawn the tin box from under
+the clothes, though he usually asked to have this done for him; and he
+had selected the key.  He now unlocked the box, and, drawing from it
+another key, looked straight at her with eyes that seemed to have
+recovered all their sharpness and said, "How many of 'em are in the
+house?"
+
+"You mean of your own relations, sir," said Mary, well used to the old
+man's way of speech.  He nodded slightly and she went on.
+
+"Mr. Jonah Featherstone and young Cranch are sleeping here."
+
+"Oh ay, they stick, do they? and the rest--they come every day, I'll
+warrant--Solomon and Jane, and all the young uns?  They come peeping,
+and counting and casting up?"
+
+"Not all of them every day.  Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Waule are here every
+day, and the others come often."
+
+The old man listened with a grimace while she spoke, and then said,
+relaxing his face, "The more fools they.  You hearken, missy.  It's
+three o'clock in the morning, and I've got all my faculties as well as
+ever I had in my life.  I know all my property, and where the money's
+put out, and everything.  And I've made everything ready to change my
+mind, and do as I like at the last.  Do you hear, missy?  I've got my
+faculties."
+
+"Well, sir?" said Mary, quietly.
+
+He now lowered his tone with an air of deeper cunning.  "I've made two
+wills, and I'm going to burn one.  Now you do as I tell you.  This is
+the key of my iron chest, in the closet there.  You push well at the
+side of the brass plate at the top, till it goes like a bolt: then you
+can put the key in the front lock and turn it.  See and do that; and
+take out the topmost paper--Last Will and Testament--big printed."
+
+"No, sir," said Mary, in a firm voice, "I cannot do that."
+
+"Not do it?  I tell you, you must," said the old man, his voice
+beginning to shake under the shock of this resistance.
+
+"I cannot touch your iron chest or your will.  I must refuse to do
+anything that might lay me open to suspicion."
+
+"I tell you, I'm in my right mind.  Shan't I do as I like at the last?
+I made two wills on purpose.  Take the key, I say."
+
+"No, sir, I will not," said Mary, more resolutely still.  Her repulsion
+was getting stronger.
+
+"I tell you, there's no time to lose."
+
+"I cannot help that, sir.  I will not let the close of your life soil
+the beginning of mine.  I will not touch your iron chest or your will."
+She moved to a little distance from the bedside.
+
+The old man paused with a blank stare for a little while, holding the
+one key erect on the ring; then with an agitated jerk he began to work
+with his bony left hand at emptying the tin box before him.
+
+"Missy," he began to say, hurriedly, "look here! take the money--the
+notes and gold--look here--take it--you shall have it all--do as I
+tell you."
+
+He made an effort to stretch out the key towards her as far as
+possible, and Mary again retreated.
+
+"I will not touch your key or your money, sir.  Pray don't ask me to do
+it again.  If you do, I must go and call your brother."
+
+He let his hand fall, and for the first time in her life Mary saw old
+Peter Featherstone begin to cry childishly.  She said, in as gentle a
+tone as she could command, "Pray put up your money, sir;" and then went
+away to her seat by the fire, hoping this would help to convince him
+that it was useless to say more.  Presently he rallied and said
+eagerly--
+
+"Look here, then.  Call the young chap.  Call Fred Vincy."
+
+Mary's heart began to beat more quickly.  Various ideas rushed through
+her mind as to what the burning of a second will might imply.  She had
+to make a difficult decision in a hurry.
+
+"I will call him, if you will let me call Mr. Jonah and others with
+him."
+
+"Nobody else, I say.  The young chap.  I shall do as I like."
+
+"Wait till broad daylight, sir, when every one is stirring.  Or let me
+call Simmons now, to go and fetch the lawyer?  He can be here in less
+than two hours."
+
+"Lawyer?  What do I want with the lawyer?  Nobody shall know--I say,
+nobody shall know.  I shall do as I like."
+
+"Let me call some one else, sir," said Mary, persuasively.  She did not
+like her position--alone with the old man, who seemed to show a strange
+flaring of nervous energy which enabled him to speak again and again
+without falling into his usual cough; yet she desired not to push
+unnecessarily the contradiction which agitated him.  "Let me, pray,
+call some one else."
+
+"You let me alone, I say.  Look here, missy.  Take the money.  You'll
+never have the chance again.  It's pretty nigh two hundred--there's
+more in the box, and nobody knows how much there was.  Take it and do
+as I tell you."
+
+Mary, standing by the fire, saw its red light falling on the old man,
+propped up on his pillows and bed-rest, with his bony hand holding out
+the key, and the money lying on the quilt before him.  She never forgot
+that vision of a man wanting to do as he liked at the last.  But the
+way in which he had put the offer of the money urged her to speak with
+harder resolution than ever.
+
+"It is of no use, sir.  I will not do it.  Put up your money.  I will
+not touch your money.  I will do anything else I can to comfort you;
+but I will not touch your keys or your money."
+
+"Anything else anything else!" said old Featherstone, with hoarse rage,
+which, as if in a nightmare, tried to be loud, and yet was only just
+audible.  "I want nothing else.  You come here--you come here."
+
+Mary approached him cautiously, knowing him too well.  She saw him
+dropping his keys and trying to grasp his stick, while he looked at her
+like an aged hyena, the muscles of his face getting distorted with the
+effort of his hand.  She paused at a safe distance.
+
+"Let me give you some cordial," she said, quietly, "and try to compose
+yourself.  You will perhaps go to sleep.  And to-morrow by daylight you
+can do as you like."
+
+He lifted the stick, in spite of her being beyond his reach, and threw
+it with a hard effort which was but impotence.  It fell, slipping over
+the foot of the bed.  Mary let it lie, and retreated to her chair by
+the fire.  By-and-by she would go to him with the cordial.  Fatigue
+would make him passive.  It was getting towards the chillest moment of
+the morning, the fire had got low, and she could see through the chink
+between the moreen window-curtains the light whitened by the blind.
+Having put some wood on the fire and thrown a shawl over her, she sat
+down, hoping that Mr. Featherstone might now fall asleep.  If she went
+near him the irritation might be kept up.  He had said nothing after
+throwing the stick, but she had seen him taking his keys again and
+laying his right hand on the money.  He did not put it up, however, and
+she thought that he was dropping off to sleep.
+
+But Mary herself began to be more agitated by the remembrance of what
+she had gone through, than she had been by the reality--questioning
+those acts of hers which had come imperatively and excluded all
+question in the critical moment.
+
+Presently the dry wood sent out a flame which illuminated every
+crevice, and Mary saw that the old man was lying quietly with his head
+turned a little on one side.  She went towards him with inaudible
+steps, and thought that his face looked strangely motionless; but the
+next moment the movement of the flame communicating itself to all
+objects made her uncertain.  The violent beating of her heart rendered
+her perceptions so doubtful that even when she touched him and listened
+for his breathing, she could not trust her conclusions.  She went to
+the window and gently propped aside the curtain and blind, so that the
+still light of the sky fell on the bed.
+
+The next moment she ran to the bell and rang it energetically.  In a
+very little while there was no longer any doubt that Peter Featherstone
+was dead, with his right hand clasping the keys, and his left hand
+lying on the heap of notes and gold.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK IV.
+
+
+
+
+
+THREE LOVE PROBLEMS.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIV.
+
+    1st Gent. Such men as this are feathers, chips, and straws.
+                  Carry no weight, no force.
+    2d Gent.                                  But levity
+                  Is causal too, and makes the sum of weight.
+                  For power finds its place in lack of power;
+                  Advance is cession, and the driven ship
+                  May run aground because the helmsman's thought
+                  Lacked force to balance opposites."
+
+
+It was on a morning of May that Peter Featherstone was buried.  In the
+prosaic neighborhood of Middlemarch, May was not always warm and sunny,
+and on this particular morning a chill wind was blowing the blossoms
+from the surrounding gardens on to the green mounds of Lowick
+churchyard.  Swiftly moving clouds only now and then allowed a gleam to
+light up any object, whether ugly or beautiful, that happened to stand
+within its golden shower.  In the churchyard the objects were
+remarkably various, for there was a little country crowd waiting to see
+the funeral.  The news had spread that it was to be a "big burying;"
+the old gentleman had left written directions about everything and
+meant to have a funeral "beyond his betters."  This was true; for old
+Featherstone had not been a Harpagon whose passions had all been
+devoured by the ever-lean and ever-hungry passion of saving, and who
+would drive a bargain with his undertaker beforehand.  He loved money,
+but he also loved to spend it in gratifying his peculiar tastes, and
+perhaps he loved it best of all as a means of making others feel his
+power more or less uncomfortably.  If any one will here contend that
+there must have been traits of goodness in old Featherstone, I will not
+presume to deny this; but I must observe that goodness is of a modest
+nature, easily discouraged, and when much privacy, elbowed in early
+life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that
+it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old
+gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments
+based on his personal acquaintance.  In any case, he had been bent on
+having a handsome funeral, and on having persons "bid" to it who would
+rather have stayed at home.  He had even desired that female relatives
+should follow him to the grave, and poor sister Martha had taken a
+difficult journey for this purpose from the Chalky Flats.  She and Jane
+would have been altogether cheered (in a tearful manner) by this sign
+that a brother who disliked seeing them while he was living had been
+prospectively fond of their presence when he should have become a
+testator, if the sign had not been made equivocal by being extended to
+Mrs. Vincy, whose expense in handsome crape seemed to imply the most
+presumptuous hopes, aggravated by a bloom of complexion which told
+pretty plainly that she was not a blood-relation, but of that generally
+objectionable class called wife's kin.
+
+We are all of us imaginative in some form or other, for images are the
+brood of desire; and poor old Featherstone, who laughed much at the way
+in which others cajoled themselves, did not escape the fellowship of
+illusion.  In writing the programme for his burial he certainly did not
+make clear to himself that his pleasure in the little drama of which it
+formed a part was confined to anticipation.  In chuckling over the
+vexations he could inflict by the rigid clutch of his dead hand, he
+inevitably mingled his consciousness with that livid stagnant presence,
+and so far as he was preoccupied with a future life, it was with one of
+gratification inside his coffin.  Thus old Featherstone was
+imaginative, after his fashion.
+
+However, the three mourning-coaches were filled according to the
+written orders of the deceased.  There were pall-bearers on horseback,
+with the richest scarfs and hatbands, and even the under-bearers had
+trappings of woe which were of a good well-priced quality.  The black
+procession, when dismounted, looked the larger for the smallness of the
+churchyard; the heavy human faces and the black draperies shivering in
+the wind seemed to tell of a world strangely incongruous with the
+lightly dropping blossoms and the gleams of sunshine on the daisies.
+The clergyman who met the procession was Mr. Cadwallader--also
+according to the request of Peter Featherstone, prompted as usual by
+peculiar reasons.  Having a contempt for curates, whom he always called
+understrappers, he was resolved to be buried by a beneficed clergyman.
+Mr. Casaubon was out of the question, not merely because he declined
+duty of this sort, but because Featherstone had an especial dislike to
+him as the rector of his own parish, who had a lien on the land in the
+shape of tithe, also as the deliverer of morning sermons, which the old
+man, being in his pew and not at all sleepy, had been obliged to sit
+through with an inward snarl.  He had an objection to a parson stuck up
+above his head preaching to him.  But his relations with Mr.
+Cadwallader had been of a different kind: the trout-stream which ran
+through Mr. Casaubon's land took its course through Featherstone's
+also, so that Mr. Cadwallader was a parson who had had to ask a favor
+instead of preaching.  Moreover, he was one of the high gentry living
+four miles away from Lowick, and was thus exalted to an equal sky with
+the sheriff of the county and other dignities vaguely regarded as
+necessary to the system of things.  There would be a satisfaction in
+being buried by Mr. Cadwallader, whose very name offered a fine
+opportunity for pronouncing wrongly if you liked.
+
+This distinction conferred on the Rector of Tipton and Freshitt was the
+reason why Mrs. Cadwallader made one of the group that watched old
+Featherstone's funeral from an upper window of the manor.  She was not
+fond of visiting that house, but she liked, as she said, to see
+collections of strange animals such as there would be at this funeral;
+and she had persuaded Sir James and the young Lady Chettam to drive the
+Rector and herself to Lowick in order that the visit might be
+altogether pleasant.
+
+"I will go anywhere with you, Mrs. Cadwallader," Celia had said; "but I
+don't like funerals."
+
+"Oh, my dear, when you have a clergyman in your family you must
+accommodate your tastes: I did that very early.  When I married
+Humphrey I made up my mind to like sermons, and I set out by liking the
+end very much.  That soon spread to the middle and the beginning,
+because I couldn't have the end without them."
+
+"No, to be sure not," said the Dowager Lady Chettam, with stately
+emphasis.
+
+The upper window from which the funeral could be well seen was in the
+room occupied by Mr. Casaubon when he had been forbidden to work; but
+he had resumed nearly his habitual style of life now in spite of
+warnings and prescriptions, and after politely welcoming Mrs.
+Cadwallader had slipped again into the library to chew a cud of erudite
+mistake about Cush and Mizraim.
+
+But for her visitors Dorothea too might have been shut up in the
+library, and would not have witnessed this scene of old Featherstone's
+funeral, which, aloof as it seemed to be from the tenor of her life,
+always afterwards came back to her at the touch of certain sensitive
+points in memory, just as the vision of St. Peter's at Rome was inwoven
+with moods of despondency.  Scenes which make vital changes in our
+neighbors' lot are but the background of our own, yet, like a
+particular aspect of the fields and trees, they become associated for
+us with the epochs of our own history, and make a part of that unity
+which lies in the selection of our keenest consciousness.
+
+The dream-like association of something alien and ill-understood with
+the deepest secrets of her experience seemed to mirror that sense of
+loneliness which was due to the very ardor of Dorothea's nature.  The
+country gentry of old time lived in a rarefied social air: dotted apart
+on their stations up the mountain they looked down with imperfect
+discrimination on the belts of thicker life below.  And Dorothea was
+not at ease in the perspective and chilliness of that height.
+
+"I shall not look any more," said Celia, after the train had entered
+the church, placing herself a little behind her husband's elbow so that
+she could slyly touch his coat with her cheek.  "I dare say Dodo likes
+it: she is fond of melancholy things and ugly people."
+
+"I am fond of knowing something about the people I live among," said
+Dorothea, who had been watching everything with the interest of a monk
+on his holiday tour.  "It seems to me we know nothing of our neighbors,
+unless they are cottagers.  One is constantly wondering what sort of
+lives other people lead, and how they take things.  I am quite obliged
+to Mrs. Cadwallader for coming and calling me out of the library."
+
+"Quite right to feel obliged to me," said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "Your rich
+Lowick farmers are as curious as any buffaloes or bisons, and I dare
+say you don't half see them at church.  They are quite different from
+your uncle's tenants or Sir James's--monsters--farmers without
+landlords--one can't tell how to class them."
+
+"Most of these followers are not Lowick people," said Sir James; "I
+suppose they are legatees from a distance, or from Middlemarch.
+Lovegood tells me the old fellow has left a good deal of money as well
+as land."
+
+"Think of that now! when so many younger sons can't dine at their own
+expense," said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "Ah," turning round at the sound of
+the opening door, "here is Mr. Brooke.  I felt that we were incomplete
+before, and here is the explanation.  You are come to see this odd
+funeral, of course?"
+
+"No, I came to look after Casaubon--to see how he goes on, you know.
+And to bring a little news--a little news, my dear," said Mr. Brooke,
+nodding at Dorothea as she came towards him.  "I looked into the
+library, and I saw Casaubon over his books.  I told him it wouldn't do:
+I said, 'This will never do, you know: think of your wife, Casaubon.'
+And he promised me to come up.  I didn't tell him my news: I said, he
+must come up."
+
+"Ah, now they are coming out of church," Mrs. Cadwallader exclaimed.
+"Dear me, what a wonderfully mixed set!  Mr. Lydgate as doctor, I
+suppose.  But that is really a good looking woman, and the fair young
+man must be her son.  Who are they, Sir James, do you know?"
+
+"I see Vincy, the Mayor of Middlemarch; they are probably his wife and
+son," said Sir James, looking interrogatively at Mr. Brooke, who nodded
+and said--
+
+"Yes, a very decent family--a very good fellow is Vincy; a credit to
+the manufacturing interest.  You have seen him at my house, you know."
+
+"Ah, yes: one of your secret committee," said Mrs. Cadwallader,
+provokingly.
+
+"A coursing fellow, though," said Sir James, with a fox-hunter's
+disgust.
+
+"And one of those who suck the life out of the wretched handloom
+weavers in Tipton and Freshitt.  That is how his family look so fair
+and sleek," said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "Those dark, purple-faced people
+are an excellent foil.  Dear me, they are like a set of jugs!  Do look
+at Humphrey: one might fancy him an ugly archangel towering above them
+in his white surplice."
+
+"It's a solemn thing, though, a funeral," said Mr. Brooke, "if you take
+it in that light, you know."
+
+"But I am not taking it in that light.  I can't wear my solemnity too
+often, else it will go to rags.  It was time the old man died, and none
+of these people are sorry."
+
+"How piteous!" said Dorothea.  "This funeral seems to me the most
+dismal thing I ever saw.  It is a blot on the morning I cannot bear to
+think that any one should die and leave no love behind."
+
+She was going to say more, but she saw her husband enter and seat
+himself a little in the background.  The difference his presence made
+to her was not always a happy one: she felt that he often inwardly
+objected to her speech.
+
+"Positively," exclaimed Mrs. Cadwallader, "there is a new face come out
+from behind that broad man queerer than any of them: a little round
+head with bulging eyes--a sort of frog-face--do look.  He must be of
+another blood, I think."
+
+"Let me see!" said Celia, with awakened curiosity, standing behind Mrs.
+Cadwallader and leaning forward over her head.  "Oh, what an odd face!"
+Then with a quick change to another sort of surprised expression, she
+added, "Why, Dodo, you never told me that Mr. Ladislaw was come again!"
+
+Dorothea felt a shock of alarm: every one noticed her sudden paleness
+as she looked up immediately at her uncle, while Mr. Casaubon looked at
+her.
+
+"He came with me, you know; he is my guest--puts up with me at the
+Grange," said Mr. Brooke, in his easiest tone, nodding at Dorothea, as
+if the announcement were just what she might have expected.  "And we
+have brought the picture at the top of the carriage.  I knew you would
+be pleased with the surprise, Casaubon.  There you are to the very
+life--as Aquinas, you know.  Quite the right sort of thing.  And you
+will hear young Ladislaw talk about it.  He talks uncommonly
+well--points out this, that, and the other--knows art and everything of
+that kind--companionable, you know--is up with you in any track--what
+I've been wanting a long while."
+
+Mr. Casaubon bowed with cold politeness, mastering his irritation, but
+only so far as to be silent.  He remembered Will's letter quite as well
+as Dorothea did; he had noticed that it was not among the letters which
+had been reserved for him on his recovery, and secretly concluding that
+Dorothea had sent word to Will not to come to Lowick, he had shrunk
+with proud sensitiveness from ever recurring to the subject.  He now
+inferred that she had asked her uncle to invite Will to the Grange; and
+she felt it impossible at that moment to enter into any explanation.
+
+Mrs. Cadwallader's eyes, diverted from the churchyard, saw a good deal
+of dumb show which was not so intelligible to her as she could have
+desired, and could not repress the question, "Who is Mr. Ladislaw?"
+
+"A young relative of Mr. Casaubon's," said Sir James, promptly.  His
+good-nature often made him quick and clear-seeing in personal matters,
+and he had divined from Dorothea's glance at her husband that there was
+some alarm in her mind.
+
+"A very nice young fellow--Casaubon has done everything for him,"
+explained Mr. Brooke.  "He repays your expense in him, Casaubon," he
+went on, nodding encouragingly.  "I hope he will stay with me a long
+while and we shall make something of my documents.  I have plenty of
+ideas and facts, you know, and I can see he is just the man to put them
+into shape--remembers what the right quotations are, omne tulit
+punctum, and that sort of thing--gives subjects a kind of turn.  I
+invited him some time ago when you were ill, Casaubon; Dorothea said
+you couldn't have anybody in the house, you know, and she asked me to
+write."
+
+Poor Dorothea felt that every word of her uncle's was about as pleasant
+as a grain of sand in the eye to Mr. Casaubon.  It would be altogether
+unfitting now to explain that she had not wished her uncle to invite
+Will Ladislaw.  She could not in the least make clear to herself the
+reasons for her husband's dislike to his presence--a dislike painfully
+impressed on her by the scene in the library; but she felt the
+unbecomingness of saying anything that might convey a notion of it to
+others.  Mr. Casaubon, indeed, had not thoroughly represented those
+mixed reasons to himself; irritated feeling with him, as with all of
+us, seeking rather for justification than for self-knowledge. But he
+wished to repress outward signs, and only Dorothea could discern the
+changes in her husband's face before he observed with more of dignified
+bending and sing-song than usual--
+
+"You are exceedingly hospitable, my dear sir; and I owe you
+acknowledgments for exercising your hospitality towards a relative of
+mine."
+
+The funeral was ended now, and the churchyard was being cleared.
+
+"Now you can see him, Mrs. Cadwallader," said Celia.  "He is just like
+a miniature of Mr. Casaubon's aunt that hangs in Dorothea's
+boudoir--quite nice-looking."
+
+"A very pretty sprig," said Mrs. Cadwallader, dryly.  "What is your
+nephew to be, Mr. Casaubon?"
+
+"Pardon me, he is not my nephew.  He is my cousin."
+
+"Well, you know," interposed Mr. Brooke, "he is trying his wings.  He
+is just the sort of young fellow to rise.  I should be glad to give him
+an opportunity.  He would make a good secretary, now, like Hobbes,
+Milton, Swift--that sort of man."
+
+"I understand," said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "One who can write speeches."
+
+"I'll fetch him in now, eh, Casaubon?" said Mr. Brooke.  "He wouldn't
+come in till I had announced him, you know.  And we'll go down and look
+at the picture.  There you are to the life: a deep subtle sort of
+thinker with his fore-finger on the page, while Saint Bonaventure or
+somebody else, rather fat and florid, is looking up at the Trinity.
+Everything is symbolical, you know--the higher style of art: I like
+that up to a certain point, but not too far--it's rather straining to
+keep up with, you know.  But you are at home in that, Casaubon.  And
+your painter's flesh is good--solidity, transparency, everything of
+that sort.  I went into that a great deal at one time.  However, I'll
+go and fetch Ladislaw."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXV.
+
+    "Non, je ne comprends pas de plus charmant plaisir
+     Que de voir d'heritiers une troupe affligee
+     Le maintien interdit, et la mine allongee,
+     Lire un long testament ou pales, etonnes
+     On leur laisse un bonsoir avec un pied de nez.
+     Pour voir au naturel leur tristesse profonde
+     Je reviendrais, je crois, expres de l'autre monde."
+                         --REGNARD: Le Legataire Universel.
+
+
+When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied
+species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to
+think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were
+eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations.  (I fear the
+part played by the vultures on that occasion would be too painful for
+art to represent, those birds being disadvantageously naked about the
+gullet, and apparently without rites and ceremonies.)
+
+The same sort of temptation befell the Christian Carnivora who formed
+Peter Featherstone's funeral procession; most of them having their
+minds bent on a limited store which each would have liked to get the
+most of.  The long-recognized blood-relations and connections by
+marriage made already a goodly number, which, multiplied by
+possibilities, presented a fine range for jealous conjecture and
+pathetic hopefulness.  Jealousy of the Vincys had created a fellowship
+in hostility among all persons of the Featherstone blood, so that in
+the absence of any decided indication that one of themselves was to
+have more than the rest, the dread lest that long-legged Fred Vincy
+should have the land was necessarily dominant, though it left abundant
+feeling and leisure for vaguer jealousies, such as were entertained
+towards Mary Garth.  Solomon found time to reflect that Jonah was
+undeserving, and Jonah to abuse Solomon as greedy; Jane, the elder
+sister, held that Martha's children ought not to expect so much as the
+young Waules; and Martha, more lax on the subject of primogeniture, was
+sorry to think that Jane was so "having."  These nearest of kin were
+naturally impressed with the unreasonableness of expectations in
+cousins and second cousins, and used their arithmetic in reckoning the
+large sums that small legacies might mount to, if there were too many
+of them.  Two cousins were present to hear the will, and a second
+cousin besides Mr. Trumbull.  This second cousin was a Middlemarch
+mercer of polite manners and superfluous aspirates.  The two cousins
+were elderly men from Brassing, one of them conscious of claims on the
+score of inconvenient expense sustained by him in presents of oysters
+and other eatables to his rich cousin Peter; the other entirely
+saturnine, leaning his hands and chin on a stick, and conscious of
+claims based on no narrow performance but on merit generally: both
+blameless citizens of Brassing, who wished that Jonah Featherstone did
+not live there.  The wit of a family is usually best received among
+strangers.
+
+"Why, Trumbull himself is pretty sure of five hundred--_that_ you may
+depend,--I shouldn't wonder if my brother promised him," said Solomon,
+musing aloud with his sisters, the evening before the funeral.
+
+"Dear, dear!" said poor sister Martha, whose imagination of hundreds
+had been habitually narrowed to the amount of her unpaid rent.
+
+But in the morning all the ordinary currents of conjecture were
+disturbed by the presence of a strange mourner who had plashed among
+them as if from the moon.  This was the stranger described by Mrs.
+Cadwallader as frog-faced: a man perhaps about two or three and thirty,
+whose prominent eyes, thin-lipped, downward-curved mouth, and hair
+sleekly brushed away from a forehead that sank suddenly above the ridge
+of the eyebrows, certainly gave his face a batrachian unchangeableness
+of expression.  Here, clearly, was a new legatee; else why was he
+bidden as a mourner?  Here were new possibilities, raising a new
+uncertainty, which almost checked remark in the mourning-coaches. We
+are all humiliated by the sudden discovery of a fact which has existed
+very comfortably and perhaps been staring at us in private while we
+have been making up our world entirely without it.  No one had seen
+this questionable stranger before except Mary Garth, and she knew
+nothing more of him than that he had twice been to Stone Court when Mr.
+Featherstone was down-stairs, and had sat alone with him for several
+hours.  She had found an opportunity of mentioning this to her father,
+and perhaps Caleb's were the only eyes, except the lawyer's, which
+examined the stranger with more of inquiry than of disgust or
+suspicion.  Caleb Garth, having little expectation and less cupidity,
+was interested in the verification of his own guesses, and the calmness
+with which he half smilingly rubbed his chin and shot intelligent
+glances much as if he were valuing a tree, made a fine contrast with
+the alarm or scorn visible in other faces when the unknown mourner,
+whose name was understood to be Rigg, entered the wainscoted parlor and
+took his seat near the door to make part of the audience when the will
+should be read.  Just then Mr. Solomon and Mr. Jonah were gone
+up-stairs with the lawyer to search for the will; and Mrs. Waule,
+seeing two vacant seats between herself and Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, had
+the spirit to move next to that great authority, who was handling his
+watch-seals and trimming his outlines with a determination not to show
+anything so compromising to a man of ability as wonder or surprise.
+
+"I suppose you know everything about what my poor brother's done, Mr.
+Trumbull," said Mrs. Waule, in the lowest of her woolly tones, while
+she turned her crape-shadowed bonnet towards Mr. Trumbull's ear.
+
+"My good lady, whatever was told me was told in confidence," said the
+auctioneer, putting his hand up to screen that secret.
+
+"Them who've made sure of their good-luck may be disappointed yet,"
+Mrs. Waule continued, finding some relief in this communication.
+
+"Hopes are often delusive," said Mr. Trumbull, still in confidence.
+
+"Ah!" said Mrs. Waule, looking across at the Vincys, and then moving
+back to the side of her sister Martha.
+
+"It's wonderful how close poor Peter was," she said, in the same
+undertones.  "We none of us know what he might have had on his mind.  I
+only hope and trust he wasn't a worse liver than we think of, Martha."
+
+Poor Mrs. Cranch was bulky, and, breathing asthmatically, had the
+additional motive for making her remarks unexceptionable and giving
+them a general bearing, that even her whispers were loud and liable to
+sudden bursts like those of a deranged barrel-organ.
+
+"I never _was_ covetous, Jane," she replied; "but I have six children
+and have buried three, and I didn't marry into money.  The eldest, that
+sits there, is but nineteen--so I leave you to guess.  And stock always
+short, and land most awkward.  But if ever I've begged and prayed; it's
+been to God above; though where there's one brother a bachelor and the
+other childless after twice marrying--anybody might think!"
+
+Meanwhile, Mr. Vincy had glanced at the passive face of Mr. Rigg, and
+had taken out his snuff-box and tapped it, but had put it again
+unopened as an indulgence which, however clarifying to the judgment,
+was unsuited to the occasion.  "I shouldn't wonder if Featherstone had
+better feelings than any of us gave him credit for," he observed, in
+the ear of his wife.  "This funeral shows a thought about everybody: it
+looks well when a man wants to be followed by his friends, and if they
+are humble, not to be ashamed of them.  I should be all the better
+pleased if he'd left lots of small legacies.  They may be uncommonly
+useful to fellows in a small way."
+
+"Everything is as handsome as could be, crape and silk and everything,"
+said Mrs. Vincy, contentedly.
+
+But I am sorry to say that Fred was under some difficulty in repressing
+a laugh, which would have been more unsuitable than his father's
+snuff-box. Fred had overheard Mr. Jonah suggesting something about a
+"love-child," and with this thought in his mind, the stranger's face,
+which happened to be opposite him, affected him too ludicrously.  Mary
+Garth, discerning his distress in the twitchings of his mouth, and his
+recourse to a cough, came cleverly to his rescue by asking him to
+change seats with her, so that he got into a shadowy corner.  Fred was
+feeling as good-naturedly as possible towards everybody, including
+Rigg; and having some relenting towards all these people who were less
+lucky than he was aware of being himself, he would not for the world
+have behaved amiss; still, it was particularly easy to laugh.
+
+But the entrance of the lawyer and the two brothers drew every one's
+attention.  The lawyer was Mr. Standish, and he had come to Stone Court
+this morning believing that he knew thoroughly well who would be
+pleased and who disappointed before the day was over.  The will he
+expected to read was the last of three which he had drawn up for Mr.
+Featherstone.  Mr. Standish was not a man who varied his manners: he
+behaved with the same deep-voiced, off-hand civility to everybody, as
+if he saw no difference in them, and talked chiefly of the hay-crop,
+which would be "very fine, by God!" of the last bulletins concerning
+the King, and of the Duke of Clarence, who was a sailor every inch of
+him, and just the man to rule over an island like Britain.
+
+Old Featherstone had often reflected as he sat looking at the fire that
+Standish would be surprised some day: it is true that if he had done as
+he liked at the last, and burnt the will drawn up by another lawyer, he
+would not have secured that minor end; still he had had his pleasure in
+ruminating on it.  And certainly Mr. Standish was surprised, but not at
+all sorry; on the contrary, he rather enjoyed the zest of a little
+curiosity in his own mind, which the discovery of a second will added
+to the prospective amazement on the part of the Featherstone family.
+
+As to the sentiments of Solomon and Jonah, they were held in utter
+suspense: it seemed to them that the old will would have a certain
+validity, and that there might be such an interlacement of poor Peter's
+former and latter intentions as to create endless "lawing" before
+anybody came by their own--an inconvenience which would have at least
+the advantage of going all round.  Hence the brothers showed a
+thoroughly neutral gravity as they re-entered with Mr. Standish; but
+Solomon took out his white handkerchief again with a sense that in any
+case there would be affecting passages, and crying at funerals, however
+dry, was customarily served up in lawn.
+
+Perhaps the person who felt the most throbbing excitement at this
+moment was Mary Garth, in the consciousness that it was she who had
+virtually determined the production of this second will, which might
+have momentous effects on the lot of some persons present.  No soul
+except herself knew what had passed on that final night.
+
+"The will I hold in my hand," said Mr. Standish, who, seated at the
+table in the middle of the room, took his time about everything,
+including the coughs with which he showed a disposition to clear his
+voice, "was drawn up by myself and executed by our deceased friend on
+the 9th of August, 1825.  But I find that there is a subsequent
+instrument hitherto unknown to me, bearing date the 20th of July, 1826,
+hardly a year later than the previous one.  And there is farther, I
+see"--Mr. Standish was cautiously travelling over the document with his
+spectacles--"a codicil to this latter will, bearing date March 1, 1828."
+
+"Dear, dear!" said sister Martha, not meaning to be audible, but driven
+to some articulation under this pressure of dates.
+
+"I shall begin by reading the earlier will," continued Mr. Standish,
+"since such, as appears by his not having destroyed the document, was
+the intention of deceased."
+
+The preamble was felt to be rather long, and several besides Solomon
+shook their heads pathetically, looking on the ground: all eyes avoided
+meeting other eyes, and were chiefly fixed either on the spots in the
+table-cloth or on Mr. Standish's bald head; excepting Mary Garth's.
+When all the rest were trying to look nowhere in particular, it was
+safe for her to look at them.  And at the sound of the first "give and
+bequeath" she could see all complexions changing subtly, as if some
+faint vibration were passing through them, save that of Mr. Rigg.  He
+sat in unaltered calm, and, in fact, the company, preoccupied with more
+important problems, and with the complication of listening to bequests
+which might or might not be revoked, had ceased to think of him.  Fred
+blushed, and Mr. Vincy found it impossible to do without his snuff-box
+in his hand, though he kept it closed.
+
+The small bequests came first, and even the recollection that there was
+another will and that poor Peter might have thought better of it, could
+not quell the rising disgust and indignation.  One likes to be done
+well by in every tense, past, present, and future.  And here was Peter
+capable five years ago of leaving only two hundred apiece to his own
+brothers and sisters, and only a hundred apiece to his own nephews and
+nieces: the Garths were not mentioned, but Mrs. Vincy and Rosamond were
+each to have a hundred.  Mr. Trumbull was to have the gold-headed cane
+and fifty pounds; the other second cousins and the cousins present were
+each to have the like handsome sum, which, as the saturnine cousin
+observed, was a sort of legacy that left a man nowhere; and there was
+much more of such offensive dribbling in favor of persons not
+present--problematical, and, it was to be feared, low connections.
+Altogether, reckoning hastily, here were about three thousand disposed of.
+Where then had Peter meant the rest of the money to go--and where the
+land? and what was revoked and what not revoked--and was the revocation
+for better or for worse?  All emotion must be conditional, and might turn
+out to be the wrong thing.  The men were strong enough to bear up and
+keep quiet under this confused suspense; some letting their lower lip
+fall, others pursing it up, according to the habit of their muscles.
+But Jane and Martha sank under the rush of questions, and began to cry;
+poor Mrs. Cranch being half moved with the consolation of getting any
+hundreds at all without working for them, and half aware that her share
+was scanty; whereas Mrs. Waule's mind was entirely flooded with the
+sense of being an own sister and getting little, while somebody else
+was to have much.  The general expectation now was that the "much"
+would fall to Fred Vincy, but the Vincys themselves were surprised when
+ten thousand pounds in specified investments were declared to be
+bequeathed to him:--was the land coming too?  Fred bit his lips: it was
+difficult to help smiling, and Mrs. Vincy felt herself the happiest of
+women--possible revocation shrinking out of sight in this dazzling
+vision.
+
+There was still a residue of personal property as well as the land, but
+the whole was left to one person, and that person was--O
+possibilities!  O expectations founded on the favor of "close" old
+gentlemen!  O endless vocatives that would still leave expression
+slipping helpless from the measurement of mortal folly!--that
+residuary legatee was Joshua Rigg, who was also sole executor, and who
+was to take thenceforth the name of Featherstone.
+
+There was a rustling which seemed like a shudder running round the
+room.  Every one stared afresh at Mr. Rigg, who apparently experienced
+no surprise.
+
+"A most singular testamentary disposition!" exclaimed Mr. Trumbull,
+preferring for once that he should be considered ignorant in the past.
+"But there is a second will--there is a further document.  We have not
+yet heard the final wishes of the deceased."
+
+Mary Garth was feeling that what they had yet to hear were not the
+final wishes.  The second will revoked everything except the legacies
+to the low persons before mentioned (some alterations in these being
+the occasion of the codicil), and the bequest of all the land lying in
+Lowick parish with all the stock and household furniture, to Joshua
+Rigg.  The residue of the property was to be devoted to the erection
+and endowment of almshouses for old men, to be called Featherstone's
+Alms-Houses, and to be built on a piece of land near Middlemarch
+already bought for the purpose by the testator, he wishing--so the
+document declared--to please God Almighty.  Nobody present had a
+farthing; but Mr. Trumbull had the gold-headed cane.  It took some time
+for the company to recover the power of expression.  Mary dared not
+look at Fred.
+
+Mr. Vincy was the first to speak--after using his snuff-box
+energetically--and he spoke with loud indignation.  "The most
+unaccountable will I ever heard!  I should say he was not in his right
+mind when he made it.  I should say this last will was void," added Mr.
+Vincy, feeling that this expression put the thing in the true light.
+"Eh Standish?"
+
+"Our deceased friend always knew what he was about, I think," said Mr.
+Standish.  "Everything is quite regular.  Here is a letter from
+Clemmens of Brassing tied with the will.  He drew it up.  A very
+respectable solicitor."
+
+"I never noticed any alienation of mind--any aberration of intellect in
+the late Mr. Featherstone," said Borthrop Trumbull, "but I call this
+will eccentric.  I was always willingly of service to the old soul; and
+he intimated pretty plainly a sense of obligation which would show
+itself in his will.  The gold-headed cane is farcical considered as an
+acknowledgment to me; but happily I am above mercenary considerations."
+
+"There's nothing very surprising in the matter that I can see," said
+Caleb Garth.  "Anybody might have had more reason for wondering if the
+will had been what you might expect from an open-minded straightforward
+man.  For my part, I wish there was no such thing as a will."
+
+"That's a strange sentiment to come from a Christian man, by God!" said
+the lawyer.  "I should like to know how you will back that up, Garth!"
+
+"Oh," said Caleb, leaning forward, adjusting his finger-tips with
+nicety and looking meditatively on the ground.  It always seemed to him
+that words were the hardest part of "business."
+
+But here Mr. Jonah Featherstone made himself heard.  "Well, he always
+was a fine hypocrite, was my brother Peter.  But this will cuts out
+everything.  If I'd known, a wagon and six horses shouldn't have drawn
+me from Brassing.  I'll put a white hat and drab coat on to-morrow."
+
+"Dear, dear," wept Mrs. Cranch, "and we've been at the expense of
+travelling, and that poor lad sitting idle here so long!  It's the
+first time I ever heard my brother Peter was so wishful to please God
+Almighty; but if I was to be struck helpless I must say it's hard--I
+can think no other."
+
+"It'll do him no good where he's gone, that's my belief," said Solomon,
+with a bitterness which was remarkably genuine, though his tone could
+not help being sly.  "Peter was a bad liver, and almshouses won't cover
+it, when he's had the impudence to show it at the last."
+
+"And all the while had got his own lawful family--brothers and sisters
+and nephews and nieces--and has sat in church with 'em whenever he
+thought well to come," said Mrs. Waule.  "And might have left his
+property so respectable, to them that's never been used to extravagance
+or unsteadiness in no manner of way--and not so poor but what they
+could have saved every penny and made more of it.  And me--the trouble
+I've been at, times and times, to come here and be sisterly--and him
+with things on his mind all the while that might make anybody's flesh
+creep.  But if the Almighty's allowed it, he means to punish him for
+it.  Brother Solomon, I shall be going, if you'll drive me."
+
+"I've no desire to put my foot on the premises again," said Solomon.
+"I've got land of my own and property of my own to will away."
+
+"It's a poor tale how luck goes in the world," said Jonah.  "It never
+answers to have a bit of spirit in you.  You'd better be a dog in the
+manger.  But those above ground might learn a lesson.  One fool's will
+is enough in a family."
+
+"There's more ways than one of being a fool," said Solomon.  "I shan't
+leave my money to be poured down the sink, and I shan't leave it to
+foundlings from Africay.  I like Featherstones that were brewed such,
+and not turned Featherstones with sticking the name on 'em."
+
+Solomon addressed these remarks in a loud aside to Mrs. Waule as he
+rose to accompany her.  Brother Jonah felt himself capable of much more
+stinging wit than this, but he reflected that there was no use in
+offending the new proprietor of Stone Court, until you were certain
+that he was quite without intentions of hospitality towards witty men
+whose name he was about to bear.
+
+Mr. Joshua Rigg, in fact, appeared to trouble himself little about any
+innuendoes, but showed a notable change of manner, walking coolly up to
+Mr. Standish and putting business questions with much coolness.  He had
+a high chirping voice and a vile accent.  Fred, whom he no longer moved
+to laughter, thought him the lowest monster he had ever seen.  But Fred
+was feeling rather sick.  The Middlemarch mercer waited for an
+opportunity of engaging Mr. Rigg in conversation: there was no knowing
+how many pairs of legs the new proprietor might require hose for, and
+profits were more to be relied on than legacies.  Also, the mercer, as
+a second cousin, was dispassionate enough to feel curiosity.
+
+Mr. Vincy, after his one outburst, had remained proudly silent, though
+too much preoccupied with unpleasant feelings to think of moving, till
+he observed that his wife had gone to Fred's side and was crying
+silently while she held her darling's hand.  He rose immediately, and
+turning his back on the company while he said to her in an
+undertone,--"Don't give way, Lucy; don't make a fool of yourself, my
+dear, before these people," he added in his usual loud voice--"Go and
+order the phaeton, Fred; I have no time to waste."
+
+Mary Garth had before this been getting ready to go home with her
+father.  She met Fred in the hall, and now for the first time had the
+courage to look at him. He had that withered sort of paleness which
+will sometimes come on young faces, and his hand was very cold when she
+shook it.  Mary too was agitated; she was conscious that fatally,
+without will of her own, she had perhaps made a great difference to
+Fred's lot.
+
+"Good-by," she said, with affectionate sadness.  "Be brave, Fred.  I do
+believe you are better without the money.  What was the good of it to
+Mr. Featherstone?"
+
+"That's all very fine," said Fred, pettishly.  "What is a fellow to do?
+I must go into the Church now."  (He knew that this would vex Mary:
+very well; then she must tell him what else he could do.) "And I
+thought I should be able to pay your father at once and make everything
+right.  And you have not even a hundred pounds left you.  What shall
+you do now, Mary?"
+
+"Take another situation, of course, as soon as I can get one.  My
+father has enough to do to keep the rest, without me.  Good-by."
+
+In a very short time Stone Court was cleared of well-brewed
+Featherstones and other long-accustomed visitors.  Another stranger had
+been brought to settle in the neighborhood of Middlemarch, but in the
+case of Mr. Rigg Featherstone there was more discontent with immediate
+visible consequences than speculation as to the effect which his
+presence might have in the future.  No soul was prophetic enough to
+have any foreboding as to what might appear on the trial of Joshua Rigg.
+
+And here I am naturally led to reflect on the means of elevating a low
+subject.  Historical parallels are remarkably efficient in this way.
+The chief objection to them is, that the diligent narrator may lack
+space, or (what is often the same thing) may not be able to think of
+them with any degree of particularity, though he may have a
+philosophical confidence that if known they would be illustrative.  It
+seems an easier and shorter way to dignity, to observe that--since
+there never was a true story which could not be told in parables, where
+you might put a monkey for a margrave, and vice versa--whatever has
+been or is to be narrated by me about low people, may be ennobled by
+being considered a parable; so that if any bad habits and ugly
+consequences are brought into view, the reader may have the relief of
+regarding them as not more than figuratively ungenteel, and may feel
+himself virtually in company with persons of some style.  Thus while I
+tell the truth about loobies, my reader's imagination need not be
+entirely excluded from an occupation with lords; and the petty sums
+which any bankrupt of high standing would be sorry to retire upon, may
+be lifted to the level of high commercial transactions by the
+inexpensive addition of proportional ciphers.
+
+As to any provincial history in which the agents are all of high moral
+rank, that must be of a date long posterior to the first Reform Bill,
+and Peter Featherstone, you perceive, was dead and buried some months
+before Lord Grey came into office.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVI.
+
+    "'Tis strange to see the humors of these men,
+     These great aspiring spirits, that should be wise:
+       .     .     .     .     .     .     .     .
+     For being the nature of great spirits to love
+     To be where they may be most eminent;
+     They, rating of themselves so farre above
+     Us in conceit, with whom they do frequent,
+     Imagine how we wonder and esteeme
+     All that they do or say; which makes them strive
+     To make our admiration more extreme,
+     Which they suppose they cannot, 'less they give
+     Notice of their extreme and highest thoughts.
+                                --DANIEL: Tragedy of Philotas.
+
+
+Mr. Vincy went home from the reading of the will with his point of view
+considerably changed in relation to many subjects.  He was an
+open-minded man, but given to indirect modes of expressing himself:
+when he was disappointed in a market for his silk braids, he swore at
+the groom; when his brother-in-law Bulstrode had vexed him, he made
+cutting remarks on Methodism; and it was now apparent that he regarded
+Fred's idleness with a sudden increase of severity, by his throwing an
+embroidered cap out of the smoking-room on to the hall-floor.
+
+"Well, sir," he observed, when that young gentleman was moving off to
+bed, "I hope you've made up your mind now to go up next term and pass
+your examination.  I've taken my resolution, so I advise you to lose no
+time in taking yours."
+
+Fred made no answer: he was too utterly depressed.  Twenty-four hours
+ago he had thought that instead of needing to know what he should do,
+he should by this time know that he needed to do nothing: that he
+should hunt in pink, have a first-rate hunter, ride to cover on a fine
+hack, and be generally respected for doing so; moreover, that he should
+be able at once to pay Mr. Garth, and that Mary could no longer have
+any reason for not marrying him.  And all this was to have come without
+study or other inconvenience, purely by the favor of providence in the
+shape of an old gentleman's caprice.  But now, at the end of the
+twenty-four hours, all those firm expectations were upset.  It was
+"rather hard lines" that while he was smarting under this
+disappointment he should be treated as if he could have helped it.  But
+he went away silently and his mother pleaded for him.
+
+"Don't be hard on the poor boy, Vincy.  He'll turn out well yet, though
+that wicked man has deceived him.  I feel as sure as I sit here, Fred
+will turn out well--else why was he brought back from the brink of the
+grave?  And I call it a robbery: it was like giving him the land, to
+promise it; and what is promising, if making everybody believe is not
+promising?  And you see he did leave him ten thousand pounds, and then
+took it away again."
+
+"Took it away again!" said Mr. Vincy, pettishly.  "I tell you the lad's
+an unlucky lad, Lucy.  And you've always spoiled him."
+
+"Well, Vincy, he was my first, and you made a fine fuss with him when
+he came.  You were as proud as proud," said Mrs. Vincy, easily
+recovering her cheerful smile.
+
+"Who knows what babies will turn to?  I was fool enough, I dare say,"
+said the husband--more mildly, however.
+
+"But who has handsomer, better children than ours?  Fred is far beyond
+other people's sons: you may hear it in his speech, that he has kept
+college company.  And Rosamond--where is there a girl like her?  She
+might stand beside any lady in the land, and only look the better for
+it.  You see--Mr. Lydgate has kept the highest company and been
+everywhere, and he fell in love with her at once.  Not but what I could
+have wished Rosamond had not engaged herself.  She might have met
+somebody on a visit who would have been a far better match; I mean at
+her schoolfellow Miss Willoughby's. There are relations in that family
+quite as high as Mr. Lydgate's."
+
+"Damn relations!" said Mr. Vincy; "I've had enough of them.  I don't
+want a son-in-law who has got nothing but his relations to recommend
+him."
+
+"Why, my dear," said Mrs. Vincy, "you seemed as pleased as could be
+about it.  It's true, I wasn't at home; but Rosamond told me you hadn't
+a word to say against the engagement.  And she has begun to buy in the
+best linen and cambric for her underclothing."
+
+"Not by my will," said Mr. Vincy.  "I shall have enough to do this
+year, with an idle scamp of a son, without paying for wedding-clothes.
+The times are as tight as can be; everybody is being ruined; and I
+don't believe Lydgate has got a farthing.  I shan't give my consent to
+their marrying.  Let 'em wait, as their elders have done before 'em."
+
+"Rosamond will take it hard, Vincy, and you know you never could bear
+to cross her."
+
+"Yes, I could.  The sooner the engagement's off, the better.  I don't
+believe he'll ever make an income, the way he goes on.  He makes
+enemies; that's all I hear of his making."
+
+"But he stands very high with Mr. Bulstrode, my dear.  The marriage
+would please _him_, I should think."
+
+"Please the deuce!" said Mr. Vincy.  "Bulstrode won't pay for their
+keep.  And if Lydgate thinks I'm going to give money for them to set up
+housekeeping, he's mistaken, that's all.  I expect I shall have to put
+down my horses soon.  You'd better tell Rosy what I say."
+
+This was a not infrequent procedure with Mr. Vincy--to be rash in
+jovial assent, and on becoming subsequently conscious that he had been
+rash, to employ others in making the offensive retractation.  However,
+Mrs. Vincy, who never willingly opposed her husband, lost no time the
+next morning in letting Rosamond know what he had said.  Rosamond,
+examining some muslin-work, listened in silence, and at the end gave a
+certain turn of her graceful neck, of which only long experience could
+teach you that it meant perfect obstinacy.
+
+"What do you say, my dear?" said her mother, with affectionate
+deference.
+
+"Papa does not mean anything of the kind," said Rosamond, quite calmly.
+"He has always said that he wished me to marry the man I loved.  And I
+shall marry Mr. Lydgate.  It is seven weeks now since papa gave his
+consent.  And I hope we shall have Mrs. Bretton's house."
+
+"Well, my dear, I shall leave you to manage your papa.  You always do
+manage everybody.  But if we ever do go and get damask, Sadler's is the
+place--far better than Hopkins's. Mrs. Bretton's is very large, though:
+I should love you to have such a house; but it will take a great deal
+of furniture--carpeting and everything, besides plate and glass.  And
+you hear, your papa says he will give no money.  Do you think Mr.
+Lydgate expects it?"
+
+"You cannot imagine that I should ask him, mamma.  Of course he
+understands his own affairs."
+
+"But he may have been looking for money, my dear, and we all thought of
+your having a pretty legacy as well as Fred;--and now everything is so
+dreadful--there's no pleasure in thinking of anything, with that poor
+boy disappointed as he is."
+
+"That has nothing to do with my marriage, mamma.  Fred must leave off
+being idle.  I am going up-stairs to take this work to Miss Morgan: she
+does the open hemming very well.  Mary Garth might do some work for me
+now, I should think.  Her sewing is exquisite; it is the nicest thing I
+know about Mary.  I should so like to have all my cambric frilling
+double-hemmed. And it takes a long time."
+
+Mrs. Vincy's belief that Rosamond could manage her papa was well
+founded.  Apart from his dinners and his coursing, Mr. Vincy,
+blustering as he was, had as little of his own way as if he had been a
+prime minister: the force of circumstances was easily too much for him,
+as it is for most pleasure-loving florid men; and the circumstance
+called Rosamond was particularly forcible by means of that mild
+persistence which, as we know, enables a white soft living substance to
+make its way in spite of opposing rock.  Papa was not a rock: he had no
+other fixity than that fixity of alternating impulses sometimes called
+habit, and this was altogether unfavorable to his taking the only
+decisive line of conduct in relation to his daughter's
+engagement--namely, to inquire thoroughly into Lydgate's circumstances,
+declare his own inability to furnish money, and forbid alike either a
+speedy marriage or an engagement which must be too lengthy.  That seems
+very simple and easy in the statement; but a disagreeable resolve
+formed in the chill hours of the morning had as many conditions against
+it as the early frost, and rarely persisted under the warming
+influences of the day.  The indirect though emphatic expression of
+opinion to which Mr. Vincy was prone suffered much restraint in this
+case: Lydgate was a proud man towards whom innuendoes were obviously
+unsafe, and throwing his hat on the floor was out of the question.  Mr.
+Vincy was a little in awe of him, a little vain that he wanted to marry
+Rosamond, a little indisposed to raise a question of money in which his
+own position was not advantageous, a little afraid of being worsted in
+dialogue with a man better educated and more highly bred than himself,
+and a little afraid of doing what his daughter would not like.  The
+part Mr. Vincy preferred playing was that of the generous host whom
+nobody criticises.  In the earlier half of the day there was business
+to hinder any formal communication of an adverse resolve; in the later
+there was dinner, wine, whist, and general satisfaction.  And in the
+mean while the hours were each leaving their little deposit and
+gradually forming the final reason for inaction, namely, that action
+was too late.  The accepted lover spent most of his evenings in Lowick
+Gate, and a love-making not at all dependent on money-advances from
+fathers-in-law, or prospective income from a profession, went on
+flourishingly under Mr. Vincy's own eyes.  Young love-making--that
+gossamer web!  Even the points it clings to--the things whence its
+subtle interlacings are swung--are scarcely perceptible: momentary
+touches of fingertips, meetings of rays from blue and dark orbs,
+unfinished phrases, lightest changes of cheek and lip, faintest
+tremors.  The web itself is made of spontaneous beliefs and indefinable
+joys, yearnings of one life towards another, visions of completeness,
+indefinite trust.  And Lydgate fell to spinning that web from his
+inward self with wonderful rapidity, in spite of experience supposed to
+be finished off with the drama of Laure--in spite too of medicine and
+biology; for the inspection of macerated muscle or of eyes presented in
+a dish (like Santa Lucia's), and other incidents of scientific inquiry,
+are observed to be less incompatible with poetic love than a native
+dulness or a lively addiction to the lowest prose.  As for Rosamond,
+she was in the water-lily's expanding wonderment at its own fuller
+life, and she too was spinning industriously at the mutual web.  All
+this went on in the corner of the drawing-room where the piano stood,
+and subtle as it was, the light made it a sort of rainbow visible to
+many observers besides Mr. Farebrother.  The certainty that Miss Vincy
+and Mr. Lydgate were engaged became general in Middlemarch without the
+aid of formal announcement.
+
+Aunt Bulstrode was again stirred to anxiety; but this time she
+addressed herself to her brother, going to the warehouse expressly to
+avoid Mrs. Vincy's volatility.  His replies were not satisfactory.
+
+"Walter, you never mean to tell me that you have allowed all this to go
+on without inquiry into Mr. Lydgate's prospects?" said Mrs. Bulstrode,
+opening her eyes with wider gravity at her brother, who was in his
+peevish warehouse humor.  "Think of this girl brought up in luxury--in
+too worldly a way, I am sorry to say--what will she do on a small
+income?"
+
+"Oh, confound it, Harriet! What can I do when men come into the town
+without any asking of mine?  Did you shut your house up against
+Lydgate?  Bulstrode has pushed him forward more than anybody.  I never
+made any fuss about the young fellow.  You should go and talk to your
+husband about it, not me."
+
+"Well, really, Walter, how can Mr. Bulstrode be to blame?  I am sure he
+did not wish for the engagement."
+
+"Oh, if Bulstrode had not taken him by the hand, I should never have
+invited him."
+
+"But you called him in to attend on Fred, and I am sure that was a
+mercy," said Mrs. Bulstrode, losing her clew in the intricacies of the
+subject.
+
+"I don't know about mercy," said Mr. Vincy, testily.  "I know I am
+worried more than I like with my family.  I was a good brother to you,
+Harriet, before you married Bulstrode, and I must say he doesn't always
+show that friendly spirit towards your family that might have been
+expected of him."  Mr. Vincy was very little like a Jesuit, but no
+accomplished Jesuit could have turned a question more adroitly.
+Harriet had to defend her husband instead of blaming her brother, and
+the conversation ended at a point as far from the beginning as some
+recent sparring between the brothers-in-law at a vestry meeting.
+
+Mrs. Bulstrode did not repeat her brother's complaints to her husband,
+but in the evening she spoke to him of Lydgate and Rosamond.  He did
+not share her warm interest, however; and only spoke with resignation
+of the risks attendant on the beginning of medical practice and the
+desirability of prudence.
+
+"I am sure we are bound to pray for that thoughtless girl--brought up
+as she has been," said Mrs. Bulstrode, wishing to rouse her husband's
+feelings.
+
+"Truly, my dear," said Mr. Bulstrode, assentingly.  "Those who are not
+of this world can do little else to arrest the errors of the
+obstinately worldly.  That is what we must accustom ourselves to
+recognize with regard to your brother's family.  I could have wished
+that Mr. Lydgate had not entered into such a union; but my relations
+with him are limited to that use of his gifts for God's purposes which
+is taught us by the divine government under each dispensation."
+
+Mrs. Bulstrode said no more, attributing some dissatisfaction which she
+felt to her own want of spirituality.  She believed that her husband
+was one of those men whose memoirs should be written when they died.
+
+As to Lydgate himself, having been accepted, he was prepared to accept
+all the consequences which he believed himself to foresee with perfect
+clearness.  Of course he must be married in a year--perhaps even in
+half a year.  This was not what he had intended; but other schemes
+would not be hindered: they would simply adjust themselves anew.
+Marriage, of course, must be prepared for in the usual way.  A house
+must be taken instead of the rooms he at present occupied; and Lydgate,
+having heard Rosamond speak with admiration of old Mrs. Bretton's house
+(situated in Lowick Gate), took notice when it fell vacant after the
+old lady's death, and immediately entered into treaty for it.
+
+He did this in an episodic way, very much as he gave orders to his
+tailor for every requisite of perfect dress, without any notion of
+being extravagant.  On the contrary, he would have despised any
+ostentation of expense; his profession had familiarized him with all
+grades of poverty, and he cared much for those who suffered hardships.
+He would have behaved perfectly at a table where the sauce was served
+in a jug with the handle off, and he would have remembered nothing
+about a grand dinner except that a man was there who talked well.  But
+it had never occurred to him that he should live in any other than what
+he would have called an ordinary way, with green glasses for hock, and
+excellent waiting at table.  In warming himself at French social
+theories he had brought away no smell of scorching.  We may handle even
+extreme opinions with impunity while our furniture, our dinner-giving,
+and preference for armorial bearings in our own case, link us
+indissolubly with the established order.  And Lydgate's tendency was
+not towards extreme opinions: he would have liked no barefooted
+doctrines, being particular about his boots: he was no radical in
+relation to anything but medical reform and the prosecution of
+discovery.  In the rest of practical life he walked by hereditary
+habit; half from that personal pride and unreflecting egoism which I
+have already called commonness, and half from that naivete which
+belonged to preoccupation with favorite ideas.
+
+Any inward debate Lydgate had as to the consequences of this engagement
+which had stolen upon him, turned on the paucity of time rather than of
+money.  Certainly, being in love and being expected continually by some
+one who always turned out to be prettier than memory could represent
+her to be, did interfere with the diligent use of spare hours which
+might serve some "plodding fellow of a German" to make the great,
+imminent discovery.  This was really an argument for not deferring the
+marriage too long, as he implied to Mr. Farebrother, one day that the
+Vicar came to his room with some pond-products which he wanted to
+examine under a better microscope than his own, and, finding Lydgate's
+tableful of apparatus and specimens in confusion, said sarcastically--
+
+"Eros has degenerated; he began by introducing order and harmony, and
+now he brings back chaos."
+
+"Yes, at some stages," said Lydgate, lifting his brows and smiling,
+while he began to arrange his microscope.  "But a better order will
+begin after."
+
+"Soon?" said the Vicar.
+
+"I hope so, really.  This unsettled state of affairs uses up the time,
+and when one has notions in science, every moment is an opportunity.  I
+feel sure that marriage must be the best thing for a man who wants to
+work steadily.  He has everything at home then--no teasing with
+personal speculations--he can get calmness and freedom."
+
+"You are an enviable dog," said the Vicar, "to have such a
+prospect--Rosamond, calmness and freedom, all to your share.  Here am
+I with nothing but my pipe and pond-animalcules. Now, are you ready?"
+
+Lydgate did not mention to the Vicar another reason he had for wishing
+to shorten the period of courtship.  It was rather irritating to him,
+even with the wine of love in his veins, to be obliged to mingle so
+often with the family party at the Vincys', and to enter so much into
+Middlemarch gossip, protracted good cheer, whist-playing, and general
+futility.  He had to be deferential when Mr. Vincy decided questions
+with trenchant ignorance, especially as to those liquors which were the
+best inward pickle, preserving you from the effects of bad air.  Mrs.
+Vincy's openness and simplicity were quite unstreaked with suspicion as
+to the subtle offence she might give to the taste of her intended
+son-in-law; and altogether Lydgate had to confess to himself that he
+was descending a little in relation to Rosamond's family.  But that
+exquisite creature herself suffered in the same sort of way:--it was
+at least one delightful thought that in marrying her, he could give her
+a much-needed transplantation.
+
+"Dear!" he said to her one evening, in his gentlest tone, as he sat
+down by her and looked closely at her face--
+
+But I must first say that he had found her alone in the drawing-room,
+where the great old-fashioned window, almost as large as the side of
+the room, was opened to the summer scents of the garden at the back of
+the house.  Her father and mother were gone to a party, and the rest
+were all out with the butterflies.
+
+"Dear! your eyelids are red."
+
+"Are they?" said Rosamond.  "I wonder why."  It was not in her nature
+to pour forth wishes or grievances.  They only came forth gracefully on
+solicitation.
+
+"As if you could hide it from me!" said Lydgate, laying his hand
+tenderly on both of hers.  "Don't I see a tiny drop on one of the
+lashes?  Things trouble you, and you don't tell me.  That is unloving."
+
+"Why should I tell you what you cannot alter?  They are every-day
+things:--perhaps they have been a little worse lately."
+
+"Family annoyances.  Don't fear speaking.  I guess them."
+
+"Papa has been more irritable lately.  Fred makes him angry, and this
+morning there was a fresh quarrel because Fred threatens to throw his
+whole education away, and do something quite beneath him.  And
+besides--"
+
+Rosamond hesitated, and her cheeks were gathering a slight flush.
+Lydgate had never seen her in trouble since the morning of their
+engagement, and he had never felt so passionately towards her as at
+this moment.  He kissed the hesitating lips gently, as if to encourage
+them.
+
+"I feel that papa is not quite pleased about our engagement," Rosamond
+continued, almost in a whisper; "and he said last night that he should
+certainly speak to you and say it must be given up."
+
+"Will you give it up?" said Lydgate, with quick energy--almost angrily.
+
+"I never give up anything that I choose to do," said Rosamond,
+recovering her calmness at the touching of this chord.
+
+"God bless you!" said Lydgate, kissing her again.  This constancy of
+purpose in the right place was adorable.  He went on:--
+
+"It is too late now for your father to say that our engagement must be
+given up.  You are of age, and I claim you as mine.  If anything is
+done to make you unhappy,--that is a reason for hastening our marriage."
+
+An unmistakable delight shone forth from the blue eyes that met his,
+and the radiance seemed to light up all his future with mild sunshine.
+Ideal happiness (of the kind known in the Arabian Nights, in which you
+are invited to step from the labor and discord of the street into a
+paradise where everything is given to you and nothing claimed) seemed
+to be an affair of a few weeks' waiting, more or less.
+
+"Why should we defer it?" he said, with ardent insistence.  "I have
+taken the house now: everything else can soon be got ready--can it
+not?  You will not mind about new clothes.  Those can be bought
+afterwards."
+
+"What original notions you clever men have!" said Rosamond, dimpling
+with more thorough laughter than usual at this humorous incongruity.
+"This is the first time I ever heard of wedding-clothes being bought
+after marriage."
+
+"But you don't mean to say you would insist on my waiting months for
+the sake of clothes?" said Lydgate, half thinking that Rosamond was
+tormenting him prettily, and half fearing that she really shrank from
+speedy marriage.  "Remember, we are looking forward to a better sort of
+happiness even than this--being continually together, independent of
+others, and ordering our lives as we will.  Come, dear, tell me how
+soon you can be altogether mine."
+
+There was a serious pleading in Lydgate's tone, as if he felt that she
+would be injuring him by any fantastic delays.  Rosamond became serious
+too, and slightly meditative; in fact, she was going through many
+intricacies of lace-edging and hosiery and petticoat-tucking, in order
+to give an answer that would at least be approximative.
+
+"Six weeks would be ample--say so, Rosamond," insisted Lydgate,
+releasing her hands to put his arm gently round her.
+
+One little hand immediately went to pat her hair, while she gave her
+neck a meditative turn, and then said seriously--
+
+"There would be the house-linen and the furniture to be prepared.
+Still, mamma could see to those while we were away."
+
+"Yes, to be sure.  We must be away a week or so."
+
+"Oh, more than that!" said Rosamond, earnestly.  She was thinking of
+her evening dresses for the visit to Sir Godwin Lydgate's, which she
+had long been secretly hoping for as a delightful employment of at
+least one quarter of the honeymoon, even if she deferred her
+introduction to the uncle who was a doctor of divinity (also a pleasing
+though sober kind of rank, when sustained by blood). She looked at her
+lover with some wondering remonstrance as she spoke, and he readily
+understood that she might wish to lengthen the sweet time of double
+solitude.
+
+"Whatever you wish, my darling, when the day is fixed.  But let us take
+a decided course, and put an end to any discomfort you may be
+suffering.  Six weeks!--I am sure they would be ample."
+
+"I could certainly hasten the work," said Rosamond.  "Will you, then,
+mention it to papa?--I think it would be better to write to him." She
+blushed and looked at him as the garden flowers look at us when we walk
+forth happily among them in the transcendent evening light: is there
+not a soul beyond utterance, half nymph, half child, in those delicate
+petals which glow and breathe about the centres of deep color?
+
+He touched her ear and a little bit of neck under it with his lips, and
+they sat quite still for many minutes which flowed by them like a small
+gurgling brook with the kisses of the sun upon it.  Rosamond thought
+that no one could be more in love than she was; and Lydgate thought
+that after all his wild mistakes and absurd credulity, he had found
+perfect womanhood--felt as if already breathed upon by exquisite wedded
+affection such as would be bestowed by an accomplished creature who
+venerated his high musings and momentous labors and would never
+interfere with them; who would create order in the home and accounts
+with still magic, yet keep her fingers ready to touch the lute and
+transform life into romance at any moment; who was instructed to the
+true womanly limit and not a hair's-breadth beyond--docile, therefore,
+and ready to carry out behests which came from that limit.  It was
+plainer now than ever that his notion of remaining much longer a
+bachelor had been a mistake: marriage would not be an obstruction but a
+furtherance.  And happening the next day to accompany a patient to
+Brassing, he saw a dinner-service there which struck him as so exactly
+the right thing that he bought it at once.  It saved time to do these
+things just when you thought of them, and Lydgate hated ugly crockery.
+The dinner-service in question was expensive, but that might be in the
+nature of dinner-services. Furnishing was necessarily expensive; but
+then it had to be done only once.
+
+"It must be lovely," said Mrs. Vincy, when Lydgate mentioned his
+purchase with some descriptive touches.  "Just what Rosy ought to have.
+I trust in heaven it won't be broken!"
+
+"One must hire servants who will not break things," said Lydgate.
+(Certainly, this was reasoning with an imperfect vision of sequences.
+But at that period there was no sort of reasoning which was not more or
+less sanctioned by men of science.)
+
+Of course it was unnecessary to defer the mention of anything to mamma,
+who did not readily take views that were not cheerful, and being a
+happy wife herself, had hardly any feeling but pride in her daughter's
+marriage.  But Rosamond had good reasons for suggesting to Lydgate that
+papa should be appealed to in writing.  She prepared for the arrival of
+the letter by walking with her papa to the warehouse the next morning,
+and telling him on the way that Mr. Lydgate wished to be married soon.
+
+"Nonsense, my dear!" said Mr. Vincy.  "What has he got to marry on?
+You'd much better give up the engagement.  I've told you so pretty
+plainly before this.  What have you had such an education for, if you
+are to go and marry a poor man?  It's a cruel thing for a father to
+see."
+
+"Mr. Lydgate is not poor, papa.  He bought Mr. Peacock's practice,
+which, they say, is worth eight or nine hundred a-year."
+
+"Stuff and nonsense!  What's buying a practice?  He might as well buy
+next year's swallows.  It'll all slip through his fingers."
+
+"On the contrary, papa, he will increase the practice.  See how he has
+been called in by the Chettams and Casaubons."
+
+"I hope he knows I shan't give anything--with this disappointment about
+Fred, and Parliament going to be dissolved, and machine-breaking
+everywhere, and an election coming on--"
+
+"Dear papa! what can that have to do with my marriage?"
+
+"A pretty deal to do with it!  We may all be ruined for what I know--the
+country's in that state!  Some say it's the end of the world, and
+be hanged if I don't think it looks like it!  Anyhow, it's not a time
+for me to be drawing money out of my business, and I should wish
+Lydgate to know that."
+
+"I am sure he expects nothing, papa.  And he has such very high
+connections: he is sure to rise in one way or another.  He is engaged
+in making scientific discoveries."
+
+Mr. Vincy was silent.
+
+"I cannot give up my only prospect of happiness, papa. Mr. Lydgate is a
+gentleman.  I could never love any one who was not a perfect gentleman.
+You would not like me to go into a consumption, as Arabella Hawley did.
+And you know that I never change my mind."
+
+Again papa was silent.
+
+"Promise me, papa, that you will consent to what we wish.  We shall
+never give each other up; and you know that you have always objected to
+long courtships and late marriages."
+
+There was a little more urgency of this kind, till Mr. Vincy said,
+"Well, well, child, he must write to me first before I can answer
+him,"--and Rosamond was certain that she had gained her point.
+
+Mr. Vincy's answer consisted chiefly in a demand that Lydgate should
+insure his life--a demand immediately conceded.  This was a
+delightfully reassuring idea supposing that Lydgate died, but in the
+mean time not a self-supporting idea.  However, it seemed to make
+everything comfortable about Rosamond's marriage; and the necessary
+purchases went on with much spirit.  Not without prudential
+considerations, however.  A bride (who is going to visit at a
+baronet's) must have a few first-rate pocket-handkerchiefs; but beyond
+the absolutely necessary half-dozen, Rosamond contented herself without
+the very highest style of embroidery and Valenciennes.  Lydgate also,
+finding that his sum of eight hundred pounds had been considerably
+reduced since he had come to Middlemarch, restrained his inclination
+for some plate of an old pattern which was shown to him when he went
+into Kibble's establishment at Brassing to buy forks and spoons.  He
+was too proud to act as if he presupposed that Mr. Vincy would advance
+money to provide furniture; and though, since it would not be
+necessary to pay for everything at once, some bills would be left
+standing over, he did not waste time in conjecturing how much his
+father-in-law would give in the form of dowry, to make payment easy.
+He was not going to do anything extravagant, but the requisite things
+must be bought, and it would be bad economy to buy them of a poor
+quality.  All these matters were by the bye.  Lydgate foresaw that
+science and his profession were the objects he should alone pursue
+enthusiastically; but he could not imagine himself pursuing them in
+such a home as Wrench had--the doors all open, the oil-cloth worn, the
+children in soiled pinafores, and lunch lingering in the form of bones,
+black-handled knives, and willow-pattern. But Wrench had a wretched
+lymphatic wife who made a mummy of herself indoors in a large shawl;
+and he must have altogether begun with an ill-chosen domestic apparatus.
+
+Rosamond, however, was on her side much occupied with conjectures,
+though her quick imitative perception warned her against betraying them
+too crudely.
+
+"I shall like so much to know your family," she said one day, when the
+wedding journey was being discussed.  "We might perhaps take a
+direction that would allow us to see them as we returned.  Which of
+your uncles do you like best?"
+
+"Oh,--my uncle Godwin, I think.  He is a good-natured old fellow."
+
+"You were constantly at his house at Quallingham, when you were a boy,
+were you not?  I should so like to see the old spot and everything you
+were used to.  Does he know you are going to be married?"
+
+"No," said Lydgate, carelessly, turning in his chair and rubbing his
+hair up.
+
+"Do send him word of it, you naughty undutiful nephew.  He will perhaps
+ask you to take me to Quallingham; and then you could show me about the
+grounds, and I could imagine you there when you were a boy.  Remember,
+you see me in my home, just as it has been since I was a child.  It is
+not fair that I should be so ignorant of yours.  But perhaps you would
+be a little ashamed of me.  I forgot that."
+
+Lydgate smiled at her tenderly, and really accepted the suggestion that
+the proud pleasure of showing so charming a bride was worth some
+trouble.  And now he came to think of it, he would like to see the old
+spots with Rosamond.
+
+"I will write to him, then.  But my cousins are bores."
+
+It seemed magnificent to Rosamond to be able to speak so slightingly of
+a baronet's family, and she felt much contentment in the prospect of
+being able to estimate them contemptuously on her own account.
+
+But mamma was near spoiling all, a day or two later, by saying--
+
+"I hope your uncle Sir Godwin will not look down on Rosy, Mr. Lydgate.
+I should think he would do something handsome.  A thousand or two can
+be nothing to a baronet."
+
+"Mamma!" said Rosamond, blushing deeply; and Lydgate pitied her so much
+that he remained silent and went to the other end of the room to
+examine a print curiously, as if he had been absent-minded. Mamma had a
+little filial lecture afterwards, and was docile as usual.  But
+Rosamond reflected that if any of those high-bred cousins who were
+bores, should be induced to visit Middlemarch, they would see many
+things in her own family which might shock them.  Hence it seemed
+desirable that Lydgate should by-and-by get some first-rate position
+elsewhere than in Middlemarch; and this could hardly be difficult in
+the case of a man who had a titled uncle and could make discoveries.
+Lydgate, you perceive, had talked fervidly to Rosamond of his hopes as
+to the highest uses of his life, and had found it delightful to be
+listened to by a creature who would bring him the sweet furtherance of
+satisfying affection--beauty--repose--such help as our thoughts get
+from the summer sky and the flower-fringed meadows.
+
+Lydgate relied much on the psychological difference between what for
+the sake of variety I will call goose and gander: especially on the
+innate submissiveness of the goose as beautifully corresponding to the
+strength of the gander.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVII.
+
+    "Thrice happy she that is so well assured
+     Unto herself and settled so in heart
+     That neither will for better be allured
+     Ne fears to worse with any chance to start,
+     But like a steddy ship doth strongly part
+     The raging waves and keeps her course aright;
+     Ne aught for tempest doth from it depart,
+     Ne aught for fairer weather's false delight.
+     Such self-assurance need not fear the spight
+     Of grudging foes; ne favour seek of friends;
+     But in the stay of her own stedfast might
+     Neither to one herself nor other bends.
+        Most happy she that most assured doth rest,
+        But he most happy who such one loves best."
+                                               --SPENSER.
+
+
+The doubt hinted by Mr. Vincy whether it were only the general election
+or the end of the world that was coming on, now that George the Fourth
+was dead, Parliament dissolved, Wellington and Peel generally
+depreciated and the new King apologetic, was a feeble type of the
+uncertainties in provincial opinion at that time.  With the glow-worm
+lights of country places, how could men see which were their own
+thoughts in the confusion of a Tory Ministry passing Liberal measures,
+of Tory nobles and electors being anxious to return Liberals rather
+than friends of the recreant Ministers, and of outcries for remedies
+which seemed to have a mysteriously remote bearing on private interest,
+and were made suspicious by the advocacy of disagreeable neighbors?
+Buyers of the Middlemarch newspapers found themselves in an anomalous
+position: during the agitation on the Catholic Question many had given
+up the "Pioneer"--which had a motto from Charles James Fox and was in
+the van of progress--because it had taken Peel's side about the
+Papists, and had thus blotted its Liberalism with a toleration of
+Jesuitry and Baal; but they were ill-satisfied with the "Trumpet,"
+which--since its blasts against Rome, and in the general flaccidity of
+the public mind (nobody knowing who would support whom)--had become
+feeble in its blowing.
+
+It was a time, according to a noticeable article in the "Pioneer," when
+the crying needs of the country might well counteract a reluctance to
+public action on the part of men whose minds had from long experience
+acquired breadth as well as concentration, decision of judgment as well
+as tolerance, dispassionateness as well as energy--in fact, all those
+qualities which in the melancholy experience of mankind have been the
+least disposed to share lodgings.
+
+Mr. Hackbutt, whose fluent speech was at that time floating more widely
+than usual, and leaving much uncertainty as to its ultimate channel,
+was heard to say in Mr. Hawley's office that the article in question
+"emanated" from Brooke of Tipton, and that Brooke had secretly bought
+the "Pioneer" some months ago.
+
+"That means mischief, eh?" said Mr. Hawley.  "He's got the freak of
+being a popular man now, after dangling about like a stray tortoise.
+So much the worse for him.  I've had my eye on him for some time.  He
+shall be prettily pumped upon.  He's a damned bad landlord.  What
+business has an old county man to come currying favor with a low set of
+dark-blue freemen?  As to his paper, I only hope he may do the writing
+himself.  It would be worth our paying for."
+
+"I understand he has got a very brilliant young fellow to edit it, who
+can write the highest style of leading article, quite equal to anything
+in the London papers.  And he means to take very high ground on Reform."
+
+"Let Brooke reform his rent-roll. He's a cursed old screw, and the
+buildings all over his estate are going to rack.  I suppose this young
+fellow is some loose fish from London."
+
+"His name is Ladislaw.  He is said to be of foreign extraction."
+
+"I know the sort," said Mr. Hawley; "some emissary.  He'll begin with
+flourishing about the Rights of Man and end with murdering a wench.
+That's the style."
+
+"You must concede that there are abuses, Hawley," said Mr. Hackbutt,
+foreseeing some political disagreement with his family lawyer.  "I
+myself should never favor immoderate views--in fact I take my stand
+with Huskisson--but I cannot blind myself to the consideration that the
+non-representation of large towns--"
+
+"Large towns be damned!" said Mr. Hawley, impatient of exposition.  "I
+know a little too much about Middlemarch elections.  Let 'em quash
+every pocket borough to-morrow, and bring in every mushroom town in the
+kingdom--they'll only increase the expense of getting into Parliament.
+I go upon facts."
+
+Mr. Hawley's disgust at the notion of the "Pioneer" being edited by an
+emissary, and of Brooke becoming actively political--as if a tortoise
+of desultory pursuits should protrude its small head ambitiously and
+become rampant--was hardly equal to the annoyance felt by some members
+of Mr. Brooke's own family.  The result had oozed forth gradually, like
+the discovery that your neighbor has set up an unpleasant kind of
+manufacture which will be permanently under your nostrils without legal
+remedy.  The "Pioneer" had been secretly bought even before Will
+Ladislaw's arrival, the expected opportunity having offered itself in
+the readiness of the proprietor to part with a valuable property which
+did not pay; and in the interval since Mr. Brooke had written his
+invitation, those germinal ideas of making his mind tell upon the world
+at large which had been present in him from his younger years, but had
+hitherto lain in some obstruction, had been sprouting under cover.
+
+The development was much furthered by a delight in his guest which
+proved greater even than he had anticipated.  For it seemed that Will
+was not only at home in all those artistic and literary subjects which
+Mr. Brooke had gone into at one time, but that he was strikingly ready
+at seizing the points of the political situation, and dealing with them
+in that large spirit which, aided by adequate memory, lends itself to
+quotation and general effectiveness of treatment.
+
+"He seems to me a kind of Shelley, you know," Mr. Brooke took an
+opportunity of saying, for the gratification of Mr. Casaubon.  "I don't
+mean as to anything objectionable--laxities or atheism, or anything of
+that kind, you know--Ladislaw's sentiments in every way I am sure are
+good--indeed, we were talking a great deal together last night.  But he
+has the same sort of enthusiasm for liberty, freedom, emancipation--a
+fine thing under guidance--under guidance, you know.  I think I shall
+be able to put him on the right tack; and I am the more pleased because
+he is a relation of yours, Casaubon."
+
+If the right tack implied anything more precise than the rest of Mr.
+Brooke's speech, Mr. Casaubon silently hoped that it referred to some
+occupation at a great distance from Lowick.  He had disliked Will while
+he helped him, but he had begun to dislike him still more now that Will
+had declined his help.  That is the way with us when we have any uneasy
+jealousy in our disposition: if our talents are chiefly of the
+burrowing kind, our honey-sipping cousin (whom we have grave reasons
+for objecting to) is likely to have a secret contempt for us, and any
+one who admires him passes an oblique criticism on ourselves.  Having
+the scruples of rectitude in our souls, we are above the meanness of
+injuring him--rather we meet all his claims on us by active benefits;
+and the drawing of cheques for him, being a superiority which he must
+recognize, gives our bitterness a milder infusion.  Now Mr. Casaubon
+had been deprived of that superiority (as anything more than a
+remembrance) in a sudden, capricious manner.  His antipathy to Will did
+not spring from the common jealousy of a winter-worn husband: it was
+something deeper, bred by his lifelong claims and discontents; but
+Dorothea, now that she was present--Dorothea, as a young wife who
+herself had shown an offensive capability of criticism, necessarily
+gave concentration to the uneasiness which had before been vague.
+
+Will Ladislaw on his side felt that his dislike was flourishing at the
+expense of his gratitude, and spent much inward discourse in justifying
+the dislike.  Casaubon hated him--he knew that very well; on his first
+entrance he could discern a bitterness in the mouth and a venom in the
+glance which would almost justify declaring war in spite of past
+benefits.  He was much obliged to Casaubon in the past, but really the
+act of marrying this wife was a set-off against the obligation.  It was
+a question whether gratitude which refers to what is done for one's
+self ought not to give way to indignation at what is done against
+another.  And Casaubon had done a wrong to Dorothea in marrying her.  A
+man was bound to know himself better than that, and if he chose to grow
+gray crunching bones in a cavern, he had no business to be luring a
+girl into his companionship.  "It is the most horrible of
+virgin-sacrifices," said Will; and he painted to himself what were
+Dorothea's inward sorrows as if he had been writing a choric wail.  But
+he would never lose sight of her: he would watch over her--if he gave
+up everything else in life he would watch over her, and she should know
+that she had one slave in the world, Will had--to use Sir Thomas
+Browne's phrase--a "passionate prodigality" of statement both to
+himself and others.  The simple truth was that nothing then invited him
+so strongly as the presence of Dorothea.
+
+Invitations of the formal kind had been wanting, however, for Will had
+never been asked to go to Lowick.  Mr. Brooke, indeed, confident of
+doing everything agreeable which Casaubon, poor fellow, was too much
+absorbed to think of, had arranged to bring Ladislaw to Lowick several
+times (not neglecting meanwhile to introduce him elsewhere on every
+opportunity as "a young relative of Casaubon's"). And though Will had
+not seen Dorothea alone, their interviews had been enough to restore
+her former sense of young companionship with one who was cleverer than
+herself, yet seemed ready to be swayed by her.  Poor Dorothea before
+her marriage had never found much room in other minds for what she
+cared most to say; and she had not, as we know, enjoyed her husband's
+superior instruction so much as she had expected.  If she spoke with
+any keenness of interest to Mr. Casaubon, he heard her with an air of
+patience as if she had given a quotation from the Delectus familiar to
+him from his tender years, and sometimes mentioned curtly what ancient
+sects or personages had held similar ideas, as if there were too much
+of that sort in stock already; at other times he would inform her that
+she was mistaken, and reassert what her remark had questioned.
+
+But Will Ladislaw always seemed to see more in what she said than she
+herself saw.  Dorothea had little vanity, but she had the ardent
+woman's need to rule beneficently by making the joy of another soul.
+Hence the mere chance of seeing Will occasionally was like a lunette
+opened in the wall of her prison, giving her a glimpse of the sunny
+air; and this pleasure began to nullify her original alarm at what her
+husband might think about the introduction of Will as her uncle's
+guest.  On this subject Mr. Casaubon had remained dumb.
+
+But Will wanted to talk with Dorothea alone, and was impatient of slow
+circumstance.  However slight the terrestrial intercourse between Dante
+and Beatrice or Petrarch and Laura, time changes the proportion of
+things, and in later days it is preferable to have fewer sonnets and
+more conversation.  Necessity excused stratagem, but stratagem was
+limited by the dread of offending Dorothea.  He found out at last that
+he wanted to take a particular sketch at Lowick; and one morning when
+Mr. Brooke had to drive along the Lowick road on his way to the county
+town, Will asked to be set down with his sketch-book and camp-stool at
+Lowick, and without announcing himself at the Manor settled himself to
+sketch in a position where he must see Dorothea if she came out to
+walk--and he knew that she usually walked an hour in the morning.
+
+But the stratagem was defeated by the weather.  Clouds gathered with
+treacherous quickness, the rain came down, and Will was obliged to take
+shelter in the house.  He intended, on the strength of relationship, to
+go into the drawing-room and wait there without being announced; and
+seeing his old acquaintance the butler in the hall, he said, "Don't
+mention that I am here, Pratt; I will wait till luncheon; I know Mr.
+Casaubon does not like to be disturbed when he is in the library."
+
+"Master is out, sir; there's only Mrs. Casaubon in the library.  I'd
+better tell her you're here, sir," said Pratt, a red-cheeked man given
+to lively converse with Tantripp, and often agreeing with her that it
+must be dull for Madam.
+
+"Oh, very well; this confounded rain has hindered me from sketching,"
+said Will, feeling so happy that he affected indifference with
+delightful ease.
+
+In another minute he was in the library, and Dorothea was meeting him
+with her sweet unconstrained smile.
+
+"Mr. Casaubon has gone to the Archdeacon's," she said, at once.  "I
+don't know whether he will be at home again long before dinner.  He was
+uncertain how long he should be.  Did you want to say anything
+particular to him?"
+
+"No; I came to sketch, but the rain drove me in.  Else I would not have
+disturbed you yet.  I supposed that Mr. Casaubon was here, and I know
+he dislikes interruption at this hour."
+
+"I am indebted to the rain, then.  I am so glad to see you." Dorothea
+uttered these common words with the simple sincerity of an unhappy
+child, visited at school.
+
+"I really came for the chance of seeing you alone," said Will,
+mysteriously forced to be just as simple as she was.  He could not stay
+to ask himself, why not?  "I wanted to talk about things, as we did in
+Rome.  It always makes a difference when other people are present."
+
+"Yes," said Dorothea, in her clear full tone of assent.  "Sit down."
+She seated herself on a dark ottoman with the brown books behind her,
+looking in her plain dress of some thin woollen-white material, without
+a single ornament on her besides her wedding-ring, as if she were under
+a vow to be different from all other women; and Will sat down opposite
+her at two yards' distance, the light falling on his bright curls and
+delicate but rather petulant profile, with its defiant curves of lip
+and chin.  Each looked at the other as if they had been two flowers
+which had opened then and there.  Dorothea for the moment forgot her
+husband's mysterious irritation against Will: it seemed fresh water at
+her thirsty lips to speak without fear to the one person whom she had
+found receptive; for in looking backward through sadness she
+exaggerated a past solace.
+
+"I have often thought that I should like to talk to you again," she
+said, immediately.  "It seems strange to me how many things I said to
+you."
+
+"I remember them all," said Will, with the unspeakable content in his
+soul of feeling that he was in the presence of a creature worthy to be
+perfectly loved.  I think his own feelings at that moment were perfect,
+for we mortals have our divine moments, when love is satisfied in the
+completeness of the beloved object.
+
+"I have tried to learn a great deal since we were in Rome," said
+Dorothea.  "I can read Latin a little, and I am beginning to understand
+just a little Greek.  I can help Mr. Casaubon better now.  I can find
+out references for him and save his eyes in many ways.  But it is very
+difficult to be learned; it seems as if people were worn out on the way
+to great thoughts, and can never enjoy them because they are too tired."
+
+"If a man has a capacity for great thoughts, he is likely to overtake
+them before he is decrepit," said Will, with irrepressible quickness.
+But through certain sensibilities Dorothea was as quick as he, and
+seeing her face change, he added, immediately, "But it is quite true
+that the best minds have been sometimes overstrained in working out
+their ideas."
+
+"You correct me," said Dorothea.  "I expressed myself ill.  I should
+have said that those who have great thoughts get too much worn in
+working them out.  I used to feel about that, even when I was a little
+girl; and it always seemed to me that the use I should like to make of
+my life would be to help some one who did great works, so that his
+burthen might be lighter."
+
+Dorothea was led on to this bit of autobiography without any sense of
+making a revelation.  But she had never before said anything to Will
+which threw so strong a light on her marriage.  He did not shrug his
+shoulders; and for want of that muscular outlet he thought the more
+irritably of beautiful lips kissing holy skulls and other emptinesses
+ecclesiastically enshrined.  Also he had to take care that his speech
+should not betray that thought.
+
+"But you may easily carry the help too far," he said, "and get
+over-wrought yourself.  Are you not too much shut up?  You already look
+paler.  It would be better for Mr. Casaubon to have a secretary; he
+could easily get a man who would do half his work for him.  It would
+save him more effectually, and you need only help him in lighter ways."
+
+"How can you think of that?" said Dorothea, in a tone of earnest
+remonstrance.  "I should have no happiness if I did not help him in his
+work.  What could I do?  There is no good to be done in Lowick.  The
+only thing I desire is to help him more.  And he objects to a
+secretary: please not to mention that again."
+
+"Certainly not, now I know your feeling.  But I have heard both Mr.
+Brooke and Sir James Chettam express the same wish."
+
+"Yes?" said Dorothea, "but they don't understand--they want me to be a
+great deal on horseback, and have the garden altered and new
+conservatories, to fill up my days.  I thought you could understand
+that one's mind has other wants," she added, rather
+impatiently--"besides, Mr. Casaubon cannot bear to hear of a secretary."
+
+"My mistake is excusable," said Will.  "In old days I used to hear Mr.
+Casaubon speak as if he looked forward to having a secretary.  Indeed
+he held out the prospect of that office to me.  But I turned out to
+be--not good enough for it."
+
+Dorothea was trying to extract out of this an excuse for her husband's
+evident repulsion, as she said, with a playful smile, "You were not a
+steady worker enough."
+
+"No," said Will, shaking his head backward somewhat after the manner of
+a spirited horse.  And then, the old irritable demon prompting him to
+give another good pinch at the moth-wings of poor Mr. Casaubon's glory,
+he went on, "And I have seen since that Mr. Casaubon does not like any
+one to overlook his work and know thoroughly what he is doing.  He is
+too doubtful--too uncertain of himself.  I may not be good for much,
+but he dislikes me because I disagree with him."
+
+Will was not without his intentions to be always generous, but our
+tongues are little triggers which have usually been pulled before
+general intentions can be brought to bear.  And it was too intolerable
+that Casaubon's dislike of him should not be fairly accounted for to
+Dorothea.  Yet when he had spoken he was rather uneasy as to the effect
+on her.
+
+But Dorothea was strangely quiet--not immediately indignant, as she had
+been on a like occasion in Rome.  And the cause lay deep.  She was no
+longer struggling against the perception of facts, but adjusting
+herself to their clearest perception; and now when she looked steadily
+at her husband's failure, still more at his possible consciousness of
+failure, she seemed to be looking along the one track where duty became
+tenderness.  Will's want of reticence might have been met with more
+severity, if he had not already been recommended to her mercy by her
+husband's dislike, which must seem hard to her till she saw better
+reason for it.
+
+She did not answer at once, but after looking down ruminatingly she
+said, with some earnestness, "Mr. Casaubon must have overcome his
+dislike of you so far as his actions were concerned: and that is
+admirable."
+
+"Yes; he has shown a sense of justice in family matters.  It was an
+abominable thing that my grandmother should have been disinherited
+because she made what they called a mesalliance, though there was
+nothing to be said against her husband except that he was a Polish
+refugee who gave lessons for his bread."
+
+"I wish I knew all about her!" said Dorothea.  "I wonder how she bore
+the change from wealth to poverty: I wonder whether she was happy with
+her husband!  Do you know much about them?"
+
+"No; only that my grandfather was a patriot--a bright fellow--could
+speak many languages--musical--got his bread by teaching all sorts of
+things.  They both died rather early.  And I never knew much of my
+father, beyond what my mother told me; but he inherited the musical
+talents.  I remember his slow walk and his long thin hands; and one day
+remains with me when he was lying ill, and I was very hungry, and had
+only a little bit of bread."
+
+"Ah, what a different life from mine!" said Dorothea, with keen
+interest, clasping her hands on her lap.  "I have always had too much
+of everything.  But tell me how it was--Mr. Casaubon could not have
+known about you then."
+
+"No; but my father had made himself known to Mr. Casaubon, and that was
+my last hungry day.  My father died soon after, and my mother and I
+were well taken care of.  Mr. Casaubon always expressly recognized it
+as his duty to take care of us because of the harsh injustice which had
+been shown to his mother's sister.  But now I am telling you what is
+not new to you."
+
+In his inmost soul Will was conscious of wishing to tell Dorothea what
+was rather new even in his own construction of things--namely, that
+Mr. Casaubon had never done more than pay a debt towards him.  Will was
+much too good a fellow to be easy under the sense of being ungrateful.
+And when gratitude has become a matter of reasoning there are many ways
+of escaping from its bonds.
+
+"No," answered Dorothea; "Mr. Casaubon has always avoided dwelling on
+his own honorable actions."  She did not feel that her husband's
+conduct was depreciated; but this notion of what justice had required
+in his relations with Will Ladislaw took strong hold on her mind.
+After a moment's pause, she added, "He had never told me that he
+supported your mother.  Is she still living?"
+
+"No; she died by an accident--a fall--four years ago.  It is curious
+that my mother, too, ran away from her family, but not for the sake of
+her husband.  She never would tell me anything about her family, except
+that she forsook them to get her own living--went on the stage, in
+fact.  She was a dark-eyed creature, with crisp ringlets, and never
+seemed to be getting old.  You see I come of rebellious blood on both
+sides," Will ended, smiling brightly at Dorothea, while she was still
+looking with serious intentness before her, like a child seeing a drama
+for the first time.
+
+But her face, too, broke into a smile as she said, "That is your
+apology, I suppose, for having yourself been rather rebellious; I mean,
+to Mr. Casaubon's wishes.  You must remember that you have not done
+what he thought best for you.  And if he dislikes you--you were
+speaking of dislike a little while ago--but I should rather say, if he
+has shown any painful feelings towards you, you must consider how
+sensitive he has become from the wearing effect of study.  Perhaps,"
+she continued, getting into a pleading tone, "my uncle has not told you
+how serious Mr. Casaubon's illness was.  It would be very petty of us
+who are well and can bear things, to think much of small offences from
+those who carry a weight of trial."
+
+"You teach me better," said Will.  "I will never grumble on that
+subject again."  There was a gentleness in his tone which came from the
+unutterable contentment of perceiving--what Dorothea was hardly
+conscious of--that she was travelling into the remoteness of pure pity
+and loyalty towards her husband.  Will was ready to adore her pity and
+loyalty, if she would associate himself with her in manifesting them.
+"I have really sometimes been a perverse fellow," he went on, "but I
+will never again, if I can help it, do or say what you would
+disapprove."
+
+"That is very good of you," said Dorothea, with another open smile.  "I
+shall have a little kingdom then, where I shall give laws.  But you
+will soon go away, out of my rule, I imagine.  You will soon be tired
+of staying at the Grange."
+
+"That is a point I wanted to mention to you--one of the reasons why I
+wished to speak to you alone.  Mr. Brooke proposes that I should stay
+in this neighborhood.  He has bought one of the Middlemarch newspapers,
+and he wishes me to conduct that, and also to help him in other ways."
+
+"Would not that be a sacrifice of higher prospects for you?" said
+Dorothea.
+
+"Perhaps; but I have always been blamed for thinking of prospects, and
+not settling to anything.  And here is something offered to me.  If you
+would not like me to accept it, I will give it up.  Otherwise I would
+rather stay in this part of the country than go away.  I belong to
+nobody anywhere else."
+
+"I should like you to stay very much," said Dorothea, at once, as
+simply and readily as she had spoken at Rome.  There was not the shadow
+of a reason in her mind at the moment why she should not say so.
+
+"Then I _will_ stay," said Ladislaw, shaking his head backward, rising
+and going towards the window, as if to see whether the rain had ceased.
+
+But the next moment, Dorothea, according to a habit which was getting
+continually stronger, began to reflect that her husband felt
+differently from herself, and she colored deeply under the double
+embarrassment of having expressed what might be in opposition to her
+husband's feeling, and of having to suggest this opposition to Will.
+His face was not turned towards her, and this made it easier to say--
+
+"But my opinion is of little consequence on such a subject.  I think
+you should be guided by Mr. Casaubon.  I spoke without thinking of
+anything else than my own feeling, which has nothing to do with the
+real question.  But it now occurs to me--perhaps Mr. Casaubon might
+see that the proposal was not wise.  Can you not wait now and mention
+it to him?"
+
+"I can't wait to-day," said Will, inwardly seared by the possibility
+that Mr. Casaubon would enter.  "The rain is quite over now.  I told
+Mr. Brooke not to call for me: I would rather walk the five miles.  I
+shall strike across Halsell Common, and see the gleams on the wet
+grass.  I like that."
+
+He approached her to shake hands quite hurriedly, longing but not
+daring to say, "Don't mention the subject to Mr. Casaubon." No, he
+dared not, could not say it.  To ask her to be less simple and direct
+would be like breathing on the crystal that you want to see the light
+through.  And there was always the other great dread--of himself
+becoming dimmed and forever ray-shorn in her eyes.
+
+"I wish you could have stayed," said Dorothea, with a touch of
+mournfulness, as she rose and put out her hand.  She also had her
+thought which she did not like to express:--Will certainly ought to
+lose no time in consulting Mr. Casaubon's wishes, but for her to urge
+this might seem an undue dictation.
+
+So they only said "Good-by," and Will quitted the house, striking
+across the fields so as not to run any risk of encountering Mr.
+Casaubon's carriage, which, however, did not appear at the gate until
+four o'clock. That was an unpropitious hour for coming home: it was too
+early to gain the moral support under ennui of dressing his person for
+dinner, and too late to undress his mind of the day's frivolous
+ceremony and affairs, so as to be prepared for a good plunge into the
+serious business of study.  On such occasions he usually threw into an
+easy-chair in the library, and allowed Dorothea to read the London
+papers to him, closing his eyes the while.  To-day, however, he
+declined that relief, observing that he had already had too many public
+details urged upon him; but he spoke more cheerfully than usual, when
+Dorothea asked about his fatigue, and added with that air of formal
+effort which never forsook him even when he spoke without his waistcoat
+and cravat--
+
+"I have had the gratification of meeting my former acquaintance, Dr.
+Spanning, to-day, and of being praised by one who is himself a worthy
+recipient of praise.  He spoke very handsomely of my late tractate on
+the Egyptian Mysteries,--using, in fact, terms which it would not
+become me to repeat."  In uttering the last clause, Mr. Casaubon leaned
+over the elbow of his chair, and swayed his head up and down,
+apparently as a muscular outlet instead of that recapitulation which
+would not have been becoming.
+
+"I am very glad you have had that pleasure," said Dorothea, delighted
+to see her husband less weary than usual at this hour.  "Before you
+came I had been regretting that you happened to be out to-day."
+
+"Why so, my dear?" said Mr. Casaubon, throwing himself backward again.
+
+"Because Mr. Ladislaw has been here; and he has mentioned a proposal of
+my uncle's which I should like to know your opinion of." Her husband
+she felt was really concerned in this question.  Even with her
+ignorance of the world she had a vague impression that the position
+offered to Will was out of keeping with his family connections, and
+certainly Mr. Casaubon had a claim to be consulted.  He did not speak,
+but merely bowed.
+
+"Dear uncle, you know, has many projects.  It appears that he has
+bought one of the Middlemarch newspapers, and he has asked Mr. Ladislaw
+to stay in this neighborhood and conduct the paper for him, besides
+helping him in other ways."
+
+Dorothea looked at her husband while she spoke, but he had at first
+blinked and finally closed his eyes, as if to save them; while his lips
+became more tense.  "What is your opinion?" she added, rather timidly,
+after a slight pause.
+
+"Did Mr. Ladislaw come on purpose to ask my opinion?" said Mr.
+Casaubon, opening his eyes narrowly with a knife-edged look at
+Dorothea.  She was really uncomfortable on the point he inquired about,
+but she only became a little more serious, and her eyes did not swerve.
+
+"No," she answered immediately, "he did not say that he came to ask
+your opinion.  But when he mentioned the proposal, he of course
+expected me to tell you of it."
+
+Mr. Casaubon was silent.
+
+"I feared that you might feel some objection.  But certainly a young
+man with so much talent might be very useful to my uncle--might help
+him to do good in a better way.  And Mr. Ladislaw wishes to have some
+fixed occupation.  He has been blamed, he says, for not seeking
+something of that kind, and he would like to stay in this neighborhood
+because no one cares for him elsewhere."
+
+Dorothea felt that this was a consideration to soften her husband.
+However, he did not speak, and she presently recurred to Dr. Spanning
+and the Archdeacon's breakfast.  But there was no longer sunshine on
+these subjects.
+
+The next morning, without Dorothea's knowledge, Mr. Casaubon despatched
+the following letter, beginning "Dear Mr. Ladislaw" (he had always
+before addressed him as "Will"):--
+
+
+"Mrs. Casaubon informs me that a proposal has been made to you, and
+(according to an inference by no means stretched) has on your part been
+in some degree entertained, which involves your residence in this
+neighborhood in a capacity which I am justified in saying touches my
+own position in such a way as renders it not only natural and
+warrantable in me when that effect is viewed under the influence of
+legitimate feeling, but incumbent on me when the same effect is
+considered in the light of my responsibilities, to state at once that
+your acceptance of the proposal above indicated would be highly
+offensive to me.  That I have some claim to the exercise of a veto
+here, would not, I believe, be denied by any reasonable person
+cognizant of the relations between us: relations which, though thrown
+into the past by your recent procedure, are not thereby annulled in
+their character of determining antecedents.  I will not here make
+reflections on any person's judgment.  It is enough for me to point out
+to yourself that there are certain social fitnesses and proprieties
+which should hinder a somewhat near relative of mine from becoming any
+wise conspicuous in this vicinity in a status not only much beneath my
+own, but associated at best with the sciolism of literary or political
+adventurers.  At any rate, the contrary issue must exclude you from
+further reception at my house.
+
+                Yours faithfully,
+                        "EDWARD CASAUBON."
+
+
+Meanwhile Dorothea's mind was innocently at work towards the further
+embitterment of her husband; dwelling, with a sympathy that grew to
+agitation, on what Will had told her about his parents and
+grandparents.  Any private hours in her day were usually spent in her
+blue-green boudoir, and she had come to be very fond of its pallid
+quaintness.  Nothing had been outwardly altered there; but while the
+summer had gradually advanced over the western fields beyond the avenue
+of elms, the bare room had gathered within it those memories of an
+inward life which fill the air as with a cloud of good or bad angels,
+the invisible yet active forms of our spiritual triumphs or our
+spiritual falls.  She had been so used to struggle for and to find
+resolve in looking along the avenue towards the arch of western light
+that the vision itself had gained a communicating power.  Even the pale
+stag seemed to have reminding glances and to mean mutely, "Yes, we
+know." And the group of delicately touched miniatures had made an
+audience as of beings no longer disturbed about their own earthly lot,
+but still humanly interested.  Especially the mysterious "Aunt Julia"
+about whom Dorothea had never found it easy to question her husband.
+
+And now, since her conversation with Will, many fresh images had
+gathered round that Aunt Julia who was Will's grandmother; the presence
+of that delicate miniature, so like a living face that she knew,
+helping to concentrate her feelings.  What a wrong, to cut off the girl
+from the family protection and inheritance only because she had chosen
+a man who was poor!  Dorothea, early troubling her elders with
+questions about the facts around her, had wrought herself into some
+independent clearness as to the historical, political reasons why
+eldest sons had superior rights, and why land should be entailed: those
+reasons, impressing her with a certain awe, might be weightier than she
+knew, but here was a question of ties which left them uninfringed.
+Here was a daughter whose child--even according to the ordinary aping
+of aristocratic institutions by people who are no more aristocratic
+than retired grocers, and who have no more land to "keep together" than
+a lawn and a paddock--would have a prior claim.  Was inheritance a
+question of liking or of responsibility?  All the energy of Dorothea's
+nature went on the side of responsibility--the fulfilment of claims
+founded on our own deeds, such as marriage and parentage.
+
+It was true, she said to herself, that Mr. Casaubon had a debt to the
+Ladislaws--that he had to pay back what the Ladislaws had been wronged
+of.  And now she began to think of her husband's will, which had been
+made at the time of their marriage, leaving the bulk of his property to
+her, with proviso in case of her having children.  That ought to be
+altered; and no time ought to be lost.  This very question which had
+just arisen about Will Ladislaw's occupation, was the occasion for
+placing things on a new, right footing.  Her husband, she felt sure,
+according to all his previous conduct, would be ready to take the just
+view, if she proposed it--she, in whose interest an unfair
+concentration of the property had been urged.  His sense of right had
+surmounted and would continue to surmount anything that might be called
+antipathy.  She suspected that her uncle's scheme was disapproved by
+Mr. Casaubon, and this made it seem all the more opportune that a fresh
+understanding should be begun, so that instead of Will's starting
+penniless and accepting the first function that offered itself, he
+should find himself in possession of a rightful income which should be
+paid by her husband during his life, and, by an immediate alteration of
+the will, should be secured at his death.  The vision of all this as
+what ought to be done seemed to Dorothea like a sudden letting in of
+daylight, waking her from her previous stupidity and incurious
+self-absorbed ignorance about her husband's relation to others.  Will
+Ladislaw had refused Mr. Casaubon's future aid on a ground that no
+longer appeared right to her; and Mr. Casaubon had never himself seen
+fully what was the claim upon him.  "But he will!" said Dorothea.  "The
+great strength of his character lies here.  And what are we doing with
+our money?  We make no use of half of our income.  My own money buys me
+nothing but an uneasy conscience."
+
+There was a peculiar fascination for Dorothea in this division of
+property intended for herself, and always regarded by her as excessive.
+She was blind, you see, to many things obvious to others--likely to
+tread in the wrong places, as Celia had warned her; yet her blindness
+to whatever did not lie in her own pure purpose carried her safely by
+the side of precipices where vision would have been perilous with fear.
+
+The thoughts which had gathered vividness in the solitude of her
+boudoir occupied her incessantly through the day on which Mr. Casaubon
+had sent his letter to Will.  Everything seemed hindrance to her till
+she could find an opportunity of opening her heart to her husband.  To
+his preoccupied mind all subjects were to be approached gently, and she
+had never since his illness lost from her consciousness the dread of
+agitating him.  But when young ardor is set brooding over the
+conception of a prompt deed, the deed itself seems to start forth with
+independent life, mastering ideal obstacles.  The day passed in a
+sombre fashion, not unusual, though Mr. Casaubon was perhaps unusually
+silent; but there were hours of the night which might be counted on as
+opportunities of conversation; for Dorothea, when aware of her
+husband's sleeplessness, had established a habit of rising, lighting a
+candle, and reading him to sleep again.  And this night she was from
+the beginning sleepless, excited by resolves.  He slept as usual for a
+few hours, but she had risen softly and had sat in the darkness for
+nearly an hour before he said--
+
+"Dorothea, since you are up, will you light a candle?"
+
+"Do you feel ill, dear?" was her first question, as she obeyed him.
+
+"No, not at all; but I shall be obliged, since you are up, if you will
+read me a few pages of Lowth."
+
+"May I talk to you a little instead?" said Dorothea.
+
+"Certainly."
+
+"I have been thinking about money all day--that I have always had too
+much, and especially the prospect of too much."
+
+"These, my dear Dorothea, are providential arrangements."
+
+"But if one has too much in consequence of others being wronged, it
+seems to me that the divine voice which tells us to set that wrong
+right must be obeyed."
+
+"What, my love, is the bearing of your remark?"
+
+"That you have been too liberal in arrangements for me--I mean, with
+regard to property; and that makes me unhappy."
+
+"How so?  I have none but comparatively distant connections."
+
+"I have been led to think about your aunt Julia, and how she was left
+in poverty only because she married a poor man, an act which was not
+disgraceful, since he was not unworthy.  It was on that ground, I know,
+that you educated Mr. Ladislaw and provided for his mother."
+
+Dorothea waited a few moments for some answer that would help her
+onward.  None came, and her next words seemed the more forcible to her,
+falling clear upon the dark silence.
+
+"But surely we should regard his claim as a much greater one, even to
+the half of that property which I know that you have destined for me.
+And I think he ought at once to be provided for on that understanding.
+It is not right that he should be in the dependence of poverty while we
+are rich.  And if there is any objection to the proposal he mentioned,
+the giving him his true place and his true share would set aside any
+motive for his accepting it."
+
+"Mr. Ladislaw has probably been speaking to you on this subject?" said
+Mr. Casaubon, with a certain biting quickness not habitual to him.
+
+"Indeed, no!" said Dorothea, earnestly.  "How can you imagine it, since
+he has so lately declined everything from you?  I fear you think too
+hardly of him, dear.  He only told me a little about his parents and
+grandparents, and almost all in answer to my questions.  You are so
+good, so just--you have done everything you thought to be right.  But
+it seems to me clear that more than that is right; and I must speak
+about it, since I am the person who would get what is called benefit by
+that 'more' not being done."
+
+There was a perceptible pause before Mr. Casaubon replied, not quickly
+as before, but with a still more biting emphasis.
+
+"Dorothea, my love, this is not the first occasion, but it were well
+that it should be the last, on which you have assumed a judgment on
+subjects beyond your scope.  Into the question how far conduct,
+especially in the matter of alliances, constitutes a forfeiture of
+family claims, I do not now enter.  Suffice it, that you are not here
+qualified to discriminate.  What I now wish you to understand is, that
+I accept no revision, still less dictation within that range of affairs
+which I have deliberated upon as distinctly and properly mine.  It is
+not for you to interfere between me and Mr. Ladislaw, and still less to
+encourage communications from him to you which constitute a criticism
+on my procedure."
+
+Poor Dorothea, shrouded in the darkness, was in a tumult of conflicting
+emotions.  Alarm at the possible effect on himself of her husband's
+strongly manifested anger, would have checked any expression of her own
+resentment, even if she had been quite free from doubt and compunction
+under the consciousness that there might be some justice in his last
+insinuation.  Hearing him breathe quickly after he had spoken, she sat
+listening, frightened, wretched--with a dumb inward cry for help to
+bear this nightmare of a life in which every energy was arrested by
+dread.  But nothing else happened, except that they both remained a
+long while sleepless, without speaking again.
+
+The next day, Mr. Casaubon received the following answer from Will
+Ladislaw:--
+
+
+"DEAR MR. CASAUBON,--I have given all due consideration to your letter
+of yesterday, but I am unable to take precisely your view of our mutual
+position.  With the fullest acknowledgment of your generous conduct to
+me in the past, I must still maintain that an obligation of this kind
+cannot fairly fetter me as you appear to expect that it should.
+Granted that a benefactor's wishes may constitute a claim; there must
+always be a reservation as to the quality of those wishes.  They may
+possibly clash with more imperative considerations.  Or a benefactor's
+veto might impose such a negation on a man's life that the consequent
+blank might be more cruel than the benefaction was generous.  I am
+merely using strong illustrations.  In the present case I am unable to
+take your view of the bearing which my acceptance of occupation--not
+enriching certainly, but not dishonorable--will have on your own
+position which seems to me too substantial to be affected in that
+shadowy manner.  And though I do not believe that any change in our
+relations will occur (certainly none has yet occurred) which can
+nullify the obligations imposed on me by the past, pardon me for not
+seeing that those obligations should restrain me from using the
+ordinary freedom of living where I choose, and maintaining myself by
+any lawful occupation I may choose.  Regretting that there exists this
+difference between us as to a relation in which the conferring of
+benefits has been entirely on your side--
+
+                I remain, yours with persistent obligation,
+                        WILL LADISLAW."
+
+
+Poor Mr. Casaubon felt (and must not we, being impartial, feel with him
+a little?) that no man had juster cause for disgust and suspicion than
+he.  Young Ladislaw, he was sure, meant to defy and annoy him, meant to
+win Dorothea's confidence and sow her mind with disrespect, and perhaps
+aversion, towards her husband.  Some motive beneath the surface had
+been needed to account for Will's sudden change of course in rejecting Mr.
+Casaubon's aid and quitting his travels; and this defiant determination
+to fix himself in the neighborhood by taking up something so much at
+variance with his former choice as Mr. Brooke's Middlemarch projects,
+revealed clearly enough that the undeclared motive had relation to
+Dorothea.  Not for one moment did Mr. Casaubon suspect Dorothea of any
+doubleness: he had no suspicions of her, but he had (what was little
+less uncomfortable) the positive knowledge that her tendency to form
+opinions about her husband's conduct was accompanied with a disposition
+to regard Will Ladislaw favorably and be influenced by what he said.
+His own proud reticence had prevented him from ever being undeceived in
+the supposition that Dorothea had originally asked her uncle to invite
+Will to his house.
+
+And now, on receiving Will's letter, Mr. Casaubon had to consider his
+duty.  He would never have been easy to call his action anything else
+than duty; but in this case, contending motives thrust him back into
+negations.
+
+Should he apply directly to Mr. Brooke, and demand of that troublesome
+gentleman to revoke his proposal?  Or should he consult Sir James
+Chettam, and get him to concur in remonstrance against a step which
+touched the whole family?  In either case Mr. Casaubon was aware that
+failure was just as probable as success.  It was impossible for him to
+mention Dorothea's name in the matter, and without some alarming
+urgency Mr. Brooke was as likely as not, after meeting all
+representations with apparent assent, to wind up by saying, "Never
+fear, Casaubon!  Depend upon it, young Ladislaw will do you credit.
+Depend upon it, I have put my finger on the right thing."  And Mr.
+Casaubon shrank nervously from communicating on the subject with Sir
+James Chettam, between whom and himself there had never been any
+cordiality, and who would immediately think of Dorothea without any
+mention of her.
+
+Poor Mr. Casaubon was distrustful of everybody's feeling towards him,
+especially as a husband.  To let any one suppose that he was jealous
+would be to admit their (suspected) view of his disadvantages: to let
+them know that he did not find marriage particularly blissful would
+imply his conversion to their (probably) earlier disapproval.  It would
+be as bad as letting Carp, and Brasenose generally, know how backward
+he was in organizing the matter for his "Key to all Mythologies."  All
+through his life Mr. Casaubon had been trying not to admit even to
+himself the inward sores of self-doubt and jealousy.  And on the most
+delicate of all personal subjects, the habit of proud suspicious
+reticence told doubly.
+
+Thus Mr. Casaubon remained proudly, bitterly silent.  But he had
+forbidden Will to come to Lowick Manor, and he was mentally preparing
+other measures of frustration.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXVIII.
+
+    "C'est beaucoup que le jugement des hommes sur les actions
+    humaines; tôt ou tard il devient efficace."--GUIZOT.
+
+
+Sir James Chettam could not look with any satisfaction on Mr. Brooke's
+new courses; but it was easier to object than to hinder.  Sir James
+accounted for his having come in alone one day to lunch with the
+Cadwalladers by saying--
+
+"I can't talk to you as I want, before Celia: it might hurt her.
+Indeed, it would not be right."
+
+"I know what you mean--the 'Pioneer' at the Grange!" darted in Mrs.
+Cadwallader, almost before the last word was off her friend's tongue.
+"It is frightful--this taking to buying whistles and blowing them in
+everybody's hearing.  Lying in bed all day and playing at dominoes,
+like poor Lord Plessy, would be more private and bearable."
+
+"I see they are beginning to attack our friend Brooke in the
+'Trumpet,'" said the Rector, lounging back and smiling easily, as he
+would have done if he had been attacked himself.  "There are tremendous
+sarcasms against a landlord not a hundred miles from Middlemarch, who
+receives his own rents, and makes no returns."
+
+"I do wish Brooke would leave that off," said Sir James, with his
+little frown of annoyance.
+
+"Is he really going to be put in nomination, though?" said Mr.
+Cadwallader.  "I saw Farebrother yesterday--he's Whiggish himself,
+hoists Brougham and Useful Knowledge; that's the worst I know of
+him;--and he says that Brooke is getting up a pretty strong party.
+Bulstrode, the banker, is his foremost man.  But he thinks Brooke would
+come off badly at a nomination."
+
+"Exactly," said Sir James, with earnestness.  "I have been inquiring
+into the thing, for I've never known anything about Middlemarch
+politics before--the county being my business.  What Brooke trusts to,
+is that they are going to turn out Oliver because he is a Peelite.  But
+Hawley tells me that if they send up a Whig at all it is sure to be
+Bagster, one of those candidates who come from heaven knows where, but
+dead against Ministers, and an experienced Parliamentary man.  Hawley's
+rather rough: he forgot that he was speaking to me.  He said if Brooke
+wanted a pelting, he could get it cheaper than by going to the
+hustings."
+
+"I warned you all of it," said Mrs. Cadwallader, waving her hands
+outward.  "I said to Humphrey long ago, Mr. Brooke is going to make a
+splash in the mud.  And now he has done it."
+
+"Well, he might have taken it into his head to marry," said the Rector.
+"That would have been a graver mess than a little flirtation with
+politics."
+
+"He may do that afterwards," said Mrs. Cadwallader--"when he has come
+out on the other side of the mud with an ague."
+
+"What I care for most is his own dignity," said Sir James.  "Of course
+I care the more because of the family.  But he's getting on in life
+now, and I don't like to think of his exposing himself.  They will be
+raking up everything against him."
+
+"I suppose it's no use trying any persuasion," said the Rector.
+"There's such an odd mixture of obstinacy and changeableness in Brooke.
+Have you tried him on the subject?"
+
+"Well, no," said Sir James; "I feel a delicacy in appearing to dictate.
+But I have been talking to this young Ladislaw that Brooke is making a
+factotum of.  Ladislaw seems clever enough for anything.  I thought it
+as well to hear what he had to say; and he is against Brooke's standing
+this time.  I think he'll turn him round: I think the nomination may be
+staved off."
+
+"I know," said Mrs. Cadwallader, nodding.  "The independent member
+hasn't got his speeches well enough by heart."
+
+"But this Ladislaw--there again is a vexatious business," said Sir
+James.  "We have had him two or three times to dine at the Hall (you
+have met him, by the bye) as Brooke's guest and a relation of
+Casaubon's, thinking he was only on a flying visit.  And now I find
+he's in everybody's mouth in Middlemarch as the editor of the
+'Pioneer.'  There are stories going about him as a quill-driving alien,
+a foreign emissary, and what not."
+
+"Casaubon won't like that," said the Rector.
+
+"There _is_ some foreign blood in Ladislaw," returned Sir James.  "I
+hope he won't go into extreme opinions and carry Brooke on."
+
+"Oh, he's a dangerous young sprig, that Mr. Ladislaw," said Mrs.
+Cadwallader, "with his opera songs and his ready tongue.  A sort of
+Byronic hero--an amorous conspirator, it strikes me.  And Thomas
+Aquinas is not fond of him.  I could see that, the day the picture was
+brought."
+
+"I don't like to begin on the subject with Casaubon," said Sir James.
+"He has more right to interfere than I. But it's a disagreeable affair
+all round.  What a character for anybody with decent connections to
+show himself in!--one of those newspaper fellows!  You have only to
+look at Keck, who manages the 'Trumpet.' I saw him the other day with
+Hawley.  His writing is sound enough, I believe, but he's such a low
+fellow, that I wished he had been on the wrong side."
+
+"What can you expect with these peddling Middlemarch papers?" said the
+Rector.  "I don't suppose you could get a high style of man anywhere to
+be writing up interests he doesn't really care about, and for pay that
+hardly keeps him in at elbows."
+
+"Exactly: that makes it so annoying that Brooke should have put a man
+who has a sort of connection with the family in a position of that
+kind.  For my part, I think Ladislaw is rather a fool for accepting."
+
+"It is Aquinas's fault," said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "Why didn't he use his
+interest to get Ladislaw made an attache or sent to India?  That is how
+families get rid of troublesome sprigs."
+
+"There is no knowing to what lengths the mischief may go," said Sir
+James, anxiously.  "But if Casaubon says nothing, what can I do?"
+
+"Oh my dear Sir James," said the Rector, "don't let us make too much of
+all this.  It is likely enough to end in mere smoke.  After a month or
+two Brooke and this Master Ladislaw will get tired of each other;
+Ladislaw will take wing; Brooke will sell the 'Pioneer,' and everything
+will settle down again as usual."
+
+"There is one good chance--that he will not like to feel his money
+oozing away," said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "If I knew the items of election
+expenses I could scare him.  It's no use plying him with wide words
+like Expenditure: I wouldn't talk of phlebotomy, I would empty a pot of
+leeches upon him.  What we good stingy people don't like, is having our
+sixpences sucked away from us."
+
+"And he will not like having things raked up against him," said Sir
+James.  "There is the management of his estate.  They have begun upon
+that already.  And it really is painful for me to see.  It is a
+nuisance under one's very nose.  I do think one is bound to do the best
+for one's land and tenants, especially in these hard times."
+
+"Perhaps the 'Trumpet' may rouse him to make a change, and some good
+may come of it all," said the Rector.  "I know I should be glad.  I
+should hear less grumbling when my tithe is paid.  I don't know what I
+should do if there were not a modus in Tipton."
+
+"I want him to have a proper man to look after things--I want him to
+take on Garth again," said Sir James.  "He got rid of Garth twelve
+years ago, and everything has been going wrong since.  I think of
+getting Garth to manage for me--he has made such a capital plan for my
+buildings; and Lovegood is hardly up to the mark.  But Garth would not
+undertake the Tipton estate again unless Brooke left it entirely to
+him."
+
+"In the right of it too," said the Rector.  "Garth is an independent
+fellow: an original, simple-minded fellow.  One day, when he was doing
+some valuation for me, he told me point-blank that clergymen seldom
+understood anything about business, and did mischief when they meddled;
+but he said it as quietly and respectfully as if he had been talking to
+me about sailors.  He would make a different parish of Tipton, if
+Brooke would let him manage.  I wish, by the help of the 'Trumpet,' you
+could bring that round."
+
+"If Dorothea had kept near her uncle, there would have been some
+chance," said Sir James.  "She might have got some power over him in
+time, and she was always uneasy about the estate.  She had wonderfully
+good notions about such things.  But now Casaubon takes her up
+entirely.  Celia complains a good deal.  We can hardly get her to dine
+with us, since he had that fit." Sir James ended with a look of pitying
+disgust, and Mrs. Cadwallader shrugged her shoulders as much as to say
+that _she_ was not likely to see anything new in that direction.
+
+"Poor Casaubon!" the Rector said.  "That was a nasty attack.  I thought
+he looked shattered the other day at the Archdeacon's."
+
+"In point of fact," resumed Sir James, not choosing to dwell on "fits,"
+"Brooke doesn't mean badly by his tenants or any one else, but he has
+got that way of paring and clipping at expenses."
+
+"Come, that's a blessing," said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "That helps him to
+find himself in a morning.  He may not know his own opinions, but he
+does know his own pocket."
+
+"I don't believe a man is in pocket by stinginess on his land," said
+Sir James.
+
+"Oh, stinginess may be abused like other virtues: it will not do to
+keep one's own pigs lean," said Mrs. Cadwallader, who had risen to look
+out of the window.  "But talk of an independent politician and he will
+appear."
+
+"What!  Brooke?" said her husband.
+
+"Yes.  Now, you ply him with the 'Trumpet,' Humphrey; and I will put
+the leeches on him.  What will you do, Sir James?"
+
+"The fact is, I don't like to begin about it with Brooke, in our mutual
+position; the whole thing is so unpleasant.  I do wish people would
+behave like gentlemen," said the good baronet, feeling that this was a
+simple and comprehensive programme for social well-being.
+
+"Here you all are, eh?" said Mr. Brooke, shuffling round and shaking
+hands.  "I was going up to the Hall by-and-by, Chettam.  But it's
+pleasant to find everybody, you know.  Well, what do you think of
+things?--going on a little fast!  It was true enough, what Lafitte
+said--'Since yesterday, a century has passed away:'--they're in the
+next century, you know, on the other side of the water.  Going on
+faster than we are."
+
+"Why, yes," said the Rector, taking up the newspaper.  "Here is the
+'Trumpet' accusing you of lagging behind--did you see?"
+
+"Eh? no," said Mr. Brooke, dropping his gloves into his hat and hastily
+adjusting his eye-glass. But Mr. Cadwallader kept the paper in his
+hand, saying, with a smile in his eyes--
+
+"Look here! all this is about a landlord not a hundred miles from
+Middlemarch, who receives his own rents.  They say he is the most
+retrogressive man in the county.  I think you must have taught them
+that word in the 'Pioneer.'"
+
+"Oh, that is Keck--an illiterate fellow, you know.  Retrogressive, now!
+Come, that's capital.  He thinks it means destructive: they want to
+make me out a destructive, you know," said Mr. Brooke, with that
+cheerfulness which is usually sustained by an adversary's ignorance.
+
+"I think he knows the meaning of the word.  Here is a sharp stroke or
+two.  If we had to describe a man who is retrogressive in the most evil
+sense of the word--we should say, he is one who would dub himself a
+reformer of our constitution, while every interest for which he is
+immediately responsible is going to decay: a philanthropist who cannot
+bear one rogue to be hanged, but does not mind five honest tenants
+being half-starved: a man who shrieks at corruption, and keeps his
+farms at rack-rent: who roars himself red at rotten boroughs, and does
+not mind if every field on his farms has a rotten gate: a man very
+open-hearted to Leeds and Manchester, no doubt; he would give any
+number of representatives who will pay for their seats out of their own
+pockets: what he objects to giving, is a little return on rent-days to
+help a tenant to buy stock, or an outlay on repairs to keep the weather
+out at a tenant's barn-door or make his house look a little less like
+an Irish cottier's. But we all know the wag's definition of a
+philanthropist: a man whose charity increases directly as the square of
+the distance. And so on.  All the rest is to show what sort of
+legislator a philanthropist is likely to make," ended the Rector,
+throwing down the paper, and clasping his hands at the back of his
+head, while he looked at Mr. Brooke with an air of amused neutrality.
+
+"Come, that's rather good, you know," said Mr. Brooke, taking up the
+paper and trying to bear the attack as easily as his neighbor did, but
+coloring and smiling rather nervously; "that about roaring himself red
+at rotten boroughs--I never made a speech about rotten boroughs in my
+life.  And as to roaring myself red and that kind of thing--these men
+never understand what is good satire.  Satire, you know, should be true
+up to a certain point.  I recollect they said that in 'The Edinburgh'
+somewhere--it must be true up to a certain point."
+
+"Well, that is really a hit about the gates," said Sir James, anxious
+to tread carefully.  "Dagley complained to me the other day that he
+hadn't got a decent gate on his farm.  Garth has invented a new pattern
+of gate--I wish you would try it.  One ought to use some of one's
+timber in that way."
+
+"You go in for fancy farming, you know, Chettam," said Mr. Brooke,
+appearing to glance over the columns of the "Trumpet."  "That's your
+hobby, and you don't mind the expense."
+
+"I thought the most expensive hobby in the world was standing for
+Parliament," said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "They said the last unsuccessful
+candidate at Middlemarch--Giles, wasn't his name?--spent ten thousand
+pounds and failed because he did not bribe enough.  What a bitter
+reflection for a man!"
+
+"Somebody was saying," said the Rector, laughingly, "that East Retford
+was nothing to Middlemarch, for bribery."
+
+"Nothing of the kind," said Mr. Brooke.  "The Tories bribe, you know:
+Hawley and his set bribe with treating, hot codlings, and that sort of
+thing; and they bring the voters drunk to the poll.  But they are not
+going to have it their own way in future--not in future, you know.
+Middlemarch is a little backward, I admit--the freemen are a little
+backward.  But we shall educate them--we shall bring them on, you
+know.  The best people there are on our side."
+
+"Hawley says you have men on your side who will do you harm," remarked
+Sir James.  "He says Bulstrode the banker will do you harm."
+
+"And that if you got pelted," interposed Mrs. Cadwallader, "half the
+rotten eggs would mean hatred of your committee-man. Good heavens!
+Think what it must be to be pelted for wrong opinions.  And I seem to
+remember a story of a man they pretended to chair and let him fall into
+a dust-heap on purpose!"
+
+"Pelting is nothing to their finding holes in one's coat," said the
+Rector.  "I confess that's what I should be afraid of, if we parsons
+had to stand at the hustings for preferment.  I should be afraid of
+their reckoning up all my fishing days.  Upon my word, I think the
+truth is the hardest missile one can be pelted with."
+
+"The fact is," said Sir James, "if a man goes into public life he must
+be prepared for the consequences.  He must make himself proof against
+calumny."
+
+"My dear Chettam, that is all very fine, you know," said Mr. Brooke.
+"But how will you make yourself proof against calumny?  You should read
+history--look at ostracism, persecution, martyrdom, and that kind of
+thing.  They always happen to the best men, you know.  But what is that
+in Horace?--'fiat justitia, ruat . . .  something or other."
+
+"Exactly," said Sir James, with a little more heat than usual.  "What I
+mean by being proof against calumny is being able to point to the fact
+as a contradiction."
+
+"And it is not martyrdom to pay bills that one has run into one's
+self," said Mrs. Cadwallader.
+
+But it was Sir James's evident annoyance that most stirred Mr. Brooke.
+"Well, you know, Chettam," he said, rising, taking up his hat and
+leaning on his stick, "you and I have a different system.  You are all
+for outlay with your farms.  I don't want to make out that my system is
+good under all circumstances--under all circumstances, you know."
+
+"There ought to be a new valuation made from time to time," said Sir
+James.  "Returns are very well occasionally, but I like a fair
+valuation.  What do you say, Cadwallader?"
+
+"I agree with you.  If I were Brooke, I would choke the 'Trumpet' at
+once by getting Garth to make a new valuation of the farms, and giving
+him carte blanche about gates and repairs: that's my view of the
+political situation," said the Rector, broadening himself by sticking
+his thumbs in his armholes, and laughing towards Mr. Brooke.
+
+"That's a showy sort of thing to do, you know," said Mr. Brooke.  "But
+I should like you to tell me of another landlord who has distressed his
+tenants for arrears as little as I have.  I let the old tenants stay
+on.  I'm uncommonly easy, let me tell you, uncommonly easy.  I have my
+own ideas, and I take my stand on them, you know.  A man who does that
+is always charged with eccentricity, inconsistency, and that kind of
+thing.  When I change my line of action, I shall follow my own ideas."
+
+After that, Mr. Brooke remembered that there was a packet which he had
+omitted to send off from the Grange, and he bade everybody hurriedly
+good-by.
+
+"I didn't want to take a liberty with Brooke," said Sir James; "I see
+he is nettled.  But as to what he says about old tenants, in point of
+fact no new tenant would take the farms on the present terms."
+
+"I have a notion that he will be brought round in time," said the
+Rector.  "But you were pulling one way, Elinor, and we were pulling
+another.  You wanted to frighten him away from expense, and we want to
+frighten him into it.  Better let him try to be popular and see that
+his character as a landlord stands in his way.  I don't think it
+signifies two straws about the 'Pioneer,' or Ladislaw, or Brooke's
+speechifying to the Middlemarchers.  But it does signify about the
+parishioners in Tipton being comfortable."
+
+"Excuse me, it is you two who are on the wrong tack," said Mrs.
+Cadwallader.  "You should have proved to him that he loses money by bad
+management, and then we should all have pulled together.  If you put
+him a-horseback on politics, I warn you of the consequences.  It was
+all very well to ride on sticks at home and call them ideas."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXIX.
+
+    "If, as I have, you also doe,
+       Vertue attired in woman see,
+     And dare love that, and say so too,
+       And forget the He and She;
+
+     And if this love, though placed so,
+       From prophane men you hide,
+     Which will no faith on this bestow,
+       Or, if they doe, deride:
+
+     Then you have done a braver thing
+       Than all the Worthies did,
+     And a braver thence will spring,
+       Which is, to keep that hid."
+                             --DR. DONNE.
+
+
+Sir James Chettam's mind was not fruitful in devices, but his growing
+anxiety to "act on Brooke," once brought close to his constant belief
+in Dorothea's capacity for influence, became formative, and issued in a
+little plan; namely, to plead Celia's indisposition as a reason for
+fetching Dorothea by herself to the Hall, and to leave her at the
+Grange with the carriage on the way, after making her fully aware of
+the situation concerning the management of the estate.
+
+In this way it happened that one day near four o'clock, when Mr. Brooke
+and Ladislaw were seated in the library, the door opened and Mrs.
+Casaubon was announced.
+
+Will, the moment before, had been low in the depths of boredom, and,
+obliged to help Mr. Brooke in arranging "documents" about hanging
+sheep-stealers, was exemplifying the power our minds have of riding
+several horses at once by inwardly arranging measures towards getting a
+lodging for himself in Middlemarch and cutting short his constant
+residence at the Grange; while there flitted through all these steadier
+images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealing epic written with Homeric
+particularity.  When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from
+an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger-ends.  Any one
+observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the
+adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which
+might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed
+the message of a magic touch.  And so it had.  For effective magic is
+transcendent nature; and who shall measure the subtlety of those
+touches which convey the quality of soul as well as body, and make a
+man's passion for one woman differ from his passion for another as joy
+in the morning light over valley and river and white mountain-top
+differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass panels?  Will, too,
+was made of very impressible stuff.  The bow of a violin drawn near him
+cleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him,
+and his point of view shifted--as easily as his mood.  Dorothea's
+entrance was the freshness of morning.
+
+"Well, my dear, this is pleasant, now," said Mr. Brooke, meeting and
+kissing her.  "You have left Casaubon with his books, I suppose.
+That's right.  We must not have you getting too learned for a woman,
+you know."
+
+"There is no fear of that, uncle," said Dorothea, turning to Will and
+shaking hands with open cheerfulness, while she made no other form of
+greeting, but went on answering her uncle.  "I am very slow.  When I
+want to be busy with books, I am often playing truant among my
+thoughts.  I find it is not so easy to be learned as to plan cottages."
+
+She seated herself beside her uncle opposite to Will, and was evidently
+preoccupied with something that made her almost unmindful of him.  He
+was ridiculously disappointed, as if he had imagined that her coming
+had anything to do with him.
+
+"Why, yes, my dear, it was quite your hobby to draw plans.  But it was
+good to break that off a little.  Hobbies are apt to ran away with us,
+you know; it doesn't do to be run away with.  We must keep the reins.
+I have never let myself be run away with; I always pulled up.  That is
+what I tell Ladislaw.  He and I are alike, you know: he likes to go
+into everything.  We are working at capital punishment.  We shall do a
+great deal together, Ladislaw and I."
+
+"Yes," said Dorothea, with characteristic directness, "Sir James has
+been telling me that he is in hope of seeing a great change made soon
+in your management of the estate--that you are thinking of having the
+farms valued, and repairs made, and the cottages improved, so that
+Tipton may look quite another place.  Oh, how happy!"--she went on,
+clasping her hands, with a return to that more childlike impetuous
+manner, which had been subdued since her marriage.  "If I were at home
+still, I should take to riding again, that I might go about with you
+and see all that!  And you are going to engage Mr. Garth, who praised
+my cottages, Sir James says."
+
+"Chettam is a little hasty, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, coloring
+slightly; "a little hasty, you know.  I never said I should do anything
+of the kind.  I never said I should _not_ do it, you know."
+
+"He only feels confident that you will do it," said Dorothea, in a
+voice as clear and unhesitating as that of a young chorister chanting a
+credo, "because you mean to enter Parliament as a member who cares for
+the improvement of the people, and one of the first things to be made
+better is the state of the land and the laborers.  Think of Kit Downes,
+uncle, who lives with his wife and seven children in a house with one
+sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than this table!--and those
+poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse, where they live in the
+back kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rats!  That is one reason
+why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle--which you think me
+stupid about.  I used to come from the village with all that dirt and
+coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in
+the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in
+what is false, while we don't mind how hard the truth is for the
+neighbors outside our walls.  I think we have no right to come forward
+and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils
+which lie under our own hands."
+
+Dorothea had gathered emotion as she went on, and had forgotten
+everything except the relief of pouring forth her feelings, unchecked:
+an experience once habitual with her, but hardly ever present since her
+marriage, which had been a perpetual struggle of energy with fear.  For
+the moment, Will's admiration was accompanied with a chilling sense of
+remoteness.  A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a
+woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having
+intended greatness for men.  But nature has sometimes made sad
+oversights in carrying out her intention; as in the case of good Mr.
+Brooke, whose masculine consciousness was at this moment in rather a
+stammering condition under the eloquence of his niece.  He could not
+immediately find any other mode of expressing himself than that of
+rising, fixing his eye-glass, and fingering the papers before him.  At
+last he said--
+
+"There is something in what you say, my dear, something in what you
+say--but not everything--eh, Ladislaw?  You and I don't like our
+pictures and statues being found fault with.  Young ladies are a little
+ardent, you know--a little one-sided, my dear.  Fine art, poetry, that
+kind of thing, elevates a nation--emollit mores--you understand a
+little Latin now.  But--eh? what?"
+
+These interrogatives were addressed to the footman who had come in to
+say that the keeper had found one of Dagley's boys with a leveret in
+his hand just killed.
+
+"I'll come, I'll come.  I shall let him off easily, you know," said Mr.
+Brooke aside to Dorothea, shuffling away very cheerfully.
+
+"I hope you feel how right this change is that I--that Sir James wishes
+for," said Dorothea to Will, as soon as her uncle was gone.
+
+"I do, now I have heard you speak about it.  I shall not forget what
+you have said.  But can you think of something else at this moment?  I
+may not have another opportunity of speaking to you about what has
+occurred," said Will, rising with a movement of impatience, and holding
+the back of his chair with both hands.
+
+"Pray tell me what it is," said Dorothea, anxiously, also rising and
+going to the open window, where Monk was looking in, panting and
+wagging his tail.  She leaned her back against the window-frame, and
+laid her hand on the dog's head; for though, as we know, she was not
+fond of pets that must be held in the hands or trodden on, she was
+always attentive to the feelings of dogs, and very polite if she had to
+decline their advances.
+
+Will followed her only with his eyes and said, "I presume you know that
+Mr. Casaubon has forbidden me to go to his house."
+
+"No, I did not," said Dorothea, after a moment's pause.  She was
+evidently much moved.  "I am very, very sorry," she added, mournfully.
+She was thinking of what Will had no knowledge of--the conversation
+between her and her husband in the darkness; and she was anew smitten
+with hopelessness that she could influence Mr. Casaubon's action.  But
+the marked expression of her sorrow convinced Will that it was not all
+given to him personally, and that Dorothea had not been visited by the
+idea that Mr. Casaubon's dislike and jealousy of him turned upon
+herself.  He felt an odd mixture of delight and vexation: of delight
+that he could dwell and be cherished in her thought as in a pure home,
+without suspicion and without stint--of vexation because he was of too
+little account with her, was not formidable enough, was treated with an
+unhesitating benevolence which did not flatter him.  But his dread of
+any change in Dorothea was stronger than his discontent, and he began
+to speak again in a tone of mere explanation.
+
+"Mr. Casaubon's reason is, his displeasure at my taking a position here
+which he considers unsuited to my rank as his cousin.  I have told him
+that I cannot give way on this point.  It is a little too hard on me to
+expect that my course in life is to be hampered by prejudices which I
+think ridiculous.  Obligation may be stretched till it is no better
+than a brand of slavery stamped on us when we were too young to know
+its meaning.  I would not have accepted the position if I had not meant
+to make it useful and honorable.  I am not bound to regard family
+dignity in any other light."
+
+Dorothea felt wretched.  She thought her husband altogether in the
+wrong, on more grounds than Will had mentioned.
+
+"It is better for us not to speak on the subject," she said, with a
+tremulousness not common in her voice, "since you and Mr. Casaubon
+disagree.  You intend to remain?"  She was looking out on the lawn,
+with melancholy meditation.
+
+"Yes; but I shall hardly ever see you now," said Will, in a tone of
+almost boyish complaint.
+
+"No," said Dorothea, turning her eyes full upon him, "hardly ever.  But
+I shall hear of you.  I shall know what you are doing for my uncle."
+
+"I shall know hardly anything about you," said Will.  "No one will tell
+me anything."
+
+"Oh, my life is very simple," said Dorothea, her lips curling with an
+exquisite smile, which irradiated her melancholy.  "I am always at
+Lowick."
+
+"That is a dreadful imprisonment," said Will, impetuously.
+
+"No, don't think that," said Dorothea.  "I have no longings."
+
+He did not speak, but she replied to some change in his expression.  "I
+mean, for myself.  Except that I should like not to have so much more
+than my share without doing anything for others.  But I have a belief
+of my own, and it comforts me."
+
+"What is that?" said Will, rather jealous of the belief.
+
+"That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know
+what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power
+against evil--widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with
+darkness narrower."
+
+"That is a beautiful mysticism--it is a--"
+
+"Please not to call it by any name," said Dorothea, putting out her
+hands entreatingly.  "You will say it is Persian, or something else
+geographical.  It is my life.  I have found it out, and cannot part
+with it.  I have always been finding out my religion since I was a
+little girl.  I used to pray so much--now I hardly ever pray.  I try
+not to have desires merely for myself, because they may not be good for
+others, and I have too much already.  I only told you, that you might
+know quite well how my days go at Lowick."
+
+"God bless you for telling me!" said Will, ardently, and rather
+wondering at himself.  They were looking at each other like two fond
+children who were talking confidentially of birds.
+
+"What is _your_ religion?" said Dorothea.  "I mean--not what you know
+about religion, but the belief that helps you most?"
+
+"To love what is good and beautiful when I see it," said Will.  "But I
+am a rebel: I don't feel bound, as you do, to submit to what I don't
+like."
+
+"But if you like what is good, that comes to the same thing," said
+Dorothea, smiling.
+
+"Now you are subtle," said Will.
+
+"Yes; Mr. Casaubon often says I am too subtle.  I don't feel as if I
+were subtle," said Dorothea, playfully.  "But how long my uncle is!  I
+must go and look for him.  I must really go on to the Hall.  Celia is
+expecting me."
+
+Will offered to tell Mr. Brooke, who presently came and said that he
+would step into the carriage and go with Dorothea as far as Dagley's,
+to speak about the small delinquent who had been caught with the
+leveret.  Dorothea renewed the subject of the estate as they drove
+along, but Mr. Brooke, not being taken unawares, got the talk under his
+own control.
+
+"Chettam, now," he replied; "he finds fault with me, my dear; but I
+should not preserve my game if it were not for Chettam, and he can't
+say that that expense is for the sake of the tenants, you know.  It's a
+little against my feeling:--poaching, now, if you come to look into
+it--I have often thought of getting up the subject.  Not long ago,
+Flavell, the Methodist preacher, was brought up for knocking down a
+hare that came across his path when he and his wife were walking out
+together.  He was pretty quick, and knocked it on the neck."
+
+"That was very brutal, I think," said Dorothea
+
+"Well, now, it seemed rather black to me, I confess, in a Methodist
+preacher, you know.  And Johnson said, 'You may judge what a
+_hypocrite_ he is.'  And upon my word, I thought Flavell looked very
+little like 'the highest style of man'--as somebody calls the
+Christian--Young, the poet Young, I think--you know Young?  Well, now,
+Flavell in his shabby black gaiters, pleading that he thought the Lord
+had sent him and his wife a good dinner, and he had a right to knock it
+down, though not a mighty hunter before the Lord, as Nimrod was--I
+assure you it was rather comic: Fielding would have made something of
+it--or Scott, now--Scott might have worked it up.  But really, when I
+came to think of it, I couldn't help liking that the fellow should have
+a bit of hare to say grace over.  It's all a matter of
+prejudice--prejudice with the law on its side, you know--about the
+stick and the gaiters, and so on.  However, it doesn't do to reason
+about things; and law is law.  But I got Johnson to be quiet, and I
+hushed the matter up.  I doubt whether Chettam would not have been more
+severe, and yet he comes down on me as if I were the hardest man in the
+county.  But here we are at Dagley's."
+
+Mr. Brooke got down at a farmyard-gate, and Dorothea drove on.  It is
+wonderful how much uglier things will look when we only suspect that we
+are blamed for them.  Even our own persons in the glass are apt to
+change their aspect for us after we have heard some frank remark on
+their less admirable points; and on the other hand it is astonishing
+how pleasantly conscience takes our encroachments on those who never
+complain or have nobody to complain for them.  Dagley's homestead never
+before looked so dismal to Mr. Brooke as it did today, with his mind
+thus sore about the fault-finding of the "Trumpet," echoed by Sir James.
+
+It is true that an observer, under that softening influence of the fine
+arts which makes other people's hardships picturesque, might have been
+delighted with this homestead called Freeman's End: the old house had
+dormer-windows in the dark red roof, two of the chimneys were choked
+with ivy, the large porch was blocked up with bundles of sticks, and
+half the windows were closed with gray worm-eaten shutters about which
+the jasmine-boughs grew in wild luxuriance; the mouldering garden wall
+with hollyhocks peeping over it was a perfect study of highly mingled
+subdued color, and there was an aged goat (kept doubtless on
+interesting superstitious grounds) lying against the open back-kitchen
+door.  The mossy thatch of the cow-shed, the broken gray barn-doors,
+the pauper laborers in ragged breeches who had nearly finished
+unloading a wagon of corn into the barn ready for early thrashing; the
+scanty dairy of cows being tethered for milking and leaving one half of
+the shed in brown emptiness; the very pigs and white ducks seeming to
+wander about the uneven neglected yard as if in low spirits from
+feeding on a too meagre quality of rinsings,--all these objects under
+the quiet light of a sky marbled with high clouds would have made a
+sort of picture which we have all paused over as a "charming bit,"
+touching other sensibilities than those which are stirred by the
+depression of the agricultural interest, with the sad lack of farming
+capital, as seen constantly in the newspapers of that time.  But these
+troublesome associations were just now strongly present to Mr. Brooke,
+and spoiled the scene for him.  Mr. Dagley himself made a figure in the
+landscape, carrying a pitchfork and wearing his milking-hat--a very old
+beaver flattened in front.  His coat and breeches were the best he had,
+and he would not have been wearing them on this weekday occasion if he
+had not been to market and returned later than usual, having given
+himself the rare treat of dining at the public table of the Blue Bull.
+How he came to fall into this extravagance would perhaps be matter of
+wonderment to himself on the morrow; but before dinner something in the
+state of the country, a slight pause in the harvest before the Far Dips
+were cut, the stories about the new King and the numerous handbills on
+the walls, had seemed to warrant a little recklessness.  It was a maxim
+about Middlemarch, and regarded as self-evident, that good meat should
+have good drink, which last Dagley interpreted as plenty of table ale
+well followed up by rum-and-water. These liquors have so far truth in
+them that they were not false enough to make poor Dagley seem merry:
+they only made his discontent less tongue-tied than usual.  He had also
+taken too much in the shape of muddy political talk, a stimulant
+dangerously disturbing to his farming conservatism, which consisted in
+holding that whatever is, is bad, and any change is likely to be worse.
+He was flushed, and his eyes had a decidedly quarrelsome stare as he
+stood still grasping his pitchfork, while the landlord approached with
+his easy shuffling walk, one hand in his trouser-pocket and the other
+swinging round a thin walking-stick.
+
+"Dagley, my good fellow," began Mr. Brooke, conscious that he was going
+to be very friendly about the boy.
+
+"Oh, ay, I'm a good feller, am I?  Thank ye, sir, thank ye," said
+Dagley, with a loud snarling irony which made Fag the sheep-dog stir
+from his seat and prick his ears; but seeing Monk enter the yard after
+some outside loitering, Fag seated himself again in an attitude of
+observation.  "I'm glad to hear I'm a good feller."
+
+Mr. Brooke reflected that it was market-day, and that his worthy tenant
+had probably been dining, but saw no reason why he should not go on,
+since he could take the precaution of repeating what he had to say to
+Mrs. Dagley.
+
+"Your little lad Jacob has been caught killing a leveret, Dagley: I
+have told Johnson to lock him up in the empty stable an hour or two,
+just to frighten him, you know.  But he will be brought home by-and-by,
+before night: and you'll just look after him, will you, and give him a
+reprimand, you know?"
+
+"No, I woon't: I'll be dee'd if I'll leather my boy to please you or
+anybody else, not if you was twenty landlords istid o' one, and that a
+bad un."
+
+Dagley's words were loud enough to summon his wife to the back-kitchen
+door--the only entrance ever used, and one always open except in bad
+weather--and Mr. Brooke, saying soothingly, "Well, well, I'll speak to
+your wife--I didn't mean beating, you know," turned to walk to the
+house.  But Dagley, only the more inclined to "have his say" with a
+gentleman who walked away from him, followed at once, with Fag
+slouching at his heels and sullenly evading some small and probably
+charitable advances on the part of Monk.
+
+"How do you do, Mrs. Dagley?" said Mr. Brooke, making some haste.  "I
+came to tell you about your boy: I don't want you to give him the
+stick, you know."  He was careful to speak quite plainly this time.
+
+Overworked Mrs. Dagley--a thin, worn woman, from whose life pleasure
+had so entirely vanished that she had not even any Sunday clothes which
+could give her satisfaction in preparing for church--had already had a
+misunderstanding with her husband since he had come home, and was in
+low spirits, expecting the worst.  But her husband was beforehand in
+answering.
+
+"No, nor he woon't hev the stick, whether you want it or no," pursued
+Dagley, throwing out his voice, as if he wanted it to hit hard.
+"You've got no call to come an' talk about sticks o' these primises, as
+you woon't give a stick tow'rt mending.  Go to Middlemarch to ax for
+_your_ charrickter."
+
+"You'd far better hold your tongue, Dagley," said the wife, "and not
+kick your own trough over.  When a man as is father of a family has
+been an' spent money at market and made himself the worse for liquor,
+he's done enough mischief for one day.  But I should like to know what
+my boy's done, sir."
+
+"Niver do you mind what he's done," said Dagley, more fiercely, "it's
+my business to speak, an' not yourn.  An' I wull speak, too.  I'll hev
+my say--supper or no.  An' what I say is, as I've lived upo' your
+ground from my father and grandfather afore me, an' hev dropped our
+money into't, an' me an' my children might lie an' rot on the ground
+for top-dressin' as we can't find the money to buy, if the King wasn't
+to put a stop."
+
+"My good fellow, you're drunk, you know," said Mr. Brooke,
+confidentially but not judiciously.  "Another day, another day," he
+added, turning as if to go.
+
+But Dagley immediately fronted him, and Fag at his heels growled low,
+as his master's voice grew louder and more insulting, while Monk also
+drew close in silent dignified watch.  The laborers on the wagon were
+pausing to listen, and it seemed wiser to be quite passive than to
+attempt a ridiculous flight pursued by a bawling man.
+
+"I'm no more drunk nor you are, nor so much," said Dagley.  "I can
+carry my liquor, an' I know what I meean.  An' I meean as the King 'ull
+put a stop to 't, for them say it as knows it, as there's to be a
+Rinform, and them landlords as never done the right thing by their
+tenants 'ull be treated i' that way as they'll hev to scuttle off.  An'
+there's them i' Middlemarch knows what the Rinform is--an' as knows
+who'll hev to scuttle.  Says they, 'I know who _your_ landlord is.'
+An' says I, 'I hope you're the better for knowin' him, I arn't.' Says
+they, 'He's a close-fisted un.' 'Ay ay,' says I. 'He's a man for the
+Rinform,' says they.  That's what they says.  An' I made out what the
+Rinform were--an' it were to send you an' your likes a-scuttlin' an'
+wi' pretty strong-smellin' things too.  An' you may do as you like now,
+for I'm none afeard on you.  An' you'd better let my boy aloan, an'
+look to yoursen, afore the Rinform has got upo' your back.  That's what
+I'n got to say," concluded Mr. Dagley, striking his fork into the
+ground with a firmness which proved inconvenient as he tried to draw it
+up again.
+
+At this last action Monk began to bark loudly, and it was a moment for
+Mr. Brooke to escape.  He walked out of the yard as quickly as he
+could, in some amazement at the novelty of his situation.  He had never
+been insulted on his own land before, and had been inclined to regard
+himself as a general favorite (we are all apt to do so, when we think
+of our own amiability more than of what other people are likely to want
+of us). When he had quarrelled with Caleb Garth twelve years before he
+had thought that the tenants would be pleased at the landlord's taking
+everything into his own hands.
+
+Some who follow the narrative of his experience may wonder at the
+midnight darkness of Mr. Dagley; but nothing was easier in those times
+than for an hereditary farmer of his grade to be ignorant, in spite
+somehow of having a rector in the twin parish who was a gentleman to
+the backbone, a curate nearer at hand who preached more learnedly than
+the rector, a landlord who had gone into everything, especially fine
+art and social improvement, and all the lights of Middlemarch only
+three miles off.  As to the facility with which mortals escape
+knowledge, try an average acquaintance in the intellectual blaze of
+London, and consider what that eligible person for a dinner-party would
+have been if he had learned scant skill in "summing" from the
+parish-clerk of Tipton, and read a chapter in the Bible with immense
+difficulty, because such names as Isaiah or Apollos remained
+unmanageable after twice spelling.  Poor Dagley read a few verses
+sometimes on a Sunday evening, and the world was at least not darker to
+him than it had been before.  Some things he knew thoroughly, namely,
+the slovenly habits of farming, and the awkwardness of weather, stock
+and crops, at Freeman's End--so called apparently by way of sarcasm,
+to imply that a man was free to quit it if he chose, but that there was
+no earthly "beyond" open to him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XL.
+
+    Wise in his daily work was he:
+      To fruits of diligence,
+    And not to faiths or polity,
+      He plied his utmost sense.
+    These perfect in their little parts,
+      Whose work is all their prize--
+    Without them how could laws, or arts,
+      Or towered cities rise?
+
+
+In watching effects, if only of an electric battery, it is often
+necessary to change our place and examine a particular mixture or group
+at some distance from the point where the movement we are interested in
+was set up.  The group I am moving towards is at Caleb Garth's
+breakfast-table in the large parlor where the maps and desk were:
+father, mother, and five of the children.  Mary was just now at home
+waiting for a situation, while Christy, the boy next to her, was
+getting cheap learning and cheap fare in Scotland, having to his
+father's disappointment taken to books instead of that sacred calling
+"business."
+
+The letters had come--nine costly letters, for which the postman had
+been paid three and twopence, and Mr. Garth was forgetting his tea and
+toast while he read his letters and laid them open one above the other,
+sometimes swaying his head slowly, sometimes screwing up his mouth in
+inward debate, but not forgetting to cut off a large red seal unbroken,
+which Letty snatched up like an eager terrier.
+
+The talk among the rest went on unrestrainedly, for nothing disturbed
+Caleb's absorption except shaking the table when he was writing.
+
+Two letters of the nine had been for Mary.  After reading them, she had
+passed them to her mother, and sat playing with her tea-spoon absently,
+till with a sudden recollection she returned to her sewing, which she
+had kept on her lap during breakfast.
+
+"Oh, don't sew, Mary!" said Ben, pulling her arm down.  "Make me a
+peacock with this bread-crumb." He had been kneading a small mass for
+the purpose.
+
+"No, no, Mischief!" said Mary, good-humoredly, while she pricked his
+hand lightly with her needle.  "Try and mould it yourself: you have
+seen me do it often enough.  I must get this sewing done.  It is for
+Rosamond Vincy: she is to be married next week, and she can't be
+married without this handkerchief."  Mary ended merrily, amused with
+the last notion.
+
+"Why can't she, Mary?" said Letty, seriously interested in this
+mystery, and pushing her head so close to her sister that Mary now
+turned the threatening needle towards Letty's nose.
+
+"Because this is one of a dozen, and without it there would only be
+eleven," said Mary, with a grave air of explanation, so that Letty sank
+back with a sense of knowledge.
+
+"Have you made up your mind, my dear?" said Mrs. Garth, laying the
+letters down.
+
+"I shall go to the school at York," said Mary.  "I am less unfit to
+teach in a school than in a family.  I like to teach classes best.
+And, you see, I must teach: there is nothing else to be done."
+
+"Teaching seems to me the most delightful work in the world," said Mrs.
+Garth, with a touch of rebuke in her tone.  "I could understand your
+objection to it if you had not knowledge enough, Mary, or if you
+disliked children."
+
+"I suppose we never quite understand why another dislikes what we like,
+mother," said Mary, rather curtly.  "I am not fond of a schoolroom: I
+like the outside world better.  It is a very inconvenient fault of
+mine."
+
+"It must be very stupid to be always in a girls' school," said Alfred.
+"Such a set of nincompoops, like Mrs. Ballard's pupils walking two and
+two."
+
+"And they have no games worth playing at," said Jim.  "They can neither
+throw nor leap.  I don't wonder at Mary's not liking it."
+
+"What is that Mary doesn't like, eh?" said the father, looking over his
+spectacles and pausing before he opened his next letter.
+
+"Being among a lot of nincompoop girls," said Alfred.
+
+"Is it the situation you had heard of, Mary?" said Caleb, gently,
+looking at his daughter.
+
+"Yes, father: the school at York.  I have determined to take it.  It is
+quite the best.  Thirty-five pounds a-year, and extra pay for teaching
+the smallest strummers at the piano."
+
+"Poor child!  I wish she could stay at home with us, Susan," said
+Caleb, looking plaintively at his wife.
+
+"Mary would not be happy without doing her duty," said Mrs. Garth,
+magisterially, conscious of having done her own.
+
+"It wouldn't make me happy to do such a nasty duty as that," said
+Alfred--at which Mary and her father laughed silently, but Mrs. Garth
+said, gravely--
+
+"Do find a fitter word than nasty, my dear Alfred, for everything that
+you think disagreeable.  And suppose that Mary could help you to go to
+Mr. Hanmer's with the money she gets?"
+
+"That seems to me a great shame.  But she's an old brick," said Alfred,
+rising from his chair, and pulling Mary's head backward to kiss her.
+
+Mary colored and laughed, but could not conceal that the tears were
+coming.  Caleb, looking on over his spectacles, with the angles of his
+eyebrows falling, had an expression of mingled delight and sorrow as he
+returned to the opening of his letter; and even Mrs. Garth, her lips
+curling with a calm contentment, allowed that inappropriate language to
+pass without correction, although Ben immediately took it up, and sang,
+"She's an old brick, old brick, old brick!" to a cantering measure,
+which he beat out with his fist on Mary's arm.
+
+But Mrs. Garth's eyes were now drawn towards her husband, who was
+already deep in the letter he was reading.  His face had an expression
+of grave surprise, which alarmed her a little, but he did not like to
+be questioned while he was reading, and she remained anxiously watching
+till she saw him suddenly shaken by a little joyous laugh as he turned
+back to the beginning of the letter, and looking at her above his
+spectacles, said, in a low tone, "What do you think, Susan?"
+
+She went and stood behind him, putting her hand on his shoulder, while
+they read the letter together.  It was from Sir James Chettam, offering
+to Mr. Garth the management of the family estates at Freshitt and
+elsewhere, and adding that Sir James had been requested by Mr. Brooke
+of Tipton to ascertain whether Mr. Garth would be disposed at the same
+time to resume the agency of the Tipton property.  The Baronet added in
+very obliging words that he himself was particularly desirous of seeing
+the Freshitt and Tipton estates under the same management, and he hoped
+to be able to show that the double agency might be held on terms
+agreeable to Mr. Garth, whom he would be glad to see at the Hall at
+twelve o'clock on the following day.
+
+"He writes handsomely, doesn't he, Susan?" said Caleb, turning his eyes
+upward to his wife, who raised her hand from his shoulder to his ear,
+while she rested her chin on his head.  "Brooke didn't like to ask me
+himself, I can see," he continued, laughing silently.
+
+"Here is an honor to your father, children," said Mrs. Garth, looking
+round at the five pair of eyes, all fixed on the parents.  "He is asked
+to take a post again by those who dismissed him long ago.  That shows
+that he did his work well, so that they feel the want of him."
+
+"Like Cincinnatus--hooray!" said Ben, riding on his chair, with a
+pleasant confidence that discipline was relaxed.
+
+"Will they come to fetch him, mother?" said Letty, thinking of the
+Mayor and Corporation in their robes.
+
+Mrs. Garth patted Letty's head and smiled, but seeing that her husband
+was gathering up his letters and likely soon to be out of reach in that
+sanctuary "business," she pressed his shoulder and said emphatically--
+
+"Now, mind you ask fair pay, Caleb."
+
+"Oh yes," said Caleb, in a deep voice of assent, as if it would be
+unreasonable to suppose anything else of him.  "It'll come to between
+four and five hundred, the two together."  Then with a little start of
+remembrance he said, "Mary, write and give up that school.  Stay and
+help your mother.  I'm as pleased as Punch, now I've thought of that."
+
+No manner could have been less like that of Punch triumphant than
+Caleb's, but his talents did not lie in finding phrases, though he was
+very particular about his letter-writing, and regarded his wife as a
+treasury of correct language.
+
+There was almost an uproar among the children now, and Mary held up the
+cambric embroidery towards her mother entreatingly, that it might be
+put out of reach while the boys dragged her into a dance.  Mrs. Garth,
+in placid joy, began to put the cups and plates together, while Caleb
+pushing his chair from the table, as if he were going to move to the
+desk, still sat holding his letters in his hand and looking on the
+ground meditatively, stretching out the fingers of his left hand,
+according to a mute language of his own.  At last he said--
+
+"It's a thousand pities Christy didn't take to business, Susan.  I
+shall want help by-and-by. And Alfred must go off to the
+engineering--I've made up my mind to that."  He fell into meditation and
+finger-rhetoric again for a little while, and then continued: "I shall
+make Brooke have new agreements with the tenants, and I shall draw up a
+rotation of crops.  And I'll lay a wager we can get fine bricks out of
+the clay at Bott's corner.  I must look into that: it would cheapen the
+repairs.  It's a fine bit of work, Susan!  A man without a family would
+be glad to do it for nothing."
+
+"Mind you don't, though," said his wife, lifting up her finger.
+
+"No, no; but it's a fine thing to come to a man when he's seen into the
+nature of business: to have the chance of getting a bit of the country
+into good fettle, as they say, and putting men into the right way with
+their farming, and getting a bit of good contriving and solid building
+done--that those who are living and those who come after will be the
+better for.  I'd sooner have it than a fortune.  I hold it the most
+honorable work that is."  Here Caleb laid down his letters, thrust his
+fingers between the buttons of his waistcoat, and sat upright, but
+presently proceeded with some awe in his voice and moving his head
+slowly aside--"It's a great gift of God, Susan."
+
+"That it is, Caleb," said his wife, with answering fervor.  "And it
+will be a blessing to your children to have had a father who did such
+work: a father whose good work remains though his name may be
+forgotten."  She could not say any more to him then about the pay.
+
+In the evening, when Caleb, rather tired with his day's work, was
+seated in silence with his pocket-book open on his knee, while Mrs.
+Garth and Mary were at their sewing, and Letty in a corner was
+whispering a dialogue with her doll, Mr. Farebrother came up the
+orchard walk, dividing the bright August lights and shadows with the
+tufted grass and the apple-tree boughs.  We know that he was fond of
+his parishioners the Garths, and had thought Mary worth mentioning to
+Lydgate.  He used to the full the clergyman's privilege of disregarding
+the Middlemarch discrimination of ranks, and always told his mother
+that Mrs. Garth was more of a lady than any matron in the town.  Still,
+you see, he spent his evenings at the Vincys', where the matron, though
+less of a lady, presided over a well-lit drawing-room and whist.  In
+those days human intercourse was not determined solely by respect.  But
+the Vicar did heartily respect the Garths, and a visit from him was no
+surprise to that family.  Nevertheless he accounted for it even while
+he was shaking hands, by saying, "I come as an envoy, Mrs. Garth: I
+have something to say to you and Garth on behalf of Fred Vincy.  The
+fact is, poor fellow," he continued, as he seated himself and looked
+round with his bright glance at the three who were listening to him,
+"he has taken me into his confidence."
+
+Mary's heart beat rather quickly: she wondered how far Fred's
+confidence had gone.
+
+"We haven't seen the lad for months," said Caleb.  "I couldn't think
+what was become of him."
+
+"He has been away on a visit," said the Vicar, "because home was a
+little too hot for him, and Lydgate told his mother that the poor
+fellow must not begin to study yet.  But yesterday he came and poured
+himself out to me.  I am very glad he did, because I have seen him grow
+up from a youngster of fourteen, and I am so much at home in the house
+that the children are like nephews and nieces to me.  But it is a
+difficult case to advise upon.  However, he has asked me to come and
+tell you that he is going away, and that he is so miserable about his
+debt to you, and his inability to pay, that he can't bear to come
+himself even to bid you good by."
+
+"Tell him it doesn't signify a farthing," said Caleb, waving his hand.
+"We've had the pinch and have got over it.  And now I'm going to be as
+rich as a Jew."
+
+"Which means," said Mrs. Garth, smiling at the Vicar, "that we are
+going to have enough to bring up the boys well and to keep Mary at
+home."
+
+"What is the treasure-trove?" said Mr. Farebrother.
+
+"I'm going to be agent for two estates, Freshitt and Tipton; and
+perhaps for a pretty little bit of land in Lowick besides: it's all the
+same family connection, and employment spreads like water if it's once
+set going.  It makes me very happy, Mr. Farebrother"--here Caleb threw
+back his head a little, and spread his arms on the elbows of his
+chair--"that I've got an opportunity again with the letting of the
+land, and carrying out a notion or two with improvements.  It's a most
+uncommonly cramping thing, as I've often told Susan, to sit on
+horseback and look over the hedges at the wrong thing, and not be able
+to put your hand to it to make it right.  What people do who go into
+politics I can't think: it drives me almost mad to see mismanagement
+over only a few hundred acres."
+
+It was seldom that Caleb volunteered so long a speech, but his
+happiness had the effect of mountain air: his eyes were bright, and the
+words came without effort.
+
+"I congratulate you heartily, Garth," said the Vicar.  "This is the
+best sort of news I could have had to carry to Fred Vincy, for he dwelt
+a good deal on the injury he had done you in causing you to part with
+money--robbing you of it, he said--which you wanted for other purposes.
+I wish Fred were not such an idle dog; he has some very good points,
+and his father is a little hard upon him."
+
+"Where is he going?" said Mrs. Garth, rather coldly.
+
+"He means to try again for his degree, and he is going up to study
+before term.  I have advised him to do that.  I don't urge him to enter
+the Church--on the contrary.  But if he will go and work so as to pass,
+that will be some guarantee that he has energy and a will; and he is
+quite at sea; he doesn't know what else to do.  So far he will please
+his father, and I have promised in the mean time to try and reconcile
+Vincy to his son's adopting some other line of life.  Fred says frankly
+he is not fit for a clergyman, and I would do anything I could to
+hinder a man from the fatal step of choosing the wrong profession.  He
+quoted to me what you said, Miss Garth--do you remember it?"  (Mr.
+Farebrother used to say "Mary" instead of "Miss Garth," but it was part
+of his delicacy to treat her with the more deference because, according
+to Mrs. Vincy's phrase, she worked for her bread.)
+
+Mary felt uncomfortable, but, determined to take the matter lightly,
+answered at once, "I have said so many impertinent things to Fred--we
+are such old playfellows."
+
+"You said, according to him, that he would be one of those ridiculous
+clergymen who help to make the whole clergy ridiculous.  Really, that
+was so cutting that I felt a little cut myself."
+
+Caleb laughed.  "She gets her tongue from you, Susan," he said, with
+some enjoyment.
+
+"Not its flippancy, father," said Mary, quickly, fearing that her
+mother would be displeased.  "It is rather too bad of Fred to repeat my
+flippant speeches to Mr. Farebrother."
+
+"It was certainly a hasty speech, my dear," said Mrs. Garth, with whom
+speaking evil of dignities was a high misdemeanor.  "We should not
+value our Vicar the less because there was a ridiculous curate in the
+next parish."
+
+"There's something in what she says, though," said Caleb, not disposed
+to have Mary's sharpness undervalued.  "A bad workman of any sort makes
+his fellows mistrusted.  Things hang together," he added, looking on
+the floor and moving his feet uneasily with a sense that words were
+scantier than thoughts.
+
+"Clearly," said the Vicar, amused.  "By being contemptible we set men's
+minds, to the tune of contempt.  I certainly agree with Miss Garth's
+view of the matter, whether I am condemned by it or not.  But as to
+Fred Vincy, it is only fair he should be excused a little: old
+Featherstone's delusive behavior did help to spoil him.  There was
+something quite diabolical in not leaving him a farthing after all.
+But Fred has the good taste not to dwell on that.  And what he cares
+most about is having offended you, Mrs. Garth; he supposes you will
+never think well of him again."
+
+"I have been disappointed in Fred," said Mrs. Garth, with decision.
+"But I shall be ready to think well of him again when he gives me good
+reason to do so."
+
+At this point Mary went out of the room, taking Letty with her.
+
+"Oh, we must forgive young people when they're sorry," said Caleb,
+watching Mary close the door.  "And as you say, Mr. Farebrother, there
+was the very devil in that old man. Now Mary's gone out, I must tell you
+a thing--it's only known to Susan and me, and you'll not tell it again.
+The old scoundrel wanted Mary to burn one of the wills the very night
+he died, when she was sitting up with him by herself, and he offered her
+a sum of money that he had in the box by him if she would do it.  But Mary,
+you understand, could do no such thing--would not be handling his iron
+chest, and so on.  Now, you see, the will he wanted burnt was this last,
+so that if Mary had done what he wanted, Fred Vincy would have had ten
+thousand pounds. The old man did turn to him at the last.  That touches
+poor Mary close; she couldn't help it--she was in the right to do what
+she did, but she feels, as she says, much as if she had knocked down
+somebody's property and broken it against her will, when she was
+rightfully defending herself.  I feel with her, somehow, and if I could
+make any amends to the poor lad, instead of bearing him a grudge for
+the harm he did us, I should be glad to do it.  Now, what is your opinion,
+sir?  Susan doesn't agree with me.  She says--tell what you say, Susan."
+
+"Mary could not have acted otherwise, even if she had known what would
+be the effect on Fred," said Mrs. Garth, pausing from her work, and
+looking at Mr. Farebrother.
+
+"And she was quite ignorant of it.  It seems to me, a loss which falls
+on another because we have done right is not to lie upon our
+conscience."
+
+The Vicar did not answer immediately, and Caleb said, "It's the
+feeling.  The child feels in that way, and I feel with her.  You don't
+mean your horse to tread on a dog when you're backing out of the way;
+but it goes through you, when it's done."
+
+"I am sure Mrs. Garth would agree with you there," said Mr.
+Farebrother, who for some reason seemed more inclined to ruminate than
+to speak.  "One could hardly say that the feeling you mention about
+Fred is wrong--or rather, mistaken--though no man ought to make a claim
+on such feeling."
+
+"Well, well," said Caleb, "it's a secret.  You will not tell Fred."
+
+"Certainly not.  But I shall carry the other good news--that you can
+afford the loss he caused you."
+
+Mr. Farebrother left the house soon after, and seeing Mary in the
+orchard with Letty, went to say good-by to her.  They made a pretty
+picture in the western light which brought out the brightness of the
+apples on the old scant-leaved boughs--Mary in her lavender gingham and
+black ribbons holding a basket, while Letty in her well-worn nankin
+picked up the fallen apples.  If you want to know more particularly how
+Mary looked, ten to one you will see a face like hers in the crowded
+street to-morrow, if you are there on the watch: she will not be among
+those daughters of Zion who are haughty, and walk with stretched-out
+necks and wanton eyes, mincing as they go: let all those pass, and fix
+your eyes on some small plump brownish person of firm but quiet
+carriage, who looks about her, but does not suppose that anybody is
+looking at her.  If she has a broad face and square brow, well-marked
+eyebrows and curly dark hair, a certain expression of amusement in her
+glance which her mouth keeps the secret of, and for the rest features
+entirely insignificant--take that ordinary but not disagreeable person
+for a portrait of Mary Garth.  If you made her smile, she would show
+you perfect little teeth; if you made her angry, she would not raise
+her voice, but would probably say one of the bitterest things you have
+ever tasted the flavor of; if you did her a kindness, she would never
+forget it.  Mary admired the keen-faced handsome little Vicar in his
+well-brushed threadbare clothes more than any man she had had the
+opportunity of knowing.  She had never heard him say a foolish thing,
+though she knew that he did unwise ones; and perhaps foolish sayings
+were more objectionable to her than any of Mr. Farebrother's unwise
+doings.  At least, it was remarkable that the actual imperfections of
+the Vicar's clerical character never seemed to call forth the same
+scorn and dislike which she showed beforehand for the predicted
+imperfections of the clerical character sustained by Fred Vincy.  These
+irregularities of judgment, I imagine, are found even in riper minds
+than Mary Garth's: our impartiality is kept for abstract merit and
+demerit, which none of us ever saw.  Will any one guess towards which
+of those widely different men Mary had the peculiar woman's
+tenderness?--the one she was most inclined to be severe on, or the
+contrary?
+
+"Have you any message for your old playfellow, Miss Garth?" said the
+Vicar, as he took a fragrant apple from the basket which she held
+towards him, and put it in his pocket.  "Something to soften down that
+harsh judgment?  I am going straight to see him."
+
+"No," said Mary, shaking her head, and smiling.  "If I were to say that
+he would not be ridiculous as a clergyman, I must say that he would be
+something worse than ridiculous.  But I am very glad to hear that he is
+going away to work."
+
+"On the other hand, I am very glad to hear that _you_ are not going
+away to work.  My mother, I am sure, will be all the happier if you
+will come to see her at the vicarage: you know she is fond of having
+young people to talk to, and she has a great deal to tell about old
+times.  You will really be doing a kindness."
+
+"I should like it very much, if I may," said Mary.  "Everything seems
+too happy for me all at once.  I thought it would always be part of my
+life to long for home, and losing that grievance makes me feel rather
+empty: I suppose it served instead of sense to fill up my mind?"
+
+"May I go with you, Mary?" whispered Letty--a most inconvenient child,
+who listened to everything.  But she was made exultant by having her
+chin pinched and her cheek kissed by Mr. Farebrother--an incident
+which she narrated to her mother and father.
+
+As the Vicar walked to Lowick, any one watching him closely might have
+seen him twice shrug his shoulders.  I think that the rare Englishmen
+who have this gesture are never of the heavy type--for fear of any
+lumbering instance to the contrary, I will say, hardly ever; they have
+usually a fine temperament and much tolerance towards the smaller
+errors of men (themselves inclusive). The Vicar was holding an inward
+dialogue in which he told himself that there was probably something
+more between Fred and Mary Garth than the regard of old playfellows,
+and replied with a question whether that bit of womanhood were not a
+great deal too choice for that crude young gentleman.  The rejoinder to
+this was the first shrug.  Then he laughed at himself for being likely
+to have felt jealous, as if he had been a man able to marry, which,
+added he, it is as clear as any balance-sheet that I am not.  Whereupon
+followed the second shrug.
+
+What could two men, so different from each other, see in this "brown
+patch," as Mary called herself?  It was certainly not her plainness
+that attracted them (and let all plain young ladies be warned against
+the dangerous encouragement given them by Society to confide in their
+want of beauty). A human being in this aged nation of ours is a very
+wonderful whole, the slow creation of long interchanging influences:
+and charm is a result of two such wholes, the one loving and the one
+loved.
+
+When Mr. and Mrs. Garth were sitting alone, Caleb said, "Susan, guess
+what I'm thinking of."
+
+"The rotation of crops," said Mrs. Garth, smiling at him, above her
+knitting, "or else the back-doors of the Tipton cottages."
+
+"No," said Caleb, gravely; "I am thinking that I could do a great turn
+for Fred Vincy.  Christy's gone, Alfred will be gone soon, and it will
+be five years before Jim is ready to take to business.  I shall want
+help, and Fred might come in and learn the nature of things and act
+under me, and it might be the making of him into a useful man, if he
+gives up being a parson.  What do you think?"
+
+"I think, there is hardly anything honest that his family would object
+to more," said Mrs. Garth, decidedly.
+
+"What care I about their objecting?" said Caleb, with a sturdiness
+which he was apt to show when he had an opinion.  "The lad is of age
+and must get his bread.  He has sense enough and quickness enough; he
+likes being on the land, and it's my belief that he could learn
+business well if he gave his mind to it."
+
+"But would he?  His father and mother wanted him to be a fine
+gentleman, and I think he has the same sort of feeling himself.  They
+all think us beneath them.  And if the proposal came from you, I am
+sure Mrs. Vincy would say that we wanted Fred for Mary."
+
+"Life is a poor tale, if it is to be settled by nonsense of that sort,"
+said Caleb, with disgust.
+
+"Yes, but there is a certain pride which is proper, Caleb."
+
+"I call it improper pride to let fools' notions hinder you from doing a
+good action.  There's no sort of work," said Caleb, with fervor,
+putting out his hand and moving it up and down to mark his emphasis,
+"that could ever be done well, if you minded what fools say.  You must
+have it inside you that your plan is right, and that plan you must
+follow."
+
+"I will not oppose any plan you have set your mind on, Caleb," said
+Mrs. Garth, who was a firm woman, but knew that there were some points
+on which her mild husband was yet firmer.  "Still, it seems to be fixed
+that Fred is to go back to college: will it not be better to wait and
+see what he will choose to do after that?  It is not easy to keep
+people against their will.  And you are not yet quite sure enough of
+your own position, or what you will want."
+
+"Well, it may be better to wait a bit.  But as to my getting plenty of
+work for two, I'm pretty sure of that.  I've always had my hands full
+with scattered things, and there's always something fresh turning up.
+Why, only yesterday--bless me, I don't think I told you!--it was rather
+odd that two men should have been at me on different sides to do the
+same bit of valuing.  And who do you think they were?" said Caleb,
+taking a pinch of snuff and holding it up between his fingers, as if it
+were a part of his exposition.  He was fond of a pinch when it occurred
+to him, but he usually forgot that this indulgence was at his command.
+
+His wife held down her knitting and looked attentive.
+
+"Why, that Rigg, or Rigg Featherstone, was one.  But Bulstrode was
+before him, so I'm going to do it for Bulstrode.  Whether it's mortgage
+or purchase they're going for, I can't tell yet."
+
+"Can that man be going to sell the land just left him--which he has
+taken the name for?" said Mrs. Garth.
+
+"Deuce knows," said Caleb, who never referred the knowledge of
+discreditable doings to any higher power than the deuce.  "But
+Bulstrode has long been wanting to get a handsome bit of land under his
+fingers--that I know.  And it's a difficult matter to get, in this part
+of the country."
+
+Caleb scattered his snuff carefully instead of taking it, and then
+added, "The ins and outs of things are curious.  Here is the land
+they've been all along expecting for Fred, which it seems the old man
+never meant to leave him a foot of, but left it to this side-slip of a
+son that he kept in the dark, and thought of his sticking there and
+vexing everybody as well as he could have vexed 'em himself if he could
+have kept alive.  I say, it would be curious if it got into Bulstrode's
+hands after all.  The old man hated him, and never would bank with him."
+
+"What reason could the miserable creature have for hating a man whom he
+had nothing to do with?" said Mrs. Garth.
+
+"Pooh! where's the use of asking for such fellows' reasons?  The soul
+of man," said Caleb, with the deep tone and grave shake of the head
+which always came when he used this phrase--"The soul of man, when it
+gets fairly rotten, will bear you all sorts of poisonous toad-stools,
+and no eye can see whence came the seed thereof."
+
+It was one of Caleb's quaintnesses, that in his difficulty of finding
+speech for his thought, he caught, as it were, snatches of diction
+which he associated with various points of view or states of mind; and
+whenever he had a feeling of awe, he was haunted by a sense of Biblical
+phraseology, though he could hardly have given a strict quotation.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLI.
+
+    "By swaggering could I never thrive,
+     For the rain it raineth every day.
+                            --Twelfth Night
+
+
+The transactions referred to by Caleb Garth as having gone forward
+between Mr. Bulstrode and Mr. Joshua Rigg Featherstone concerning the
+land attached to Stone Court, had occasioned the interchange of a
+letter or two between these personages.
+
+Who shall tell what may be the effect of writing?  If it happens to
+have been cut in stone, though it lie face down-most for ages on a
+forsaken beach, or "rest quietly under the drums and tramplings of many
+conquests," it may end by letting us into the secret of usurpations and
+other scandals gossiped about long empires ago:--this world being
+apparently a huge whispering-gallery. Such conditions are often
+minutely represented in our petty lifetimes.  As the stone which has
+been kicked by generations of clowns may come by curious little links
+of effect under the eyes of a scholar, through whose labors it may at
+last fix the date of invasions and unlock religions, so a bit of ink
+and paper which has long been an innocent wrapping or stop-gap may at
+last be laid open under the one pair of eyes which have knowledge
+enough to turn it into the opening of a catastrophe.  To Uriel watching
+the progress of planetary history from the sun, the one result would be
+just as much of a coincidence as the other.
+
+Having made this rather lofty comparison I am less uneasy in calling
+attention to the existence of low people by whose interference, however
+little we may like it, the course of the world is very much determined.
+It would be well, certainly, if we could help to reduce their number,
+and something might perhaps be done by not lightly giving occasion to
+their existence.  Socially speaking, Joshua Rigg would have been
+generally pronounced a superfluity.  But those who like Peter
+Featherstone never had a copy of themselves demanded, are the very last
+to wait for such a request either in prose or verse.  The copy in this
+case bore more of outside resemblance to the mother, in whose sex
+frog-features, accompanied with fresh-colored cheeks and a well-rounded
+figure, are compatible with much charm for a certain order of admirers.
+The result is sometimes a frog-faced male, desirable, surely, to no
+order of intelligent beings.  Especially when he is suddenly brought
+into evidence to frustrate other people's expectations--the very
+lowest aspect in which a social superfluity can present himself.
+
+But Mr. Rigg Featherstone's low characteristics were all of the sober,
+water-drinking kind.  From the earliest to the latest hour of the day
+he was always as sleek, neat, and cool as the frog he resembled, and
+old Peter had secretly chuckled over an offshoot almost more
+calculating, and far more imperturbable, than himself.  I will add that
+his finger-nails were scrupulously attended to, and that he meant to
+marry a well-educated young lady (as yet unspecified) whose person was
+good, and whose connections, in a solid middle-class way, were
+undeniable.  Thus his nails and modesty were comparable to those of
+most gentlemen; though his ambition had been educated only by the
+opportunities of a clerk and accountant in the smaller commercial
+houses of a seaport.  He thought the rural Featherstones very simple
+absurd people, and they in their turn regarded his "bringing up" in a
+seaport town as an exaggeration of the monstrosity that their brother
+Peter, and still more Peter's property, should have had such belongings.
+
+The garden and gravel approach, as seen from the two windows of the
+wainscoted parlor at Stone Court, were never in better trim than now,
+when Mr. Rigg Featherstone stood, with his hands behind him, looking
+out on these grounds as their master.  But it seemed doubtful whether
+he looked out for the sake of contemplation or of turning his back to a
+person who stood in the middle of the room, with his legs considerably
+apart and his hands in his trouser-pockets: a person in all respects a
+contrast to the sleek and cool Rigg.  He was a man obviously on the way
+towards sixty, very florid and hairy, with much gray in his bushy
+whiskers and thick curly hair, a stoutish body which showed to
+disadvantage the somewhat worn joinings of his clothes, and the air of
+a swaggerer, who would aim at being noticeable even at a show of
+fireworks, regarding his own remarks on any other person's performance
+as likely to be more interesting than the performance itself.
+
+His name was John Raffles, and he sometimes wrote jocosely W.A.G.
+after his signature, observing when he did so, that he was once taught
+by Leonard Lamb of Finsbury who wrote B.A. after his name, and that he,
+Raffles, originated the witticism of calling that celebrated principal
+Ba-Lamb. Such were the appearance and mental flavor of Mr. Raffles,
+both of which seemed to have a stale odor of travellers' rooms in the
+commercial hotels of that period.
+
+"Come, now, Josh," he was saying, in a full rumbling tone, "look at it
+in this light: here is your poor mother going into the vale of years,
+and you could afford something handsome now to make her comfortable."
+
+"Not while you live.  Nothing would make her comfortable while you
+live," returned Rigg, in his cool high voice.  "What I give her, you'll
+take."
+
+"You bear me a grudge, Josh, that I know.  But come, now--as between
+man and man--without humbug--a little capital might enable me to make a
+first-rate thing of the shop.  The tobacco trade is growing.  I should
+cut my own nose off in not doing the best I could at it.  I should
+stick to it like a flea to a fleece for my own sake.  I should always
+be on the spot.  And nothing would make your poor mother so happy.
+I've pretty well done with my wild oats--turned fifty-five. I want to
+settle down in my chimney-corner. And if I once buckled to the tobacco
+trade, I could bring an amount of brains and experience to bear on it
+that would not be found elsewhere in a hurry.  I don't want to be
+bothering you one time after another, but to get things once for all
+into the right channel.  Consider that, Josh--as between man and
+man--and with your poor mother to be made easy for her life.  I was
+always fond of the old woman, by Jove!"
+
+"Have you done?" said Mr. Rigg, quietly, without looking away from the
+window.
+
+"Yes, I've done," said Raffles, taking hold of his hat which stood
+before him on the table, and giving it a sort of oratorical push.
+
+"Then just listen to me.  The more you say anything, the less I shall
+believe it.  The more you want me to do a thing, the more reason I
+shall have for never doing it.  Do you think I mean to forget your
+kicking me when I was a lad, and eating all the best victual away from
+me and my mother?  Do you think I forget your always coming home to
+sell and pocket everything, and going off again leaving us in the
+lurch?  I should be glad to see you whipped at the cart-tail.  My
+mother was a fool to you: she'd no right to give me a father-in-law,
+and she's been punished for it.  She shall have her weekly allowance
+paid and no more: and that shall be stopped if you dare to come on to
+these premises again, or to come into this country after me again.  The
+next time you show yourself inside the gates here, you shall be driven
+off with the dogs and the wagoner's whip."
+
+As Rigg pronounced the last words he turned round and looked at Raffles
+with his prominent frozen eyes.  The contrast was as striking as it
+could have been eighteen years before, when Rigg was a most unengaging
+kickable boy, and Raffles was the rather thick-set Adonis of bar-rooms
+and back-parlors. But the advantage now was on the side of Rigg, and
+auditors of this conversation might probably have expected that Raffles
+would retire with the air of a defeated dog.  Not at all.  He made a
+grimace which was habitual with him whenever he was "out" in a game;
+then subsided into a laugh, and drew a brandy-flask from his pocket.
+
+"Come, Josh," he said, in a cajoling tone, "give us a spoonful of
+brandy, and a sovereign to pay the way back, and I'll go.  Honor
+bright!  I'll go like a bullet, _by_ Jove!"
+
+"Mind," said Rigg, drawing out a bunch of keys, "if I ever see you
+again, I shan't speak to you.  I don't own you any more than if I saw a
+crow; and if you want to own me you'll get nothing by it but a
+character for being what you are--a spiteful, brassy, bullying rogue."
+
+"That's a pity, now, Josh," said Raffles, affecting to scratch his head
+and wrinkle his brows upward as if he were nonplussed.  "I'm very fond
+of you; _by_ Jove, I am!  There's nothing I like better than plaguing
+you--you're so like your mother, and I must do without it.  But the
+brandy and the sovereign's a bargain."
+
+He jerked forward the flask and Rigg went to a fine old oaken bureau
+with his keys.  But Raffles had reminded himself by his movement with
+the flask that it had become dangerously loose from its leather
+covering, and catching sight of a folded paper which had fallen within
+the fender, he took it up and shoved it under the leather so as to make
+the glass firm.
+
+By that time Rigg came forward with a brandy-bottle, filled the flask,
+and handed Raffles a sovereign, neither looking at him nor speaking to
+him.  After locking up the bureau again, he walked to the window and
+gazed out as impassibly as he had done at the beginning of the
+interview, while Raffles took a small allowance from the flask, screwed
+it up, and deposited it in his side-pocket, with provoking slowness,
+making a grimace at his stepson's back.
+
+"Farewell, Josh--and if forever!" said Raffles, turning back his head
+as he opened the door.
+
+Rigg saw him leave the grounds and enter the lane.  The gray day had
+turned to a light drizzling rain, which freshened the hedgerows and the
+grassy borders of the by-roads, and hastened the laborers who were
+loading the last shocks of corn.  Raffles, walking with the uneasy gait
+of a town loiterer obliged to do a bit of country journeying on foot,
+looked as incongruous amid this moist rural quiet and industry as if he
+had been a baboon escaped from a menagerie.  But there were none to
+stare at him except the long-weaned calves, and none to show dislike of
+his appearance except the little water-rats which rustled away at his
+approach.
+
+He was fortunate enough when he got on to the highroad to be overtaken
+by the stage-coach, which carried him to Brassing; and there he took
+the new-made railway, observing to his fellow-passengers that he
+considered it pretty well seasoned now it had done for Huskisson.  Mr.
+Raffles on most occasions kept up the sense of having been educated at
+an academy, and being able, if he chose, to pass well everywhere;
+indeed, there was not one of his fellow-men whom he did not feel
+himself in a position to ridicule and torment, confident of the
+entertainment which he thus gave to all the rest of the company.
+
+He played this part now with as much spirit as if his journey had been
+entirely successful, resorting at frequent intervals to his flask.  The
+paper with which he had wedged it was a letter signed Nicholas
+Bulstrode, but Raffles was not likely to disturb it from its present
+useful position.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLII.
+
+    "How much, methinks, I could despise this man
+     Were I not bound in charity against it!
+                          --SHAKESPEARE: Henry VIII.
+
+
+One of the professional calls made by Lydgate soon after his return
+from his wedding-journey was to Lowick Manor, in consequence of a
+letter which had requested him to fix a time for his visit.
+
+Mr. Casaubon had never put any question concerning the nature of his
+illness to Lydgate, nor had he even to Dorothea betrayed any anxiety as
+to how far it might be likely to cut short his labors or his life.  On
+this point, as on all others, he shrank from pity; and if the suspicion
+of being pitied for anything in his lot surmised or known in spite of
+himself was embittering, the idea of calling forth a show of compassion
+by frankly admitting an alarm or a sorrow was necessarily intolerable
+to him.  Every proud mind knows something of this experience, and
+perhaps it is only to be overcome by a sense of fellowship deep enough
+to make all efforts at isolation seem mean and petty instead of
+exalting.
+
+But Mr. Casaubon was now brooding over something through which the
+question of his health and life haunted his silence with a more
+harassing importunity even than through the autumnal unripeness of his
+authorship.  It is true that this last might be called his central
+ambition; but there are some kinds of authorship in which by far the
+largest result is the uneasy susceptibility accumulated in the
+consciousness of the author--one knows of the river by a few streaks
+amid a long-gathered deposit of uncomfortable mud.  That was the way
+with Mr. Casaubon's hard intellectual labors.  Their most
+characteristic result was not the "Key to all Mythologies," but a
+morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he
+had not demonstrably merited--a perpetual suspicious conjecture that
+the views entertained of him were not to his advantage--a melancholy
+absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate
+resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.
+
+Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have absorbed
+and dried him, was really no security against wounds, least of all
+against those which came from Dorothea.  And he had begun now to frame
+possibilities for the future which were somehow more embittering to him
+than anything his mind had dwelt on before.
+
+Against certain facts he was helpless: against Will Ladislaw's
+existence, his defiant stay in the neighborhood of Lowick, and his
+flippant state of mind with regard to the possessors of authentic,
+well-stamped erudition: against Dorothea's nature, always taking on
+some new shape of ardent activity, and even in submission and silence
+covering fervid reasons which it was an irritation to think of: against
+certain notions and likings which had taken possession of her mind in
+relation to subjects that he could not possibly discuss with her.
+There was no denying that Dorothea was as virtuous and lovely a young
+lady as he could have obtained for a wife; but a young lady turned out
+to be something more troublesome than he had conceived.  She nursed
+him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous
+about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband's mind the
+certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like
+a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts--was accompanied with a
+power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too
+luminously as a part of things in general.  His discontent passed
+vapor-like through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to
+that inappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.
+
+Poor Mr. Casaubon!  This suffering was the harder to bear because it
+seemed like a betrayal: the young creature who had worshipped him with
+perfect trust had quickly turned into the critical wife; and early
+instances of criticism and resentment had made an impression which no
+tenderness and submission afterwards could remove.  To his suspicious
+interpretation Dorothea's silence now was a suppressed rebellion; a
+remark from her which he had not in any way anticipated was an
+assertion of conscious superiority; her gentle answers had an
+irritating cautiousness in them; and when she acquiesced it was a
+self-approved effort of forbearance.  The tenacity with which he strove
+to hide this inward drama made it the more vivid for him; as we hear
+with the more keenness what we wish others not to hear.
+
+Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think
+it quite ordinary.  Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot
+out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the
+blot?  I know no speck so troublesome as self.  And who, if Mr.
+Casaubon had chosen to expound his discontents--his suspicions that he
+was not any longer adored without criticism--could have denied that
+they were founded on good reasons?  On the contrary, there was a strong
+reason to be added, which he had not himself taken explicitly into
+account--namely, that he was not unmixedly adorable.  He suspected
+this, however, as he suspected other things, without confessing it, and
+like the rest of us, felt how soothing it would have been to have a
+companion who would never find it out.
+
+This sore susceptibility in relation to Dorothea was thoroughly
+prepared before Will Ladislaw had returned to Lowick, and what had
+occurred since then had brought Mr. Casaubon's power of suspicious
+construction into exasperated activity.  To all the facts which he
+knew, he added imaginary facts both present and future which became
+more real to him than those because they called up a stronger dislike,
+a more predominating bitterness.  Suspicion and jealousy of Will
+Ladislaw's intentions, suspicion and jealousy of Dorothea's
+impressions, were constantly at their weaving work.  It would be quite
+unjust to him to suppose that he could have entered into any coarse
+misinterpretation of Dorothea: his own habits of mind and conduct,
+quite as much as the open elevation of her nature, saved him from any
+such mistake.  What he was jealous of was her opinion, the sway that
+might be given to her ardent mind in its judgments, and the future
+possibilities to which these might lead her.  As to Will, though until
+his last defiant letter he had nothing definite which he would choose
+formally to allege against him, he felt himself warranted in believing
+that he was capable of any design which could fascinate a rebellious
+temper and an undisciplined impulsiveness.  He was quite sure that
+Dorothea was the cause of Will's return from Rome, and his
+determination to settle in the neighborhood; and he was penetrating
+enough to imagine that Dorothea had innocently encouraged this course.
+It was as clear as possible that she was ready to be attached to Will
+and to be pliant to his suggestions: they had never had a tete-a-tete
+without her bringing away from it some new troublesome impression, and
+the last interview that Mr. Casaubon was aware of (Dorothea, on
+returning from Freshitt Hall, had for the first time been silent about
+having seen Will) had led to a scene which roused an angrier feeling
+against them both than he had ever known before.  Dorothea's outpouring
+of her notions about money, in the darkness of the night, had done
+nothing but bring a mixture of more odious foreboding into her
+husband's mind.
+
+And there was the shock lately given to his health always sadly present
+with him.  He was certainly much revived; he had recovered all his
+usual power of work: the illness might have been mere fatigue, and
+there might still be twenty years of achievement before him, which
+would justify the thirty years of preparation.  That prospect was made
+the sweeter by a flavor of vengeance against the hasty sneers of Carp &
+Company; for even when Mr. Casaubon was carrying his taper among the
+tombs of the past, those modern figures came athwart the dim light, and
+interrupted his diligent exploration.  To convince Carp of his mistake,
+so that he would have to eat his own words with a good deal of
+indigestion, would be an agreeable accident of triumphant authorship,
+which the prospect of living to future ages on earth and to all
+eternity in heaven could not exclude from contemplation.  Since, thus,
+the prevision of his own unending bliss could not nullify the bitter
+savors of irritated jealousy and vindictiveness, it is the less
+surprising that the probability of a transient earthly bliss for other
+persons, when he himself should have entered into glory, had not a
+potently sweetening effect.  If the truth should be that some
+undermining disease was at work within him, there might be large
+opportunity for some people to be the happier when he was gone; and if
+one of those people should be Will Ladislaw, Mr. Casaubon objected so
+strongly that it seemed as if the annoyance would make part of his
+disembodied existence.
+
+This is a very bare and therefore a very incomplete way of putting the
+case.  The human soul moves in many channels, and Mr. Casaubon, we
+know, had a sense of rectitude and an honorable pride in satisfying the
+requirements of honor, which compelled him to find other reasons for
+his conduct than those of jealousy and vindictiveness.  The way in
+which Mr. Casaubon put the case was this:--"In marrying Dorothea Brooke
+I had to care for her well-being in case of my death.  But well-being
+is not to be secured by ample, independent possession of property; on
+the contrary, occasions might arise in which such possession might
+expose her to the more danger.  She is ready prey to any man who knows
+how to play adroitly either on her affectionate ardor or her Quixotic
+enthusiasm; and a man stands by with that very intention in his mind--a
+man with no other principle than transient caprice, and who has a
+personal animosity towards me--I am sure of it--an animosity which is
+fed by the consciousness of his ingratitude, and which he has
+constantly vented in ridicule of which I am as well assured as if I had
+heard it.  Even if I live I shall not be without uneasiness as to what
+he may attempt through indirect influence.  This man has gained
+Dorothea's ear: he has fascinated her attention; he has evidently tried
+to impress her mind with the notion that he has claims beyond anything
+I have done for him.  If I die--and he is waiting here on the watch for
+that--he will persuade her to marry him.  That would be calamity for
+her and success for him.  _She_ would not think it calamity: he would
+make her believe anything; she has a tendency to immoderate attachment
+which she inwardly reproaches me for not responding to, and already her
+mind is occupied with his fortunes.  He thinks of an easy conquest and
+of entering into my nest.  That I will hinder! Such a marriage would be
+fatal to Dorothea.  Has he ever persisted in anything except from
+contradiction?  In knowledge he has always tried to be showy at small
+cost.  In religion he could be, as long as it suited him, the facile
+echo of Dorothea's vagaries.  When was sciolism ever dissociated from
+laxity?  I utterly distrust his morals, and it is my duty to hinder to
+the utmost the fulfilment of his designs."
+
+The arrangements made by Mr. Casaubon on his marriage left strong
+measures open to him, but in ruminating on them his mind inevitably
+dwelt so much on the probabilities of his own life that the longing to
+get the nearest possible calculation had at last overcome his proud
+reticence, and had determined him to ask Lydgate's opinion as to the
+nature of his illness.
+
+He had mentioned to Dorothea that Lydgate was coming by appointment at
+half-past three, and in answer to her anxious question, whether he had
+felt ill, replied,--"No, I merely wish to have his opinion concerning
+some habitual symptoms.  You need not see him, my dear.  I shall give
+orders that he may be sent to me in the Yew-tree Walk, where I shall be
+taking my usual exercise."
+
+When Lydgate entered the Yew-tree Walk he saw Mr. Casaubon slowly
+receding with his hands behind him according to his habit, and his head
+bent forward.  It was a lovely afternoon; the leaves from the lofty
+limes were falling silently across the sombre evergreens, while the
+lights and shadows slept side by side: there was no sound but the
+cawing of the rooks, which to the accustomed ear is a lullaby, or that
+last solemn lullaby, a dirge.  Lydgate, conscious of an energetic frame
+in its prime, felt some compassion when the figure which he was likely
+soon to overtake turned round, and in advancing towards him showed more
+markedly than ever the signs of premature age--the student's bent
+shoulders, the emaciated limbs, and the melancholy lines of the mouth.
+"Poor fellow," he thought, "some men with his years are like lions; one
+can tell nothing of their age except that they are full grown."
+
+"Mr. Lydgate," said Mr. Casaubon, with his invariably polite air, "I am
+exceedingly obliged to you for your punctuality.  We will, if you
+please, carry on our conversation in walking to and fro."
+
+"I hope your wish to see me is not due to the return of unpleasant
+symptoms," said Lydgate, filling up a pause.
+
+"Not immediately--no.  In order to account for that wish I must
+mention--what it were otherwise needless to refer to--that my life, on
+all collateral accounts insignificant, derives a possible importance
+from the incompleteness of labors which have extended through all its
+best years.  In short, I have long had on hand a work which I would
+fain leave behind me in such a state, at least, that it might be
+committed to the press by--others.  Were I assured that this is the
+utmost I can reasonably expect, that assurance would be a useful
+circumscription of my attempts, and a guide in both the positive and
+negative determination of my course."
+
+Here Mr. Casaubon paused, removed one hand from his back and thrust it
+between the buttons of his single-breasted coat.  To a mind largely
+instructed in the human destiny hardly anything could be more
+interesting than the inward conflict implied in his formal measured
+address, delivered with the usual sing-song and motion of the head.
+Nay, are there many situations more sublimely tragic than the struggle
+of the soul with the demand to renounce a work which has been all the
+significance of its life--a significance which is to vanish as the
+waters which come and go where no man has need of them?  But there was
+nothing to strike others as sublime about Mr. Casaubon, and Lydgate,
+who had some contempt at hand for futile scholarship, felt a little
+amusement mingling with his pity.  He was at present too ill acquainted
+with disaster to enter into the pathos of a lot where everything is
+below the level of tragedy except the passionate egoism of the sufferer.
+
+"You refer to the possible hindrances from want of health?" he said,
+wishing to help forward Mr. Casaubon's purpose, which seemed to be
+clogged by some hesitation.
+
+"I do.  You have not implied to me that the symptoms which--I am bound
+to testify--you watched with scrupulous care, were those of a fatal
+disease.  But were it so, Mr. Lydgate, I should desire to know the
+truth without reservation, and I appeal to you for an exact statement
+of your conclusions: I request it as a friendly service.  If you can
+tell me that my life is not threatened by anything else than ordinary
+casualties, I shall rejoice, on grounds which I have already indicated.
+If not, knowledge of the truth is even more important to me."
+
+"Then I can no longer hesitate as to my course," said Lydgate; "but the
+first thing I must impress on you is that my conclusions are doubly
+uncertain--uncertain not only because of my fallibility, but because
+diseases of the heart are eminently difficult to found predictions on.
+In any case, one can hardly increase appreciably the tremendous
+uncertainty of life."
+
+Mr. Casaubon winced perceptibly, but bowed.
+
+"I believe that you are suffering from what is called fatty
+degeneration of the heart, a disease which was first divined and
+explored by Laennec, the man who gave us the stethoscope, not so very
+many years ago.  A good deal of experience--a more lengthened
+observation--is wanting on the subject.  But after what you have said,
+it is my duty to tell you that death from this disease is often sudden.
+At the same time, no such result can be predicted.  Your condition may
+be consistent with a tolerably comfortable life for another fifteen
+years, or even more.  I could add no information to this beyond
+anatomical or medical details, which would leave expectation at
+precisely the same point." Lydgate's instinct was fine enough to tell
+him that plain speech, quite free from ostentatious caution, would be
+felt by Mr. Casaubon as a tribute of respect.
+
+"I thank you, Mr. Lydgate," said Mr. Casaubon, after a moment's pause.
+"One thing more I have still to ask: did you communicate what you have
+now told me to Mrs. Casaubon?"
+
+"Partly--I mean, as to the possible issues."  Lydgate was going to
+explain why he had told Dorothea, but Mr. Casaubon, with an
+unmistakable desire to end the conversation, waved his hand slightly,
+and said again, "I thank you," proceeding to remark on the rare beauty
+of the day.
+
+Lydgate, certain that his patient wished to be alone, soon left him;
+and the black figure with hands behind and head bent forward continued
+to pace the walk where the dark yew-trees gave him a mute companionship
+in melancholy, and the little shadows of bird or leaf that fleeted
+across the isles of sunlight, stole along in silence as in the presence
+of a sorrow.  Here was a man who now for the first time found himself
+looking into the eyes of death--who was passing through one of those
+rare moments of experience when we feel the truth of a commonplace,
+which is as different from what we call knowing it, as the vision of
+waters upon the earth is different from the delirious vision of the
+water which cannot be had to cool the burning tongue.  When the
+commonplace "We must all die" transforms itself suddenly into the acute
+consciousness "I must die--and soon," then death grapples us, and his
+fingers are cruel; afterwards, he may come to fold us in his arms as
+our mother did, and our last moment of dim earthly discerning may be
+like the first.  To Mr. Casaubon now, it was as if he suddenly found
+himself on the dark river-brink and heard the plash of the oncoming
+oar, not discerning the forms, but expecting the summons.  In such an
+hour the mind does not change its lifelong bias, but carries it onward
+in imagination to the other side of death, gazing backward--perhaps
+with the divine calm of beneficence, perhaps with the petty anxieties
+of self-assertion. What was Mr. Casaubon's bias his acts will give us a
+clew to.  He held himself to be, with some private scholarly
+reservations, a believing Christian, as to estimates of the present and
+hopes of the future.  But what we strive to gratify, though we may call
+it a distant hope, is an immediate desire: the future estate for which
+men drudge up city alleys exists already in their imagination and love.
+And Mr. Casaubon's immediate desire was not for divine communion and
+light divested of earthly conditions; his passionate longings, poor
+man, clung low and mist-like in very shady places.
+
+Dorothea had been aware when Lydgate had ridden away, and she had
+stepped into the garden, with the impulse to go at once to her husband.
+But she hesitated, fearing to offend him by obtruding herself; for her
+ardor, continually repulsed, served, with her intense memory, to
+heighten her dread, as thwarted energy subsides into a shudder; and she
+wandered slowly round the nearer clumps of trees until she saw him
+advancing.  Then she went towards him, and might have represented a
+heaven-sent angel coming with a promise that the short hours remaining
+should yet be filled with that faithful love which clings the closer to
+a comprehended grief.  His glance in reply to hers was so chill that
+she felt her timidity increased; yet she turned and passed her hand
+through his arm.
+
+Mr. Casaubon kept his hands behind him and allowed her pliant arm to
+cling with difficulty against his rigid arm.
+
+There was something horrible to Dorothea in the sensation which this
+unresponsive hardness inflicted on her.  That is a strong word, but not
+too strong: it is in these acts called trivialities that the seeds of
+joy are forever wasted, until men and women look round with haggard
+faces at the devastation their own waste has made, and say, the earth
+bears no harvest of sweetness--calling their denial knowledge.  You may
+ask why, in the name of manliness, Mr. Casaubon should have behaved in
+that way.  Consider that his was a mind which shrank from pity: have
+you ever watched in such a mind the effect of a suspicion that what is
+pressing it as a grief may be really a source of contentment, either
+actual or future, to the being who already offends by pitying?
+Besides, he knew little of Dorothea's sensations, and had not reflected
+that on such an occasion as the present they were comparable in
+strength to his own sensibilities about Carp's criticisms.
+
+Dorothea did not withdraw her arm, but she could not venture to speak.
+Mr. Casaubon did not say, "I wish to be alone," but he directed his
+steps in silence towards the house, and as they entered by the glass
+door on this eastern side, Dorothea withdrew her arm and lingered on
+the matting, that she might leave her husband quite free.  He entered
+the library and shut himself in, alone with his sorrow.
+
+She went up to her boudoir.  The open bow-window let in the serene
+glory of the afternoon lying in the avenue, where the lime-trees cast
+long shadows.  But Dorothea knew nothing of the scene.  She threw
+herself on a chair, not heeding that she was in the dazzling sun-rays:
+if there were discomfort in that, how could she tell that it was not
+part of her inward misery?
+
+She was in the reaction of a rebellious anger stronger than any she had
+felt since her marriage.  Instead of tears there came words:--
+
+"What have I done--what am I--that he should treat me so?  He never
+knows what is in my mind--he never cares.  What is the use of anything
+I do?  He wishes he had never married me."
+
+She began to hear herself, and was checked into stillness.  Like one
+who has lost his way and is weary, she sat and saw as in one glance all
+the paths of her young hope which she should never find again.  And
+just as clearly in the miserable light she saw her own and her
+husband's solitude--how they walked apart so that she was obliged to
+survey him.  If he had drawn her towards him, she would never have
+surveyed him--never have said, "Is he worth living for?" but would have
+felt him simply a part of her own life.  Now she said bitterly, "It is
+his fault, not mine."  In the jar of her whole being, Pity was
+overthrown.  Was it her fault that she had believed in him--had
+believed in his worthiness?--And what, exactly, was he?--  She was able
+enough to estimate him--she who waited on his glances with trembling,
+and shut her best soul in prison, paying it only hidden visits, that
+she might be petty enough to please him.  In such a crisis as this,
+some women begin to hate.
+
+The sun was low when Dorothea was thinking that she would not go down
+again, but would send a message to her husband saying that she was not
+well and preferred remaining up-stairs. She had never deliberately
+allowed her resentment to govern her in this way before, but she
+believed now that she could not see him again without telling him the
+truth about her feeling, and she must wait till she could do it without
+interruption.  He might wonder and be hurt at her message.  It was good
+that he should wonder and be hurt.  Her anger said, as anger is apt to
+say, that God was with her--that all heaven, though it were crowded
+with spirits watching them, must be on her side.  She had determined to
+ring her bell, when there came a rap at the door.
+
+Mr. Casaubon had sent to say that he would have his dinner in the
+library.  He wished to be quite alone this evening, being much occupied.
+
+"I shall not dine, then, Tantripp."
+
+"Oh, madam, let me bring you a little something?"
+
+"No; I am not well.  Get everything ready in my dressing room, but pray
+do not disturb me again."
+
+Dorothea sat almost motionless in her meditative struggle, while the
+evening slowly deepened into night.  But the struggle changed
+continually, as that of a man who begins with a movement towards
+striking and ends with conquering his desire to strike.  The energy
+that would animate a crime is not more than is wanted to inspire a
+resolved submission, when the noble habit of the soul reasserts itself.
+That thought with which Dorothea had gone out to meet her husband--her
+conviction that he had been asking about the possible arrest of all his
+work, and that the answer must have wrung his heart, could not be long
+without rising beside the image of him, like a shadowy monitor looking
+at her anger with sad remonstrance.  It cost her a litany of pictured
+sorrows and of silent cries that she might be the mercy for those
+sorrows--but the resolved submission did come; and when the house was
+still, and she knew that it was near the time when Mr. Casaubon
+habitually went to rest, she opened her door gently and stood outside
+in the darkness waiting for his coming up-stairs with a light in his
+hand.  If he did not come soon she thought that she would go down and
+even risk incurring another pang.  She would never again expect
+anything else.  But she did hear the library door open, and slowly the
+light advanced up the staircase without noise from the footsteps on the
+carpet.  When her husband stood opposite to her, she saw that his face
+was more haggard.  He started slightly on seeing her, and she looked up
+at him beseechingly, without speaking.
+
+"Dorothea!" he said, with a gentle surprise in his tone.  "Were you
+waiting for me?"
+
+"Yes, I did not like to disturb you."
+
+"Come, my dear, come.  You are young, and need not to extend your life
+by watching."
+
+When the kind quiet melancholy of that speech fell on Dorothea's ears,
+she felt something like the thankfulness that might well up in us if we
+had narrowly escaped hurting a lamed creature.  She put her hand into
+her husband's, and they went along the broad corridor together.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK V.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE DEAD HAND.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIII.
+
+    This figure hath high price: 't was wrought with love
+    Ages ago in finest ivory;
+    Nought modish in it, pure and noble lines
+    Of generous womanhood that fits all time
+    That too is costly ware; majolica
+    Of deft design, to please a lordly eye:
+    The smile, you see, is perfect--wonderful
+    As mere Faience! a table ornament
+    To suit the richest mounting."
+
+
+Dorothea seldom left home without her husband, but she did occasionally
+drive into Middlemarch alone, on little errands of shopping or charity
+such as occur to every lady of any wealth when she lives within three
+miles of a town.  Two days after that scene in the Yew-tree Walk, she
+determined to use such an opportunity in order if possible to see
+Lydgate, and learn from him whether her husband had really felt any
+depressing change of symptoms which he was concealing from her, and
+whether he had insisted on knowing the utmost about himself.  She felt
+almost guilty in asking for knowledge about him from another, but the
+dread of being without it--the dread of that ignorance which would make
+her unjust or hard--overcame every scruple.  That there had been some
+crisis in her husband's mind she was certain: he had the very next day
+begun a new method of arranging his notes, and had associated her quite
+newly in carrying out his plan.  Poor Dorothea needed to lay up stores
+of patience.
+
+It was about four o'clock when she drove to Lydgate's house in Lowick
+Gate, wishing, in her immediate doubt of finding him at home, that she
+had written beforehand.  And he was not at home.
+
+"Is Mrs. Lydgate at home?" said Dorothea, who had never, that she knew
+of, seen Rosamond, but now remembered the fact of the marriage.  Yes,
+Mrs. Lydgate was at home.
+
+"I will go in and speak to her, if she will allow me.  Will you ask her
+if she can see me--see Mrs. Casaubon, for a few minutes?"
+
+When the servant had gone to deliver that message, Dorothea could hear
+sounds of music through an open window--a few notes from a man's voice
+and then a piano bursting into roulades.  But the roulades broke off
+suddenly, and then the servant came back saying that Mrs. Lydgate would
+be happy to see Mrs. Casaubon.
+
+When the drawing-room door opened and Dorothea entered, there was a
+sort of contrast not infrequent in country life when the habits of the
+different ranks were less blent than now.  Let those who know, tell us
+exactly what stuff it was that Dorothea wore in those days of mild
+autumn--that thin white woollen stuff soft to the touch and soft to the
+eye.  It always seemed to have been lately washed, and to smell of the
+sweet hedges--was always in the shape of a pelisse with sleeves hanging
+all out of the fashion.  Yet if she had entered before a still audience
+as Imogene or Cato's daughter, the dress might have seemed right
+enough: the grace and dignity were in her limbs and neck; and about her
+simply parted hair and candid eyes the large round poke which was then
+in the fate of women, seemed no more odd as a head-dress than the gold
+trencher we call a halo.  By the present audience of two persons, no
+dramatic heroine could have been expected with more interest than Mrs.
+Casaubon.  To Rosamond she was one of those county divinities not
+mixing with Middlemarch mortality, whose slightest marks of manner or
+appearance were worthy of her study; moreover, Rosamond was not without
+satisfaction that Mrs. Casaubon should have an opportunity of studying
+_her_. What is the use of being exquisite if you are not seen by the
+best judges? and since Rosamond had received the highest compliments at
+Sir Godwin Lydgate's, she felt quite confident of the impression she
+must make on people of good birth.  Dorothea put out her hand with her
+usual simple kindness, and looked admiringly at Lydgate's lovely
+bride--aware that there was a gentleman standing at a distance, but
+seeing him merely as a coated figure at a wide angle.  The gentleman
+was too much occupied with the presence of the one woman to reflect on
+the contrast between the two--a contrast that would certainly have been
+striking to a calm observer.  They were both tall, and their eyes were
+on a level; but imagine Rosamond's infantine blondness and wondrous
+crown of hair-plaits, with her pale-blue dress of a fit and fashion so
+perfect that no dressmaker could look at it without emotion, a large
+embroidered collar which it was to be hoped all beholders would know
+the price of, her small hands duly set off with rings, and that
+controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive
+substitute for simplicity.
+
+"Thank you very much for allowing me to interrupt you," said Dorothea,
+immediately.  "I am anxious to see Mr. Lydgate, if possible, before I
+go home, and I hoped that you might possibly tell me where I could find
+him, or even allow me to wait for him, if you expect him soon."
+
+"He is at the New Hospital," said Rosamond; "I am not sure how soon he
+will come home.  But I can send for him."
+
+"Will you let me go and fetch him?" said Will Ladislaw, coming forward.
+He had already taken up his hat before Dorothea entered.  She colored
+with surprise, but put out her hand with a smile of unmistakable
+pleasure, saying--
+
+"I did not know it was you: I had no thought of seeing you here."
+
+"May I go to the Hospital and tell Mr. Lydgate that you wish to see
+him?" said Will.
+
+"It would be quicker to send the carriage for him," said Dorothea, "if
+you will be kind enough to give the message to the coachman."
+
+Will was moving to the door when Dorothea, whose mind had flashed in an
+instant over many connected memories, turned quickly and said, "I will
+go myself, thank you.  I wish to lose no time before getting home
+again.  I will drive to the Hospital and see Mr. Lydgate there.  Pray
+excuse me, Mrs. Lydgate.  I am very much obliged to you."
+
+Her mind was evidently arrested by some sudden thought, and she left
+the room hardly conscious of what was immediately around her--hardly
+conscious that Will opened the door for her and offered her his arm to
+lead her to the carriage.  She took the arm but said nothing.  Will was
+feeling rather vexed and miserable, and found nothing to say on his
+side.  He handed her into the carriage in silence, they said good-by,
+and Dorothea drove away.
+
+In the five minutes' drive to the Hospital she had time for some
+reflections that were quite new to her.  Her decision to go, and her
+preoccupation in leaving the room, had come from the sudden sense that
+there would be a sort of deception in her voluntarily allowing any
+further intercourse between herself and Will which she was unable to
+mention to her husband, and already her errand in seeking Lydgate was a
+matter of concealment.  That was all that had been explicitly in her
+mind; but she had been urged also by a vague discomfort.  Now that she
+was alone in her drive, she heard the notes of the man's voice and the
+accompanying piano, which she had not noted much at the time, returning
+on her inward sense; and she found herself thinking with some wonder
+that Will Ladislaw was passing his time with Mrs. Lydgate in her
+husband's absence.  And then she could not help remembering that he had
+passed some time with her under like circumstances, so why should there
+be any unfitness in the fact?  But Will was Mr. Casaubon's relative,
+and one towards whom she was bound to show kindness.  Still there had
+been signs which perhaps she ought to have understood as implying that
+Mr. Casaubon did not like his cousin's visits during his own absence.
+"Perhaps I have been mistaken in many things," said poor Dorothea to
+herself, while the tears came rolling and she had to dry them quickly.
+She felt confusedly unhappy, and the image of Will which had been so
+clear to her before was mysteriously spoiled.  But the carriage stopped
+at the gate of the Hospital.  She was soon walking round the grass
+plots with Lydgate, and her feelings recovered the strong bent which
+had made her seek for this interview.
+
+Will Ladislaw, meanwhile, was mortified, and knew the reason of it
+clearly enough.  His chances of meeting Dorothea were rare; and here
+for the first time there had come a chance which had set him at a
+disadvantage.  It was not only, as it had been hitherto, that she was
+not supremely occupied with him, but that she had seen him under
+circumstances in which he might appear not to be supremely occupied
+with her.  He felt thrust to a new distance from her, amongst the
+circles of Middlemarchers who made no part of her life.  But that was
+not his fault: of course, since he had taken his lodgings in the town,
+he had been making as many acquaintances as he could, his position
+requiring that he should know everybody and everything.  Lydgate was
+really better worth knowing than any one else in the neighborhood, and
+he happened to have a wife who was musical and altogether worth calling
+upon.  Here was the whole history of the situation in which Diana had
+descended too unexpectedly on her worshipper.  It was mortifying.  Will
+was conscious that he should not have been at Middlemarch but for
+Dorothea; and yet his position there was threatening to divide him from
+her with those barriers of habitual sentiment which are more fatal to
+the persistence of mutual interest than all the distance between Rome
+and Britain.  Prejudices about rank and status were easy enough to defy
+in the form of a tyrannical letter from Mr. Casaubon; but prejudices,
+like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle--solid
+as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as
+the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.  And Will was
+of a temperament to feel keenly the presence of subtleties: a man of
+clumsier perceptions would not have felt, as he did, that for the first
+time some sense of unfitness in perfect freedom with him had sprung up
+in Dorothea's mind, and that their silence, as he conducted her to the
+carriage, had had a chill in it.  Perhaps Casaubon, in his hatred and
+jealousy, had been insisting to Dorothea that Will had slid below her
+socially.  Confound Casaubon!
+
+Will re-entered the drawing-room, took up his hat, and looking
+irritated as he advanced towards Mrs. Lydgate, who had seated herself
+at her work-table, said--
+
+"It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted.  May I come
+another day and just finish about the rendering of 'Lungi dal caro
+bene'?"
+
+"I shall be happy to be taught," said Rosamond.  "But I am sure you
+admit that the interruption was a very beautiful one.  I quite envy
+your acquaintance with Mrs. Casaubon.  Is she very clever?  She looks
+as if she were."
+
+"Really, I never thought about it," said Will, sulkily.
+
+"That is just the answer Tertius gave me, when I first asked him if she
+were handsome.  What is it that you gentlemen are thinking of when you
+are with Mrs. Casaubon?"
+
+"Herself," said Will, not indisposed to provoke the charming Mrs.
+Lydgate.  "When one sees a perfect woman, one never thinks of her
+attributes--one is conscious of her presence."
+
+"I shall be jealous when Tertius goes to Lowick," said Rosamond,
+dimpling, and speaking with aery lightness.  "He will come back and
+think nothing of me."
+
+"That does not seem to have been the effect on Lydgate hitherto.  Mrs.
+Casaubon is too unlike other women for them to be compared with her."
+
+"You are a devout worshipper, I perceive.  You often see her, I
+suppose."
+
+"No," said Will, almost pettishly.  "Worship is usually a matter of
+theory rather than of practice.  But I am practising it to excess just
+at this moment--I must really tear myself away."
+
+"Pray come again some evening: Mr. Lydgate will like to hear the music,
+and I cannot enjoy it so well without him."
+
+When her husband was at home again, Rosamond said, standing in front of
+him and holding his coat-collar with both her hands, "Mr. Ladislaw was
+here singing with me when Mrs. Casaubon came in.  He seemed vexed.  Do
+you think he disliked her seeing him at our house?  Surely your
+position is more than equal to his--whatever may be his relation to the
+Casaubons."
+
+"No, no; it must be something else if he were really vexed, Ladislaw is
+a sort of gypsy; he thinks nothing of leather and prunella."
+
+"Music apart, he is not always very agreeable.  Do you like him?"
+
+"Yes: I think he is a good fellow: rather miscellaneous and
+bric-a-brac, but likable."
+
+"Do you know, I think he adores Mrs. Casaubon."
+
+"Poor devil!" said Lydgate, smiling and pinching his wife's ears.
+
+Rosamond felt herself beginning to know a great deal of the world,
+especially in discovering what when she was in her unmarried girlhood
+had been inconceivable to her except as a dim tragedy in by-gone
+costumes--that women, even after marriage, might make conquests and
+enslave men.  At that time young ladies in the country, even when
+educated at Mrs. Lemon's, read little French literature later than
+Racine, and public prints had not cast their present magnificent
+illumination over the scandals of life.  Still, vanity, with a woman's
+whole mind and day to work in, can construct abundantly on slight
+hints, especially on such a hint as the possibility of indefinite
+conquests.  How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage
+with a husband as crown-prince by your side--himself in fact a
+subject--while the captives look up forever hopeless, losing their
+rest probably, and if their appetite too, so much the better!  But
+Rosamond's romance turned at present chiefly on her crown-prince, and
+it was enough to enjoy his assured subjection.  When he said, "Poor
+devil!" she asked, with playful curiosity--
+
+"Why so?"
+
+"Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids?
+He only neglects his work and runs up bills."
+
+"I am sure you do not neglect your work.  You are always at the
+Hospital, or seeing poor patients, or thinking about some doctor's
+quarrel; and then at home you always want to pore over your microscope
+and phials.  Confess you like those things better than me."
+
+"Haven't you ambition enough to wish that your husband should be
+something better than a Middlemarch doctor?" said Lydgate, letting his
+hands fall on to his wife's shoulders, and looking at her with
+affectionate gravity.  "I shall make you learn my favorite bit from an
+old poet--
+
+        'Why should our pride make such a stir to be
+         And be forgot?  What good is like to this,
+         To do worthy the writing, and to write
+         Worthy the reading and the worlds delight?'
+
+What I want, Rosy, is to do worthy the writing,--and to write out
+myself what I have done.  A man must work, to do that, my pet."
+
+"Of course, I wish you to make discoveries: no one could more wish you
+to attain a high position in some better place than Middlemarch.  You
+cannot say that I have ever tried to hinder you from working.  But we
+cannot live like hermits.  You are not discontented with me, Tertius?"
+
+"No, dear, no.  I am too entirely contented."
+
+"But what did Mrs. Casaubon want to say to you?"
+
+"Merely to ask about her husband's health.  But I think she is going to
+be splendid to our New Hospital: I think she will give us two hundred
+a-year."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIV.
+
+    I would not creep along the coast but steer
+    Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.
+
+
+When Dorothea, walking round the laurel-planted plots of the New
+Hospital with Lydgate, had learned from him that there were no signs of
+change in Mr. Casaubon's bodily condition beyond the mental sign of
+anxiety to know the truth about his illness, she was silent for a few
+moments, wondering whether she had said or done anything to rouse this
+new anxiety.  Lydgate, not willing to let slip an opportunity of
+furthering a favorite purpose, ventured to say--
+
+"I don't know whether your or Mr.--Casaubon's attention has been drawn
+to the needs of our New Hospital.  Circumstances have made it seem
+rather egotistic in me to urge the subject; but that is not my fault:
+it is because there is a fight being made against it by the other
+medical men.  I think you are generally interested in such things, for
+I remember that when I first had the pleasure of seeing you at Tipton
+Grange before your marriage, you were asking me some questions about
+the way in which the health of the poor was affected by their miserable
+housing."
+
+"Yes, indeed," said Dorothea, brightening.  "I shall be quite grateful
+to you if you will tell me how I can help to make things a little
+better.  Everything of that sort has slipped away from me since I have
+been married.  I mean," she said, after a moment's hesitation, "that
+the people in our village are tolerably comfortable, and my mind has
+been too much taken up for me to inquire further.  But here--in such a
+place as Middlemarch--there must be a great deal to be done."
+
+"There is everything to be done," said Lydgate, with abrupt energy.
+"And this Hospital is a capital piece of work, due entirely to Mr.
+Bulstrode's exertions, and in a great degree to his money.  But one man
+can't do everything in a scheme of this sort.  Of course he looked
+forward to help.  And now there's a mean, petty feud set up against the
+thing in the town, by certain persons who want to make it a failure."
+
+"What can be their reasons?" said Dorothea, with naive surprise.
+
+"Chiefly Mr. Bulstrode's unpopularity, to begin with.  Half the town
+would almost take trouble for the sake of thwarting him.  In this
+stupid world most people never consider that a thing is good to be done
+unless it is done by their own set.  I had no connection with Bulstrode
+before I came here.  I look at him quite impartially, and I see that he
+has some notions--that he has set things on foot--which I can turn to
+good public purpose.  If a fair number of the better educated men went
+to work with the belief that their observations might contribute to the
+reform of medical doctrine and practice, we should soon see a change
+for the better.  That's my point of view.  I hold that by refusing to
+work with Mr. Bulstrode I should be turning my back on an opportunity
+of making my profession more generally serviceable."
+
+"I quite agree with you," said Dorothea, at once fascinated by the
+situation sketched in Lydgate's words.  "But what is there against Mr.
+Bulstrode?  I know that my uncle is friendly with him."
+
+"People don't like his religious tone," said Lydgate, breaking off
+there.
+
+"That is all the stronger reason for despising such an opposition,"
+said Dorothea, looking at the affairs of Middlemarch by the light of
+the great persecutions.
+
+"To put the matter quite fairly, they have other objections to him:--he
+is masterful and rather unsociable, and he is concerned with trade,
+which has complaints of its own that I know nothing about.  But what
+has that to do with the question whether it would not be a fine thing
+to establish here a more valuable hospital than any they have in the
+county?  The immediate motive to the opposition, however, is the fact
+that Bulstrode has put the medical direction into my hands.  Of course
+I am glad of that.  It gives me an opportunity of doing some good
+work,--and I am aware that I have to justify his choice of me.  But the
+consequence is, that the whole profession in Middlemarch have set
+themselves tooth and nail against the Hospital, and not only refuse to
+cooperate themselves, but try to blacken the whole affair and hinder
+subscriptions."
+
+"How very petty!" exclaimed Dorothea, indignantly.
+
+"I suppose one must expect to fight one's way: there is hardly anything
+to be done without it.  And the ignorance of people about here is
+stupendous.  I don't lay claim to anything else than having used some
+opportunities which have not come within everybody's reach; but there
+is no stifling the offence of being young, and a new-comer, and
+happening to know something more than the old inhabitants.  Still, if I
+believe that I can set going a better method of treatment--if I
+believe that I can pursue certain observations and inquiries which may
+be a lasting benefit to medical practice, I should be a base truckler
+if I allowed any consideration of personal comfort to hinder me.  And
+the course is all the clearer from there being no salary in question to
+put my persistence in an equivocal light."
+
+"I am glad you have told me this, Mr. Lydgate," said Dorothea,
+cordially.  "I feel sure I can help a little.  I have some money, and
+don't know what to do with it--that is often an uncomfortable thought
+to me.  I am sure I can spare two hundred a-year for a grand purpose
+like this.  How happy you must be, to know things that you feel sure
+will do great good!  I wish I could awake with that knowledge every
+morning.  There seems to be so much trouble taken that one can hardly
+see the good of!"
+
+There was a melancholy cadence in Dorothea's voice as she spoke these
+last words.  But she presently added, more cheerfully, "Pray come to
+Lowick and tell us more of this.  I will mention the subject to Mr.
+Casaubon.  I must hasten home now."
+
+She did mention it that evening, and said that she should like to
+subscribe two hundred a-year--she had seven hundred a-year as the
+equivalent of her own fortune, settled on her at her marriage.  Mr.
+Casaubon made no objection beyond a passing remark that the sum might
+be disproportionate in relation to other good objects, but when
+Dorothea in her ignorance resisted that suggestion, he acquiesced.  He
+did not care himself about spending money, and was not reluctant to
+give it.  If he ever felt keenly any question of money it was through
+the medium of another passion than the love of material property.
+
+Dorothea told him that she had seen Lydgate, and recited the gist of
+her conversation with him about the Hospital.  Mr. Casaubon did not
+question her further, but he felt sure that she had wished to know what
+had passed between Lydgate and himself. "She knows that I know," said
+the ever-restless voice within; but that increase of tacit knowledge
+only thrust further off any confidence between them.  He distrusted her
+affection; and what loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLV.
+
+    It is the humor of many heads to extol the days of their
+    forefathers, and declaim against the wickedness of times
+    present. Which notwithstanding they cannot handsomely do,
+    without the borrowed help and satire of times past;
+    condemning the vices of their own times, by the expressions
+    of vices in times which they commend, which cannot but argue
+    the community of vice in both. Horace, therefore, Juvenal,
+    and Persius, were no prophets, although their lines did seem
+    to indigitate and point at our times.--SIR THOMAS BROWNE:
+    Pseudodoxia Epidemica.
+
+
+That opposition to the New Fever Hospital which Lydgate had sketched to
+Dorothea was, like other oppositions, to be viewed in many different
+lights.  He regarded it as a mixture of jealousy and dunderheaded
+prejudice.  Mr. Bulstrode saw in it not only medical jealousy but a
+determination to thwart himself, prompted mainly by a hatred of that
+vital religion of which he had striven to be an effectual lay
+representative--a hatred which certainly found pretexts apart from
+religion such as were only too easy to find in the entanglements of
+human action.  These might be called the ministerial views.  But
+oppositions have the illimitable range of objections at command, which
+need never stop short at the boundary of knowledge, but can draw
+forever on the vasts of ignorance.  What the opposition in Middlemarch
+said about the New Hospital and its administration had certainly a
+great deal of echo in it, for heaven has taken care that everybody
+shall not be an originator; but there were differences which
+represented every social shade between the polished moderation of Dr.
+Minchin and the trenchant assertion of Mrs. Dollop, the landlady of the
+Tankard in Slaughter Lane.
+
+Mrs. Dollop became more and more convinced by her own asseveration,
+that Dr. Lydgate meant to let the people die in the Hospital, if not to
+poison them, for the sake of cutting them up without saying by your
+leave or with your leave; for it was a known "fac" that he had wanted
+to cut up Mrs. Goby, as respectable a woman as any in Parley Street,
+who had money in trust before her marriage--a poor tale for a doctor,
+who if he was good for anything should know what was the matter with
+you before you died, and not want to pry into your inside after you
+were gone.  If that was not reason, Mrs. Dollop wished to know what
+was; but there was a prevalent feeling in her audience that her opinion
+was a bulwark, and that if it were overthrown there would be no limits
+to the cutting-up of bodies, as had been well seen in Burke and Hare
+with their pitch-plaisters--such a hanging business as that was not
+wanted in Middlemarch!
+
+And let it not be supposed that opinion at the Tankard in Slaughter
+Lane was unimportant to the medical profession: that old authentic
+public-house--the original Tankard, known by the name of Dollop's--was
+the resort of a great Benefit Club, which had some months before put to
+the vote whether its long-standing medical man, "Doctor Gambit," should
+not be cashiered in favor of "this Doctor Lydgate," who was capable of
+performing the most astonishing cures, and rescuing people altogether
+given up by other practitioners.  But the balance had been turned
+against Lydgate by two members, who for some private reasons held that
+this power of resuscitating persons as good as dead was an equivocal
+recommendation, and might interfere with providential favors.  In the
+course of the year, however, there had been a change in the public
+sentiment, of which the unanimity at Dollop's was an index.
+
+A good deal more than a year ago, before anything was known of
+Lydgate's skill, the judgments on it had naturally been divided,
+depending on a sense of likelihood, situated perhaps in the pit of the
+stomach or in the pineal gland, and differing in its verdicts, but not
+the less valuable as a guide in the total deficit of evidence.
+Patients who had chronic diseases or whose lives had long been worn
+threadbare, like old Featherstone's, had been at once inclined to try
+him; also, many who did not like paying their doctor's bills, thought
+agreeably of opening an account with a new doctor and sending for him
+without stint if the children's temper wanted a dose, occasions when
+the old practitioners were often crusty; and all persons thus inclined
+to employ Lydgate held it likely that he was clever.  Some considered
+that he might do more than others "where there was liver;"--at least
+there would be no harm in getting a few bottles of "stuff" from him,
+since if these proved useless it would still be possible to return to
+the Purifying Pills, which kept you alive if they did not remove the
+yellowness.  But these were people of minor importance.  Good
+Middlemarch families were of course not going to change their doctor
+without reason shown; and everybody who had employed Mr. Peacock did
+not feel obliged to accept a new man merely in the character of his
+successor, objecting that he was "not likely to be equal to Peacock."
+
+But Lydgate had not been long in the town before there were particulars
+enough reported of him to breed much more specific expectations and to
+intensify differences into partisanship; some of the particulars being
+of that impressive order of which the significance is entirely hidden,
+like a statistical amount without a standard of comparison, but with a
+note of exclamation at the end.  The cubic feet of oxygen yearly
+swallowed by a full-grown man--what a shudder they might have created
+in some Middlemarch circles!  "Oxygen! nobody knows what that may
+be--is it any wonder the cholera has got to Dantzic?  And yet there are
+people who say quarantine is no good!"
+
+One of the facts quickly rumored was that Lydgate did not dispense
+drugs.  This was offensive both to the physicians whose exclusive
+distinction seemed infringed on, and to the surgeon-apothecaries with
+whom he ranged himself; and only a little while before, they might have
+counted on having the law on their side against a man who without
+calling himself a London-made M.D. dared to ask for pay except as a
+charge on drugs.  But Lydgate had not been experienced enough to
+foresee that his new course would be even more offensive to the laity;
+and to Mr. Mawmsey, an important grocer in the Top Market, who, though
+not one of his patients, questioned him in an affable manner on the
+subject, he was injudicious enough to give a hasty popular explanation
+of his reasons, pointing out to Mr. Mawmsey that it must lower the
+character of practitioners, and be a constant injury to the public, if
+their only mode of getting paid for their work was by their making out
+long bills for draughts, boluses, and mixtures.
+
+"It is in that way that hard-working medical men may come to be almost
+as mischievous as quacks," said Lydgate, rather thoughtlessly.  "To get
+their own bread they must overdose the king's lieges; and that's a bad
+sort of treason, Mr. Mawmsey--undermines the constitution in a fatal
+way."
+
+Mr. Mawmsey was not only an overseer (it was about a question of
+outdoor pay that he was having an interview with Lydgate), he was also
+asthmatic and had an increasing family: thus, from a medical point of
+view, as well as from his own, he was an important man; indeed, an
+exceptional grocer, whose hair was arranged in a flame-like pyramid,
+and whose retail deference was of the cordial, encouraging
+kind--jocosely complimentary, and with a certain considerate abstinence
+from letting out the full force of his mind.  It was Mr. Mawmsey's
+friendly jocoseness in questioning him which had set the tone of
+Lydgate's reply.  But let the wise be warned against too great
+readiness at explanation: it multiplies the sources of mistake,
+lengthening the sum for reckoners sure to go wrong.
+
+Lydgate smiled as he ended his speech, putting his foot into the
+stirrup, and Mr. Mawmsey laughed more than he would have done if he had
+known who the king's lieges were, giving his "Good morning, sir,
+good-morning, sir," with the air of one who saw everything clearly
+enough.  But in truth his views were perturbed.  For years he had been
+paying bills with strictly made items, so that for every half-crown and
+eighteen-pence he was certain something measurable had been delivered.
+He had done this with satisfaction, including it among his
+responsibilities as a husband and father, and regarding a longer bill
+than usual as a dignity worth mentioning.  Moreover, in addition to the
+massive benefit of the drugs to "self and family," he had enjoyed the
+pleasure of forming an acute judgment as to their immediate effects, so
+as to give an intelligent statement for the guidance of Mr. Gambit--a
+practitioner just a little lower in status than Wrench or Toller, and
+especially esteemed as an accoucheur, of whose ability Mr. Mawmsey had
+the poorest opinion on all other points, but in doctoring, he was wont
+to say in an undertone, he placed Gambit above any of them.
+
+Here were deeper reasons than the superficial talk of a new man, which
+appeared still flimsier in the drawing-room over the shop, when they
+were recited to Mrs. Mawmsey, a woman accustomed to be made much of as
+a fertile mother,--generally under attendance more or less frequent
+from Mr. Gambit, and occasionally having attacks which required Dr.
+Minchin.
+
+"Does this Mr. Lydgate mean to say there is no use in taking medicine?"
+said Mrs. Mawmsey, who was slightly given to drawling.  "I should like
+him to tell me how I could bear up at Fair time, if I didn't take
+strengthening medicine for a month beforehand.  Think of what I have to
+provide for calling customers, my dear!"--here Mrs. Mawmsey turned to
+an intimate female friend who sat by--"a large veal pie--a stuffed
+fillet--a round of beef--ham, tongue, et cetera, et cetera!  But what
+keeps me up best is the pink mixture, not the brown.  I wonder, Mr.
+Mawmsey, with _your_ experience, you could have patience to listen.  I
+should have told him at once that I knew a little better than that."
+
+"No, no, no," said Mr. Mawmsey; "I was not going to tell him my
+opinion.  Hear everything and judge for yourself is my motto.  But he
+didn't know who he was talking to.  I was not to be turned on _his_
+finger.  People often pretend to tell me things, when they might as
+well say, 'Mawmsey, you're a fool.'  But I smile at it: I humor
+everybody's weak place.  If physic had done harm to self and family, I
+should have found it out by this time."
+
+The next day Mr. Gambit was told that Lydgate went about saying physic
+was of no use.
+
+"Indeed!" said he, lifting his eyebrows with cautious surprise.  (He
+was a stout husky man with a large ring on his fourth finger.) "How
+will he cure his patients, then?"
+
+"That is what I say," returned Mrs. Mawmsey, who habitually gave weight
+to her speech by loading her pronouns.  "Does _he_ suppose that people
+will pay him only to come and sit with them and go away again?"
+
+Mrs. Mawmsey had had a great deal of sitting from Mr. Gambit, including
+very full accounts of his own habits of body and other affairs; but of
+course he knew there was no innuendo in her remark, since his spare
+time and personal narrative had never been charged for.  So he replied,
+humorously--
+
+"Well, Lydgate is a good-looking young fellow, you know."
+
+"Not one that I would employ," said Mrs. Mawmsey.  "_Others_ may do as
+they please."
+
+Hence Mr. Gambit could go away from the chief grocer's without fear of
+rivalry, but not without a sense that Lydgate was one of those
+hypocrites who try to discredit others by advertising their own
+honesty, and that it might be worth some people's while to show him up.
+Mr. Gambit, however, had a satisfactory practice, much pervaded by the
+smells of retail trading which suggested the reduction of cash payments
+to a balance.  And he did not think it worth his while to show Lydgate
+up until he knew how.  He had not indeed great resources of education,
+and had had to work his own way against a good deal of professional
+contempt; but he made none the worse accoucheur for calling the
+breathing apparatus "longs."
+
+Other medical men felt themselves more capable.  Mr. Toller shared the
+highest practice in the town and belonged to an old Middlemarch family:
+there were Tollers in the law and everything else above the line of
+retail trade.  Unlike our irascible friend Wrench, he had the easiest
+way in the world of taking things which might be supposed to annoy him,
+being a well-bred, quietly facetious man, who kept a good house, was
+very fond of a little sporting when he could get it, very friendly with
+Mr. Hawley, and hostile to Mr. Bulstrode.  It may seem odd that with
+such pleasant habits he should have been given to the heroic treatment,
+bleeding and blistering and starving his patients, with a dispassionate
+disregard to his personal example; but the incongruity favored the
+opinion of his ability among his patients, who commonly observed that
+Mr. Toller had lazy manners, but his treatment was as active as you
+could desire: no man, said they, carried more seriousness into his
+profession: he was a little slow in coming, but when he came, he _did_
+something.  He was a great favorite in his own circle, and whatever he
+implied to any one's disadvantage told doubly from his careless
+ironical tone.
+
+He naturally got tired of smiling and saying, "Ah!" when he was told
+that Mr. Peacock's successor did not mean to dispense medicines; and
+Mr. Hackbutt one day mentioning it over the wine at a dinner-party, Mr.
+Toller said, laughingly, "Dibbitts will get rid of his stale drugs,
+then.  I'm fond of little Dibbitts--I'm glad he's in luck."
+
+"I see your meaning, Toller," said Mr. Hackbutt, "and I am entirely of
+your opinion.  I shall take an opportunity of expressing myself to that
+effect.  A medical man should be responsible for the quality of the
+drugs consumed by his patients.  That is the rationale of the system of
+charging which has hitherto obtained; and nothing is more offensive
+than this ostentation of reform, where there is no real amelioration."
+
+"Ostentation, Hackbutt?" said Mr. Toller, ironically.  "I don't see
+that.  A man can't very well be ostentatious of what nobody believes
+in.  There's no reform in the matter: the question is, whether the
+profit on the drugs is paid to the medical man by the druggist or by
+the patient, and whether there shall be extra pay under the name of
+attendance."
+
+"Ah, to be sure; one of your damned new versions of old humbug," said
+Mr. Hawley, passing the decanter to Mr. Wrench.
+
+Mr. Wrench, generally abstemious, often drank wine rather freely at a
+party, getting the more irritable in consequence.
+
+"As to humbug, Hawley," he said, "that's a word easy to fling about.
+But what I contend against is the way medical men are fouling their own
+nest, and setting up a cry about the country as if a general
+practitioner who dispenses drugs couldn't be a gentleman.  I throw back
+the imputation with scorn.  I say, the most ungentlemanly trick a man
+can be guilty of is to come among the members of his profession with
+innovations which are a libel on their time-honored procedure.  That is
+my opinion, and I am ready to maintain it against any one who
+contradicts me."  Mr. Wrench's voice had become exceedingly sharp.
+
+"I can't oblige you there, Wrench," said Mr. Hawley, thrusting his
+hands into his trouser-pockets.
+
+"My dear fellow," said Mr. Toller, striking in pacifically, and looking
+at Mr. Wrench, "the physicians have their toes trodden on more than we
+have.  If you come to dignity it is a question for Minchin and Sprague."
+
+"Does medical jurisprudence provide nothing against these
+infringements?" said Mr. Hackbutt, with a disinterested desire to offer
+his lights.  "How does the law stand, eh, Hawley?"
+
+"Nothing to be done there," said Mr. Hawley.  "I looked into it for
+Sprague.  You'd only break your nose against a damned judge's decision."
+
+"Pooh! no need of law," said Mr. Toller.  "So far as practice is
+concerned the attempt is an absurdity.  No patient will like
+it--certainly not Peacock's, who have been used to depletion.  Pass the
+wine."
+
+Mr. Toller's prediction was partly verified.  If Mr. and Mrs. Mawmsey,
+who had no idea of employing Lydgate, were made uneasy by his supposed
+declaration against drugs, it was inevitable that those who called him
+in should watch a little anxiously to see whether he did "use all the
+means he might use" in the case.  Even good Mr. Powderell, who in his
+constant charity of interpretation was inclined to esteem Lydgate the
+more for what seemed a conscientious pursuit of a better plan, had his
+mind disturbed with doubts during his wife's attack of erysipelas, and
+could not abstain from mentioning to Lydgate that Mr. Peacock on a
+similar occasion had administered a series of boluses which were not
+otherwise definable than by their remarkable effect in bringing Mrs.
+Powderell round before Michaelmas from an illness which had begun in a
+remarkably hot August.  At last, indeed, in the conflict between his
+desire not to hurt Lydgate and his anxiety that no "means" should be
+lacking, he induced his wife privately to take Widgeon's Purifying
+Pills, an esteemed Middlemarch medicine, which arrested every disease
+at the fountain by setting to work at once upon the blood.  This
+co-operative measure was not to be mentioned to Lydgate, and Mr.
+Powderell himself had no certain reliance on it, only hoping that it
+might be attended with a blessing.
+
+But in this doubtful stage of Lydgate's introduction he was helped by
+what we mortals rashly call good fortune.  I suppose no doctor ever
+came newly to a place without making cures that surprised somebody--cures
+which may be called fortune's testimonials, and deserve as much
+credit as the written or printed kind.  Various patients got well while
+Lydgate was attending them, some even of dangerous illnesses; and it
+was remarked that the new doctor with his new ways had at least the
+merit of bringing people back from the brink of death.  The trash
+talked on such occasions was the more vexatious to Lydgate, because it
+gave precisely the sort of prestige which an incompetent and
+unscrupulous man would desire, and was sure to be imputed to him by the
+simmering dislike of the other medical men as an encouragement on his
+own part of ignorant puffing.  But even his proud outspokenness was
+checked by the discernment that it was as useless to fight against the
+interpretations of ignorance as to whip the fog; and "good fortune"
+insisted on using those interpretations.
+
+Mrs. Larcher having just become charitably concerned about alarming
+symptoms in her charwoman, when Dr. Minchin called, asked him to see
+her then and there, and to give her a certificate for the Infirmary;
+whereupon after examination he wrote a statement of the case as one of
+tumor, and recommended the bearer Nancy Nash as an out-patient. Nancy,
+calling at home on her way to the Infirmary, allowed the stay maker and
+his wife, in whose attic she lodged, to read Dr. Minchin's paper, and
+by this means became a subject of compassionate conversation in the
+neighboring shops of Churchyard Lane as being afflicted with a tumor at
+first declared to be as large and hard as a duck's egg, but later in
+the day to be about the size of "your fist." Most hearers agreed that
+it would have to be cut out, but one had known of oil and another of
+"squitchineal" as adequate to soften and reduce any lump in the body
+when taken enough of into the inside--the oil by gradually "soopling,"
+the squitchineal by eating away.
+
+Meanwhile when Nancy presented herself at the Infirmary, it happened to
+be one of Lydgate's days there.  After questioning and examining her,
+Lydgate said to the house-surgeon in an undertone, "It's not tumor:
+it's cramp."  He ordered her a blister and some steel mixture, and told
+her to go home and rest, giving her at the same time a note to Mrs.
+Larcher, who, she said, was her best employer, to testify that she was
+in need of good food.
+
+But by-and-by Nancy, in her attic, became portentously worse, the
+supposed tumor having indeed given way to the blister, but only
+wandered to another region with angrier pain.  The staymaker's wife
+went to fetch Lydgate, and he continued for a fortnight to attend Nancy
+in her own home, until under his treatment she got quite well and went
+to work again.  But the case continued to be described as one of tumor
+in Churchyard Lane and other streets--nay, by Mrs. Larcher also; for
+when Lydgate's remarkable cure was mentioned to Dr. Minchin, he
+naturally did not like to say, "The case was not one of tumor, and I
+was mistaken in describing it as such," but answered, "Indeed! ah!  I
+saw it was a surgical case, not of a fatal kind." He had been inwardly
+annoyed, however, when he had asked at the Infirmary about the woman he
+had recommended two days before, to hear from the house-surgeon, a
+youngster who was not sorry to vex Minchin with impunity, exactly what
+had occurred: he privately pronounced that it was indecent in a general
+practitioner to contradict a physician's diagnosis in that open manner,
+and afterwards agreed with Wrench that Lydgate was disagreeably
+inattentive to etiquette.  Lydgate did not make the affair a ground for
+valuing himself or (very particularly) despising Minchin, such
+rectification of misjudgments often happening among men of equal
+qualifications.  But report took up this amazing case of tumor, not
+clearly distinguished from cancer, and considered the more awful for
+being of the wandering sort; till much prejudice against Lydgate's
+method as to drugs was overcome by the proof of his marvellous skill in
+the speedy restoration of Nancy Nash after she had been rolling and
+rolling in agonies from the presence of a tumor both hard and
+obstinate, but nevertheless compelled to yield.
+
+How could Lydgate help himself?  It is offensive to tell a lady when
+she is expressing her amazement at your skill, that she is altogether
+mistaken and rather foolish in her amazement.  And to have entered into
+the nature of diseases would only have added to his breaches of medical
+propriety.  Thus he had to wince under a promise of success given by
+that ignorant praise which misses every valid quality.
+
+In the case of a more conspicuous patient, Mr. Borthrop Trumbull,
+Lydgate was conscious of having shown himself something better than an
+every-day doctor, though here too it was an equivocal advantage that he
+won.  The eloquent auctioneer was seized with pneumonia, and having
+been a patient of Mr. Peacock's, sent for Lydgate, whom he had
+expressed his intention to patronize.  Mr Trumbull was a robust man, a
+good subject for trying the expectant theory upon--watching the course
+of an interesting disease when left as much as possible to itself, so
+that the stages might be noted for future guidance; and from the air
+with which he described his sensations Lydgate surmised that he would
+like to be taken into his medical man's confidence, and be represented
+as a partner in his own cure.  The auctioneer heard, without much
+surprise, that his was a constitution which (always with due watching)
+might be left to itself, so as to offer a beautiful example of a
+disease with all its phases seen in clear delineation, and that he
+probably had the rare strength of mind voluntarily to become the test
+of a rational procedure, and thus make the disorder of his pulmonary
+functions a general benefit to society.
+
+Mr. Trumbull acquiesced at once, and entered strongly into the view
+that an illness of his was no ordinary occasion for medical science.
+
+"Never fear, sir; you are not speaking to one who is altogether
+ignorant of the vis medicatrix," said he, with his usual superiority of
+expression, made rather pathetic by difficulty of breathing.  And he
+went without shrinking through his abstinence from drugs, much
+sustained by application of the thermometer which implied the
+importance of his temperature, by the sense that he furnished objects
+for the microscope, and by learning many new words which seemed suited
+to the dignity of his secretions.  For Lydgate was acute enough to
+indulge him with a little technical talk.
+
+It may be imagined that Mr. Trumbull rose from his couch with a
+disposition to speak of an illness in which he had manifested the
+strength of his mind as well as constitution; and he was not backward
+in awarding credit to the medical man who had discerned the quality of
+patient he had to deal with.  The auctioneer was not an ungenerous man,
+and liked to give others their due, feeling that he could afford it.
+He had caught the words "expectant method," and rang chimes on this and
+other learned phrases to accompany the assurance that Lydgate "knew a
+thing or two more than the rest of the doctors--was far better versed
+in the secrets of his profession than the majority of his compeers."
+
+This had happened before the affair of Fred Vincy's illness had given
+to Mr. Wrench's enmity towards Lydgate more definite personal ground.
+The new-comer already threatened to be a nuisance in the shape of
+rivalry, and was certainly a nuisance in the shape of practical
+criticism or reflections on his hard-driven elders, who had had
+something else to do than to busy themselves with untried notions.  His
+practice had spread in one or two quarters, and from the first the
+report of his high family had led to his being pretty generally
+invited, so that the other medical men had to meet him at dinner in the
+best houses; and having to meet a man whom you dislike is not observed
+always to end in a mutual attachment.  There was hardly ever so much
+unanimity among them as in the opinion that Lydgate was an arrogant
+young fellow, and yet ready for the sake of ultimately predominating to
+show a crawling subservience to Bulstrode.  That Mr. Farebrother, whose
+name was a chief flag of the anti-Bulstrode party, always defended
+Lydgate and made a friend of him, was referred to Farebrother's
+unaccountable way of fighting on both sides.
+
+Here was plenty of preparation for the outburst of professional disgust
+at the announcement of the laws Mr. Bulstrode was laying down for the
+direction of the New Hospital, which were the more exasperating because
+there was no present possibility of interfering with his will and
+pleasure, everybody except Lord Medlicote having refused help towards
+the building, on the ground that they preferred giving to the Old
+Infirmary.  Mr. Bulstrode met all the expenses, and had ceased to be
+sorry that he was purchasing the right to carry out his notions of
+improvement without hindrance from prejudiced coadjutors; but he had
+had to spend large sums, and the building had lingered.  Caleb Garth
+had undertaken it, had failed during its progress, and before the
+interior fittings were begun had retired from the management of the
+business; and when referring to the Hospital he often said that however
+Bulstrode might ring if you tried him, he liked good solid carpentry
+and masonry, and had a notion both of drains and chimneys.  In fact,
+the Hospital had become an object of intense interest to Bulstrode, and
+he would willingly have continued to spare a large yearly sum that he
+might rule it dictatorially without any Board; but he had another
+favorite object which also required money for its accomplishment: he
+wished to buy some land in the neighborhood of Middlemarch, and
+therefore he wished to get considerable contributions towards
+maintaining the Hospital.  Meanwhile he framed his plan of management.
+The Hospital was to be reserved for fever in all its forms; Lydgate was
+to be chief medical superintendent, that he might have free authority
+to pursue all comparative investigations which his studies,
+particularly in Paris, had shown him the importance of, the other
+medical visitors having a consultative influence, but no power to
+contravene Lydgate's ultimate decisions; and the general management was
+to be lodged exclusively in the hands of five directors associated with
+Mr. Bulstrode, who were to have votes in the ratio of their
+contributions, the Board itself filling up any vacancy in its numbers,
+and no mob of small contributors being admitted to a share of
+government.
+
+There was an immediate refusal on the part of every medical man in the
+town to become a visitor at the Fever Hospital.
+
+"Very well," said Lydgate to Mr. Bulstrode, "we have a capital
+house-surgeon and dispenser, a clear-headed, neat-handed fellow; we'll
+get Webbe from Crabsley, as good a country practitioner as any of them,
+to come over twice a-week, and in case of any exceptional operation,
+Protheroe will come from Brassing.  I must work the harder, that's all,
+and I have given up my post at the Infirmary.  The plan will flourish
+in spite of them, and then they'll be glad to come in.  Things can't
+last as they are: there must be all sorts of reform soon, and then
+young fellows may be glad to come and study here."  Lydgate was in high
+spirits.
+
+"I shall not flinch, you may depend upon it, Mr. Lydgate," said Mr.
+Bulstrode.  "While I see you carrying out high intentions with vigor,
+you shall have my unfailing support.  And I have humble confidence that
+the blessing which has hitherto attended my efforts against the spirit
+of evil in this town will not be withdrawn.  Suitable directors to
+assist me I have no doubt of securing.  Mr. Brooke of Tipton has
+already given me his concurrence, and a pledge to contribute yearly: he
+has not specified the sum--probably not a great one.  But he will be a
+useful member of the board."
+
+A useful member was perhaps to be defined as one who would originate
+nothing, and always vote with Mr. Bulstrode.
+
+The medical aversion to Lydgate was hardly disguised now.  Neither Dr.
+Sprague nor Dr. Minchin said that he disliked Lydgate's knowledge, or
+his disposition to improve treatment: what they disliked was his
+arrogance, which nobody felt to be altogether deniable.  They implied
+that he was insolent, pretentious, and given to that reckless
+innovation for the sake of noise and show which was the essence of the
+charlatan.
+
+The word charlatan once thrown on the air could not be let drop.  In
+those days the world was agitated about the wondrous doings of Mr. St.
+John Long, "noblemen and gentlemen" attesting his extraction of a fluid
+like mercury from the temples of a patient.
+
+Mr. Toller remarked one day, smilingly, to Mrs. Taft, that "Bulstrode
+had found a man to suit him in Lydgate; a charlatan in religion is sure
+to like other sorts of charlatans."
+
+"Yes, indeed, I can imagine," said Mrs. Taft, keeping the number of
+thirty stitches carefully in her mind all the while; "there are so many
+of that sort.  I remember Mr. Cheshire, with his irons, trying to make
+people straight when the Almighty had made them crooked."
+
+"No, no," said Mr. Toller, "Cheshire was all right--all fair and above
+board.  But there's St. John Long--that's the kind of fellow we call a
+charlatan, advertising cures in ways nobody knows anything about: a
+fellow who wants to make a noise by pretending to go deeper than other
+people.  The other day he was pretending to tap a man's brain and get
+quicksilver out of it."
+
+"Good gracious! what dreadful trifling with people's constitutions!"
+said Mrs. Taft.
+
+After this, it came to be held in various quarters that Lydgate played
+even with respectable constitutions for his own purposes, and how much
+more likely that in his flighty experimenting he should make sixes and
+sevens of hospital patients.  Especially it was to be expected, as the
+landlady of the Tankard had said, that he would recklessly cut up their
+dead bodies.  For Lydgate having attended Mrs. Goby, who died
+apparently of a heart-disease not very clearly expressed in the
+symptoms, too daringly asked leave of her relatives to open the body,
+and thus gave an offence quickly spreading beyond Parley Street, where
+that lady had long resided on an income such as made this association
+of her body with the victims of Burke and Hare a flagrant insult to her
+memory.
+
+Affairs were in this stage when Lydgate opened the subject of the
+Hospital to Dorothea.  We see that he was bearing enmity and silly
+misconception with much spirit, aware that they were partly created by
+his good share of success.
+
+"They will not drive me away," he said, talking confidentially in Mr.
+Farebrother's study.  "I have got a good opportunity here, for the ends
+I care most about; and I am pretty sure to get income enough for our
+wants.  By-and-by I shall go on as quietly as possible: I have no
+seductions now away from home and work.  And I am more and more
+convinced that it will be possible to demonstrate the homogeneous
+origin of all the tissues.  Raspail and others are on the same track,
+and I have been losing time."
+
+"I have no power of prophecy there," said Mr. Farebrother, who had been
+puffing at his pipe thoughtfully while Lydgate talked; "but as to the
+hostility in the town, you'll weather it if you are prudent."
+
+"How am I to be prudent?" said Lydgate, "I just do what comes before me
+to do.  I can't help people's ignorance and spite, any more than
+Vesalius could.  It isn't possible to square one's conduct to silly
+conclusions which nobody can foresee."
+
+"Quite true; I didn't mean that.  I meant only two things.  One is,
+keep yourself as separable from Bulstrode as you can: of course, you
+can go on doing good work of your own by his help; but don't get tied.
+Perhaps it seems like personal feeling in me to say so--and there's a
+good deal of that, I own--but personal feeling is not always in the
+wrong if you boil it down to the impressions which make it simply an
+opinion."
+
+"Bulstrode is nothing to me," said Lydgate, carelessly, "except on
+public grounds.  As to getting very closely united to him, I am not
+fond enough of him for that.  But what was the other thing you meant?"
+said Lydgate, who was nursing his leg as comfortably as possible, and
+feeling in no great need of advice.
+
+"Why, this.  Take care--experto crede--take care not to get hampered
+about money matters.  I know, by a word you let fall one day, that you
+don't like my playing at cards so much for money.  You are right enough
+there.  But try and keep clear of wanting small sums that you haven't
+got.  I am perhaps talking rather superfluously; but a man likes to
+assume superiority over himself, by holding up his bad example and
+sermonizing on it."
+
+Lydgate took Mr. Farebrother's hints very cordially, though he would
+hardly have borne them from another man.  He could not help remembering
+that he had lately made some debts, but these had seemed inevitable,
+and he had no intention now to do more than keep house in a simple way.
+The furniture for which he owed would not want renewing; nor even the
+stock of wine for a long while.
+
+Many thoughts cheered him at that time--and justly.  A man conscious of
+enthusiasm for worthy aims is sustained under petty hostilities by the
+memory of great workers who had to fight their way not without wounds,
+and who hover in his mind as patron saints, invisibly helping.  At
+home, that same evening when he had been chatting with Mr. Farebrother,
+he had his long legs stretched on the sofa, his head thrown back, and
+his hands clasped behind it according to his favorite ruminating
+attitude, while Rosamond sat at the piano, and played one tune after
+another, of which her husband only knew (like the emotional elephant he
+was!) that they fell in with his mood as if they had been melodious
+sea-breezes.
+
+There was something very fine in Lydgate's look just then, and any one
+might have been encouraged to bet on his achievement.  In his dark eyes
+and on his mouth and brow there was that placidity which comes from the
+fulness of contemplative thought--the mind not searching, but
+beholding, and the glance seeming to be filled with what is behind it.
+
+Presently Rosamond left the piano and seated herself on a chair close
+to the sofa and opposite her husband's face.
+
+"Is that enough music for you, my lord?" she said, folding her hands
+before her and putting on a little air of meekness.
+
+"Yes, dear, if you are tired," said Lydgate, gently, turning his eyes
+and resting them on her, but not otherwise moving.  Rosamond's presence
+at that moment was perhaps no more than a spoonful brought to the lake,
+and her woman's instinct in this matter was not dull.
+
+
+"What is absorbing you?" she said, leaning forward and bringing her
+face nearer to his.
+
+He moved his hands and placed them gently behind her shoulders.
+
+"I am thinking of a great fellow, who was about as old as I am three
+hundred years ago, and had already begun a new era in anatomy."
+
+"I can't guess," said Rosamond, shaking her head.  "We used to play at
+guessing historical characters at Mrs. Lemon's, but not anatomists."
+
+"I'll tell you.  His name was Vesalius.  And the only way he could get
+to know anatomy as he did, was by going to snatch bodies at night, from
+graveyards and places of execution."
+
+"Oh!" said Rosamond, with a look of disgust on her pretty face, "I am
+very glad you are not Vesalius.  I should have thought he might find
+some less horrible way than that."
+
+"No, he couldn't," said Lydgate, going on too earnestly to take much
+notice of her answer.  "He could only get a complete skeleton by
+snatching the whitened bones of a criminal from the gallows, and
+burying them, and fetching them away by bits secretly, in the dead of
+night."
+
+"I hope he is not one of your great heroes," said Rosamond, half
+playfully, half anxiously, "else I shall have you getting up in the
+night to go to St. Peter's churchyard.  You know how angry you told me
+the people were about Mrs. Goby.  You have enemies enough already."
+
+"So had Vesalius, Rosy.  No wonder the medical fogies in Middlemarch
+are jealous, when some of the greatest doctors living were fierce upon
+Vesalius because they had believed in Galen, and he showed that Galen
+was wrong.  They called him a liar and a poisonous monster.  But the
+facts of the human frame were on his side; and so he got the better of
+them."
+
+"And what happened to him afterwards?" said Rosamond, with some
+interest.
+
+"Oh, he had a good deal of fighting to the last.  And they did
+exasperate him enough at one time to make him burn a good deal of his
+work.  Then he got shipwrecked just as he was coming from Jerusalem to
+take a great chair at Padua.  He died rather miserably."
+
+There was a moment's pause before Rosamond said, "Do you know, Tertius,
+I often wish you had not been a medical man."
+
+"Nay, Rosy, don't say that," said Lydgate, drawing her closer to him.
+"That is like saying you wish you had married another man."
+
+"Not at all; you are clever enough for anything: you might easily have
+been something else.  And your cousins at Quallingham all think that
+you have sunk below them in your choice of a profession."
+
+"The cousins at Quallingham may go to the devil!" said Lydgate, with
+scorn.  "It was like their impudence if they said anything of the sort
+to you."
+
+"Still," said Rosamond, "I do _not_ think it is a nice profession,
+dear."  We know that she had much quiet perseverance in her opinion.
+
+"It is the grandest profession in the world, Rosamond," said Lydgate,
+gravely.  "And to say that you love me without loving the medical man
+in me, is the same sort of thing as to say that you like eating a peach
+but don't like its flavor.  Don't say that again, dear, it pains me."
+
+"Very well, Doctor Grave-face," said Rosy, dimpling, "I will declare in
+future that I dote on skeletons, and body-snatchers, and bits of things
+in phials, and quarrels with everybody, that end in your dying
+miserably."
+
+"No, no, not so bad as that," said Lydgate, giving up remonstrance and
+petting her resignedly.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVI.
+
+    Pues no podemos haber aquello que queremos, queramos
+    aquello que podremos.
+
+    Since we cannot get what we like, let us like
+    what we can get.
+                                     --Spanish Proverb.
+
+
+While Lydgate, safely married and with the Hospital under his command,
+felt himself struggling for Medical Reform against Middlemarch,
+Middlemarch was becoming more and more conscious of the national
+struggle for another kind of Reform.
+
+By the time that Lord John Russell's measure was being debated in the
+House of Commons, there was a new political animation in Middlemarch,
+and a new definition of parties which might show a decided change of
+balance if a new election came.  And there were some who already
+predicted this event, declaring that a Reform Bill would never be
+carried by the actual Parliament.  This was what Will Ladislaw dwelt on
+to Mr. Brooke as a reason for congratulation that he had not yet tried
+his strength at the hustings.
+
+"Things will grow and ripen as if it were a comet year," said Will.
+"The public temper will soon get to a cometary heat, now the question
+of Reform has set in.  There is likely to be another election before
+long, and by that time Middlemarch will have got more ideas into its
+head.  What we have to work at now is the 'Pioneer' and political
+meetings."
+
+"Quite right, Ladislaw; we shall make a new thing of opinion here,"
+said Mr. Brooke.  "Only I want to keep myself independent about Reform,
+you know; I don't want to go too far.  I want to take up
+Wilberforce's and Romilly's line, you know, and work at Negro
+Emancipation, Criminal Law--that kind of thing.  But of course I should
+support Grey."
+
+"If you go in for the principle of Reform, you must be prepared to take
+what the situation offers," said Will.  "If everybody pulled for his
+own bit against everybody else, the whole question would go to tatters."
+
+"Yes, yes, I agree with you--I quite take that point of view.  I should
+put it in that light.  I should support Grey, you know.  But I don't
+want to change the balance of the constitution, and I don't think Grey
+would."
+
+"But that is what the country wants," said Will.  "Else there would be
+no meaning in political unions or any other movement that knows what
+it's about.  It wants to have a House of Commons which is not weighted
+with nominees of the landed class, but with representatives of the
+other interests.  And as to contending for a reform short of that, it
+is like asking for a bit of an avalanche which has already begun to
+thunder."
+
+"That is fine, Ladislaw: that is the way to put it.  Write that down,
+now.  We must begin to get documents about the feeling of the country,
+as well as the machine-breaking and general distress."
+
+"As to documents," said Will, "a two-inch card will hold plenty.  A few
+rows of figures are enough to deduce misery from, and a few more will
+show the rate at which the political determination of the people is
+growing."
+
+"Good: draw that out a little more at length, Ladislaw.  That is an
+idea, now: write it out in the 'Pioneer.' Put the figures and deduce
+the misery, you know; and put the other figures and deduce--and so on.
+You have a way of putting things.  Burke, now:--when I think of Burke,
+I can't help wishing somebody had a pocket-borough to give you,
+Ladislaw.  You'd never get elected, you know.  And we shall always want
+talent in the House: reform as we will, we shall always want talent.
+That avalanche and the thunder, now, was really a little like Burke.  I
+want that sort of thing--not ideas, you know, but a way of putting
+them."
+
+"Pocket-boroughs would be a fine thing," said Ladislaw, "if they were
+always in the right pocket, and there were always a Burke at hand."
+
+Will was not displeased with that complimentary comparison, even from
+Mr. Brooke; for it is a little too trying to human flesh to be
+conscious of expressing one's self better than others and never to have
+it noticed, and in the general dearth of admiration for the right
+thing, even a chance bray of applause falling exactly in time is rather
+fortifying.  Will felt that his literary refinements were usually
+beyond the limits of Middlemarch perception; nevertheless, he was
+beginning thoroughly to like the work of which when he began he had
+said to himself rather languidly, "Why not?"--and he studied the
+political situation with as ardent an interest as he had ever given to
+poetic metres or mediaevalism.  It is undeniable that but for the
+desire to be where Dorothea was, and perhaps the want of knowing what
+else to do, Will would not at this time have been meditating on the
+needs of the English people or criticising English statesmanship: he
+would probably have been rambling in Italy sketching plans for several
+dramas, trying prose and finding it too jejune, trying verse and
+finding it too artificial, beginning to copy "bits" from old pictures,
+leaving off because they were "no good," and observing that, after all,
+self-culture was the principal point; while in politics he would have
+been sympathizing warmly with liberty and progress in general.  Our
+sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place
+of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not
+a matter of indifference.
+
+Ladislaw had now accepted his bit of work, though it was not that
+indeterminate loftiest thing which he had once dreamed of as alone
+worthy of continuous effort.  His nature warmed easily in the presence
+of subjects which were visibly mixed with life and action, and the
+easily stirred rebellion in him helped the glow of public spirit.  In
+spite of Mr. Casaubon and the banishment from Lowick, he was rather
+happy; getting a great deal of fresh knowledge in a vivid way and for
+practical purposes, and making the "Pioneer" celebrated as far as
+Brassing (never mind the smallness of the area; the writing was not
+worse than much that reaches the four corners of the earth).
+
+Mr. Brooke was occasionally irritating; but Will's impatience was
+relieved by the division of his time between visits to the Grange and
+retreats to his Middlemarch lodgings, which gave variety to his life.
+
+"Shift the pegs a little," he said to himself, "and Mr. Brooke might be
+in the Cabinet, while I was Under-Secretary. That is the common order
+of things: the little waves make the large ones and are of the same
+pattern.  I am better here than in the sort of life Mr. Casaubon would
+have trained me for, where the doing would be all laid down by a
+precedent too rigid for me to react upon.  I don't care for prestige or
+high pay."
+
+As Lydgate had said of him, he was a sort of gypsy, rather enjoying the
+sense of belonging to no class; he had a feeling of romance in his
+position, and a pleasant consciousness of creating a little surprise
+wherever he went.  That sort of enjoyment had been disturbed when he
+had felt some new distance between himself and Dorothea in their
+accidental meeting at Lydgate's, and his irritation had gone out
+towards Mr. Casaubon, who had declared beforehand that Will would lose
+caste.  "I never had any caste," he would have said, if that prophecy
+had been uttered to him, and the quick blood would have come and gone
+like breath in his transparent skin.  But it is one thing to like
+defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.
+
+Meanwhile, the town opinion about the new editor of the "Pioneer" was
+tending to confirm Mr. Casaubon's view.  Will's relationship in that
+distinguished quarter did not, like Lydgate's high connections, serve
+as an advantageous introduction: if it was rumored that young Ladislaw
+was Mr. Casaubon's nephew or cousin, it was also rumored that "Mr.
+Casaubon would have nothing to do with him."
+
+"Brooke has taken him up," said Mr. Hawley, "because that is what no
+man in his senses could have expected.  Casaubon has devilish good
+reasons, you may be sure, for turning the cold shoulder on a young
+fellow whose bringing-up he paid for.  Just like Brooke--one of those
+fellows who would praise a cat to sell a horse."
+
+And some oddities of Will's, more or less poetical, appeared to support
+Mr. Keck, the editor of the "Trumpet," in asserting that Ladislaw, if
+the truth were known, was not only a Polish emissary but crack-brained,
+which accounted for the preternatural quickness and glibness of his
+speech when he got on to a platform--as he did whenever he had an
+opportunity, speaking with a facility which cast reflections on solid
+Englishmen generally.  It was disgusting to Keck to see a strip of a
+fellow, with light curls round his head, get up and speechify by the
+hour against institutions "which had existed when he was in his
+cradle."  And in a leading article of the "Trumpet," Keck characterized
+Ladislaw's speech at a Reform meeting as "the violence of an
+energumen--a miserable effort to shroud in the brilliancy of fireworks
+the daring of irresponsible statements and the poverty of a knowledge
+which was of the cheapest and most recent description."
+
+"That was a rattling article yesterday, Keck," said Dr. Sprague, with
+sarcastic intentions.  "But what is an energumen?"
+
+"Oh, a term that came up in the French Revolution," said Keck.
+
+This dangerous aspect of Ladislaw was strangely contrasted with other
+habits which became matter of remark.  He had a fondness, half
+artistic, half affectionate, for little children--the smaller they were
+on tolerably active legs, and the funnier their clothing, the better
+Will liked to surprise and please them.  We know that in Rome he was
+given to ramble about among the poor people, and the taste did not quit
+him in Middlemarch.
+
+He had somehow picked up a troop of droll children, little hatless boys
+with their galligaskins much worn and scant shirting to hang out,
+little girls who tossed their hair out of their eyes to look at him,
+and guardian brothers at the mature age of seven.  This troop he had
+led out on gypsy excursions to Halsell Wood at nutting-time, and since
+the cold weather had set in he had taken them on a clear day to gather
+sticks for a bonfire in the hollow of a hillside, where he drew out a
+small feast of gingerbread for them, and improvised a Punch-and-Judy
+drama with some private home-made puppets.  Here was one oddity.
+Another was, that in houses where he got friendly, he was given to
+stretch himself at full length on the rug while he talked, and was apt
+to be discovered in this attitude by occasional callers for whom such
+an irregularity was likely to confirm the notions of his dangerously
+mixed blood and general laxity.
+
+But Will's articles and speeches naturally recommended him in families
+which the new strictness of party division had marked off on the side
+of Reform.  He was invited to Mr. Bulstrode's; but here he could not
+lie down on the rug, and Mrs. Bulstrode felt that his mode of talking
+about Catholic countries, as if there were any truce with Antichrist,
+illustrated the usual tendency to unsoundness in intellectual men.
+
+At Mr. Farebrother's, however, whom the irony of events had brought on
+the same side with Bulstrode in the national movement, Will became a
+favorite with the ladies; especially with little Miss Noble, whom it
+was one of his oddities to escort when he met her in the street with
+her little basket, giving her his arm in the eyes of the town, and
+insisting on going with her to pay some call where she distributed her
+small filchings from her own share of sweet things.
+
+But the house where he visited oftenest and lay most on the rug was
+Lydgate's. The two men were not at all alike, but they agreed none the
+worse.  Lydgate was abrupt but not irritable, taking little notice of
+megrims in healthy people; and Ladislaw did not usually throw away his
+susceptibilities on those who took no notice of them.  With Rosamond,
+on the other hand, he pouted and was wayward--nay, often
+uncomplimentary, much to her inward surprise; nevertheless he was
+gradually becoming necessary to her entertainment by his companionship
+in her music, his varied talk, and his freedom from the grave
+preoccupation which, with all her husband's tenderness and indulgence,
+often made his manners unsatisfactory to her, and confirmed her dislike
+of the medical profession.
+
+Lydgate, inclined to be sarcastic on the superstitious faith of the
+people in the efficacy of "the bill," while nobody cared about the low
+state of pathology, sometimes assailed Will with troublesome questions.
+One evening in March, Rosamond in her cherry-colored dress with
+swansdown trimming about the throat sat at the tea-table; Lydgate,
+lately come in tired from his outdoor work, was seated sideways on an
+easy-chair by the fire with one leg over the elbow, his brow looking a
+little troubled as his eyes rambled over the columns of the "Pioneer,"
+while Rosamond, having noticed that he was perturbed, avoided looking
+at him, and inwardly thanked heaven that she herself had not a moody
+disposition.  Will Ladislaw was stretched on the rug contemplating the
+curtain-pole abstractedly, and humming very low the notes of "When
+first I saw thy face;" while the house spaniel, also stretched out with
+small choice of room, looked from between his paws at the usurper of
+the rug with silent but strong objection.
+
+Rosamond bringing Lydgate his cup of tea, he threw down the paper, and
+said to Will, who had started up and gone to the table--
+
+"It's no use your puffing Brooke as a reforming landlord, Ladislaw:
+they only pick the more holes in his coat in the 'Trumpet.'"
+
+"No matter; those who read the 'Pioneer' don't read the 'Trumpet,'"
+said Will, swallowing his tea and walking about.  "Do you suppose the
+public reads with a view to its own conversion?  We should have a
+witches' brewing with a vengeance then--'Mingle, mingle, mingle,
+mingle, You that mingle may'--and nobody would know which side he was
+going to take."
+
+"Farebrother says, he doesn't believe Brooke would get elected if the
+opportunity came: the very men who profess to be for him would bring
+another member out of the bag at the right moment."
+
+"There's no harm in trying.  It's good to have resident members."
+
+"Why?" said Lydgate, who was much given to use that inconvenient word
+in a curt tone.
+
+"They represent the local stupidity better," said Will, laughing, and
+shaking his curls; "and they are kept on their best behavior in the
+neighborhood.  Brooke is not a bad fellow, but he has done some good
+things on his estate that he never would have done but for this
+Parliamentary bite."
+
+"He's not fitted to be a public man," said Lydgate, with contemptuous
+decision.  "He would disappoint everybody who counted on him: I can see
+that at the Hospital.  Only, there Bulstrode holds the reins and drives
+him."
+
+"That depends on how you fix your standard of public men," said Will.
+"He's good enough for the occasion: when the people have made up their
+mind as they are making it up now, they don't want a man--they only
+want a vote."
+
+"That is the way with you political writers, Ladislaw--crying up a
+measure as if it were a universal cure, and crying up men who are a
+part of the very disease that wants curing."
+
+"Why not?  Men may help to cure themselves off the face of the land
+without knowing it," said Will, who could find reasons impromptu, when
+he had not thought of a question beforehand.
+
+"That is no excuse for encouraging the superstitious exaggeration of
+hopes about this particular measure, helping the cry to swallow it
+whole and to send up voting popinjays who are good for nothing but to
+carry it.  You go against rottenness, and there is nothing more
+thoroughly rotten than making people believe that society can be cured
+by a political hocus-pocus."
+
+"That's very fine, my dear fellow.  But your cure must begin somewhere,
+and put it that a thousand things which debase a population can never
+be reformed without this particular reform to begin with.  Look what
+Stanley said the other day--that the House had been tinkering long
+enough at small questions of bribery, inquiring whether this or that
+voter has had a guinea when everybody knows that the seats have been
+sold wholesale.  Wait for wisdom and conscience in public
+agents--fiddlestick!  The only conscience we can trust to is the
+massive sense of wrong in a class, and the best wisdom that will work
+is the wisdom of balancing claims.  That's my text--which side is
+injured?  I support the man who supports their claims; not the virtuous
+upholder of the wrong."
+
+"That general talk about a particular case is mere question begging,
+Ladislaw.  When I say, I go in for the dose that cures, it doesn't
+follow that I go in for opium in a given case of gout."
+
+"I am not begging the question we are upon--whether we are to try for
+nothing till we find immaculate men to work with.  Should you go on
+that plan?  If there were one man who would carry you a medical reform
+and another who would oppose it, should you inquire which had the
+better motives or even the better brains?"
+
+"Oh, of course," said Lydgate, seeing himself checkmated by a move
+which he had often used himself, "if one did not work with such men as
+are at hand, things must come to a dead-lock. Suppose the worst opinion
+in the town about Bulstrode were a true one, that would not make it
+less true that he has the sense and the resolution to do what I think
+ought to be done in the matters I know and care most about; but that is
+the only ground on which I go with him," Lydgate added rather proudly,
+bearing in mind Mr. Farebrother's remarks.  "He is nothing to me
+otherwise; I would not cry him up on any personal ground--I would keep
+clear of that."
+
+"Do you mean that I cry up Brooke on any personal ground?" said Will
+Ladislaw, nettled, and turning sharp round.  For the first time he felt
+offended with Lydgate; not the less so, perhaps, because he would have
+declined any close inquiry into the growth of his relation to Mr.
+Brooke.
+
+"Not at all," said Lydgate, "I was simply explaining my own action.  I
+meant that a man may work for a special end with others whose motives
+and general course are equivocal, if he is quite sure of his personal
+independence, and that he is not working for his private
+interest--either place or money."
+
+"Then, why don't you extend your liberality to others?" said Will,
+still nettled.  "My personal independence is as important to me as
+yours is to you.  You have no more reason to imagine that I have
+personal expectations from Brooke, than I have to imagine that you have
+personal expectations from Bulstrode.  Motives are points of honor, I
+suppose--nobody can prove them.  But as to money and place in the
+world." Will ended, tossing back his head, "I think it is pretty clear
+that I am not determined by considerations of that sort."
+
+"You quite mistake me, Ladislaw," said Lydgate, surprised.  He had been
+preoccupied with his own vindication, and had been blind to what
+Ladislaw might infer on his own account.  "I beg your pardon for
+unintentionally annoying you.  In fact, I should rather attribute to
+you a romantic disregard of your own worldly interests.  On the
+political question, I referred simply to intellectual bias."
+
+"How very unpleasant you both are this evening!" said Rosamond.  "I
+cannot conceive why money should have been referred to.  Polities and
+Medicine are sufficiently disagreeable to quarrel upon.  You can both
+of you go on quarrelling with all the world and with each other on
+those two topics."
+
+Rosamond looked mildly neutral as she said this, rising to ring the
+bell, and then crossing to her work-table.
+
+"Poor Rosy!" said Lydgate, putting out his hand to her as she was
+passing him.  "Disputation is not amusing to cherubs.  Have some music.
+Ask Ladislaw to sing with you."
+
+When Will was gone Rosamond said to her husband, "What put you out of
+temper this evening, Tertius?"
+
+"Me?  It was Ladislaw who was out of temper.  He is like a bit of
+tinder."
+
+"But I mean, before that.  Something had vexed you before you came in,
+you looked cross.  And that made you begin to dispute with Mr.
+Ladislaw.  You hurt me very much when you look so, Tertius."
+
+"Do I?  Then I am a brute," said Lydgate, caressing her penitently.
+
+"What vexed you?"
+
+"Oh, outdoor things--business."  It was really a letter insisting on
+the payment of a bill for furniture.  But Rosamond was expecting to
+have a baby, and Lydgate wished to save her from any perturbation.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVII.
+
+    Was never true love loved in vain,
+    For truest love is highest gain.
+    No art can make it: it must spring
+    Where elements are fostering.
+        So in heaven's spot and hour
+        Springs the little native flower,
+        Downward root and upward eye,
+        Shapen by the earth and sky.
+
+
+It happened to be on a Saturday evening that Will Ladislaw had that
+little discussion with Lydgate.  Its effect when he went to his own
+rooms was to make him sit up half the night, thinking over again, under
+a new irritation, all that he had before thought of his having settled
+in Middlemarch and harnessed himself with Mr. Brooke.  Hesitations
+before he had taken the step had since turned into susceptibility to
+every hint that he would have been wiser not to take it; and hence came
+his heat towards Lydgate--a heat which still kept him restless.  Was he
+not making a fool of himself?--and at a time when he was more than
+ever conscious of being something better than a fool?  And for what end?
+
+Well, for no definite end.  True, he had dreamy visions of
+possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions and
+thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions--does not find
+images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting
+it with dread.  But this, which happens to us all, happens to some with
+a wide difference; and Will was not one of those whose wit "keeps the
+roadway:" he had his bypaths where there were little joys of his own
+choosing, such as gentlemen cantering on the highroad might have
+thought rather idiotic.  The way in which he made a sort of happiness
+for himself out of his feeling for Dorothea was an example of this.  It
+may seem strange, but it is the fact, that the ordinary vulgar vision
+of which Mr. Casaubon suspected him--namely, that Dorothea might become
+a widow, and that the interest he had established in her mind might
+turn into acceptance of him as a husband--had no tempting, arresting
+power over him; he did not live in the scenery of such an event, and
+follow it out, as we all do with that imagined "otherwise" which is our
+practical heaven.  It was not only that he was unwilling to entertain
+thoughts which could be accused of baseness, and was already uneasy in
+the sense that he had to justify himself from the charge of
+ingratitude--the latent consciousness of many other barriers between
+himself and Dorothea besides the existence of her husband, had helped
+to turn away his imagination from speculating on what might befall Mr.
+Casaubon.  And there were yet other reasons.  Will, we know, could not
+bear the thought of any flaw appearing in his crystal: he was at once
+exasperated and delighted by the calm freedom with which Dorothea
+looked at him and spoke to him, and there was something so exquisite in
+thinking of her just as she was, that he could not long for a change
+which must somehow change her.  Do we not shun the street version of a
+fine melody?--or shrink from the news that the rarity--some bit of
+chiselling or engraving perhaps--which we have dwelt on even with
+exultation in the trouble it has cost us to snatch glimpses of it, is
+really not an uncommon thing, and may be obtained as an every-day
+possession?  Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our
+emotion; and to Will, a creature who cared little for what are called
+the solid things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to
+have within him such a feeling as he had towards Dorothea, was like the
+inheritance of a fortune.  What others might have called the futility
+of his passion, made an additional delight for his imagination: he was
+conscious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own
+experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy.
+Dorothea, he said to himself, was forever enthroned in his soul: no
+other woman could sit higher than her footstool; and if he could have
+written out in immortal syllables the effect she wrought within him, he
+might have boasted after the example of old Drayton, that,--
+
+        "Queens hereafter might be glad to live
+         Upon the alms of her superfluous praise."
+
+But this result was questionable.  And what else could he do for
+Dorothea?  What was his devotion worth to her?  It was impossible to
+tell.  He would not go out of her reach.  He saw no creature among her
+friends to whom he could believe that she spoke with the same simple
+confidence as to him.  She had once said that she would like him to
+stay; and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss
+around her.
+
+This had always been the conclusion of Will's hesitations.  But he was
+not without contradictoriness and rebellion even towards his own
+resolve.  He had often got irritated, as he was on this particular
+night, by some outside demonstration that his public exertions with Mr.
+Brooke as a chief could not seem as heroic as he would like them to be,
+and this was always associated with the other ground of
+irritation--that notwithstanding his sacrifice of dignity for
+Dorothea's sake, he could hardly ever see her.  Whereupon, not being
+able to contradict these unpleasant facts, he contradicted his own
+strongest bias and said, "I am a fool."
+
+Nevertheless, since the inward debate necessarily turned on Dorothea,
+he ended, as he had done before, only by getting a livelier sense of
+what her presence would be to him; and suddenly reflecting that the
+morrow would be Sunday, he determined to go to Lowick Church and see
+her.  He slept upon that idea, but when he was dressing in the rational
+morning light, Objection said--
+
+"That will be a virtual defiance of Mr. Casaubon's prohibition to visit
+Lowick, and Dorothea will be displeased."
+
+"Nonsense!" argued Inclination, "it would be too monstrous for him to
+hinder me from going out to a pretty country church on a spring
+morning.  And Dorothea will be glad."
+
+"It will be clear to Mr. Casaubon that you have come either to annoy
+him or to see Dorothea."
+
+"It is not true that I go to annoy him, and why should I not go to see
+Dorothea?  Is he to have everything to himself and be always
+comfortable?  Let him smart a little, as other people are obliged to
+do.  I have always liked the quaintness of the church and congregation;
+besides, I know the Tuckers: I shall go into their pew."
+
+Having silenced Objection by force of unreason, Will walked to Lowick
+as if he had been on the way to Paradise, crossing Halsell Common and
+skirting the wood, where the sunlight fell broadly under the budding
+boughs, bringing out the beauties of moss and lichen, and fresh green
+growths piercing the brown.  Everything seemed to know that it was
+Sunday, and to approve of his going to Lowick Church.  Will easily felt
+happy when nothing crossed his humor, and by this time the thought of
+vexing Mr. Casaubon had become rather amusing to him, making his face
+break into its merry smile, pleasant to see as the breaking of sunshine
+on the water--though the occasion was not exemplary.  But most of us
+are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is
+odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his
+personality excites in ourselves.  Will went along with a small book
+under his arm and a hand in each side-pocket, never reading, but
+chanting a little, as he made scenes of what would happen in church and
+coming out.  He was experimenting in tunes to suit some words of his
+own, sometimes trying a ready-made melody, sometimes improvising.  The
+words were not exactly a hymn, but they certainly fitted his Sunday
+experience:--
+
+        "O me, O me, what frugal cheer
+           My love doth feed upon!
+         A touch, a ray, that is not here,
+           A shadow that is gone:
+
+        "A dream of breath that might be near,
+           An inly-echoed tone,
+         The thought that one may think me dear,
+           The place where one was known,
+
+        "The tremor of a banished fear,
+           An ill that was not done--
+         O me, O me, what frugal cheer
+           My love doth feed upon!"
+
+Sometimes, when he took off his hat, shaking his head backward, and
+showing his delicate throat as he sang, he looked like an incarnation
+of the spring whose spirit filled the air--a bright creature, abundant
+in uncertain promises.
+
+The bells were still ringing when he got to Lowick, and he went into
+the curate's pew before any one else arrived there.  But he was still
+left alone in it when the congregation had assembled.  The curate's pew
+was opposite the rector's at the entrance of the small chancel, and
+Will had time to fear that Dorothea might not come while he looked
+round at the group of rural faces which made the congregation from year
+to year within the white-washed walls and dark old pews, hardly with
+more change than we see in the boughs of a tree which breaks here and
+there with age, but yet has young shoots.  Mr. Rigg's frog-face was
+something alien and unaccountable, but notwithstanding this shock to
+the order of things, there were still the Waules and the rural stock of
+the Powderells in their pews side by side; brother Samuel's cheek had
+the same purple round as ever, and the three generations of decent
+cottagers came as of old with a sense of duty to their betters
+generally--the smaller children regarding Mr. Casaubon, who wore the
+black gown and mounted to the highest box, as probably the chief of all
+betters, and the one most awful if offended.  Even in 1831 Lowick was
+at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor of the
+Sunday sermon.  The congregation had been used to seeing Will at church
+in former days, and no one took much note of him except the choir, who
+expected him to make a figure in the singing.
+
+Dorothea did at last appear on this quaint background, walking up the
+short aisle in her white beaver bonnet and gray cloak--the same she had
+worn in the Vatican.  Her face being, from her entrance, towards the
+chancel, even her shortsighted eyes soon discerned Will, but there was
+no outward show of her feeling except a slight paleness and a grave bow
+as she passed him.  To his own surprise Will felt suddenly
+uncomfortable, and dared not look at her after they had bowed to each
+other.  Two minutes later, when Mr. Casaubon came out of the vestry,
+and, entering the pew, seated himself in face of Dorothea, Will felt
+his paralysis more complete.  He could look nowhere except at the choir
+in the little gallery over the vestry-door: Dorothea was perhaps
+pained, and he had made a wretched blunder.  It was no longer amusing
+to vex Mr. Casaubon, who had the advantage probably of watching him and
+seeing that he dared not turn his head.  Why had he not imagined this
+beforehand?--but he could not expect that he should sit in that square
+pew alone, unrelieved by any Tuckers, who had apparently departed from
+Lowick altogether, for a new clergyman was in the desk.  Still he
+called himself stupid now for not foreseeing that it would be
+impossible for him to look towards Dorothea--nay, that she might feel
+his coming an impertinence.  There was no delivering himself from his
+cage, however; and Will found his places and looked at his book as if
+he had been a school-mistress, feeling that the morning service had
+never been so immeasurably long before, that he was utterly ridiculous,
+out of temper, and miserable.  This was what a man got by worshipping
+the sight of a woman!  The clerk observed with surprise that Mr.
+Ladislaw did not join in the tune of Hanover, and reflected that he
+might have a cold.
+
+Mr. Casaubon did not preach that morning, and there was no change in
+Will's situation until the blessing had been pronounced and every one
+rose.  It was the fashion at Lowick for "the betters" to go out first.
+With a sudden determination to break the spell that was upon him, Will
+looked straight at Mr. Casaubon.  But that gentleman's eyes were on the
+button of the pew-door, which he opened, allowing Dorothea to pass, and
+following her immediately without raising his eyelids.  Will's glance
+had caught Dorothea's as she turned out of the pew, and again she
+bowed, but this time with a look of agitation, as if she were
+repressing tears.  Will walked out after them, but they went on towards
+the little gate leading out of the churchyard into the shrubbery, never
+looking round.
+
+It was impossible for him to follow them, and he could only walk back
+sadly at mid-day along the same road which he had trodden hopefully in
+the morning.  The lights were all changed for him both without and
+within.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLVIII
+
+    Surely the golden hours are turning gray
+    And dance no more, and vainly strive to run:
+    I see their white locks streaming in the wind--
+    Each face is haggard as it looks at me,
+    Slow turning in the constant clasping round
+    Storm-driven.
+
+
+Dorothea's distress when she was leaving the church came chiefly from
+the perception that Mr. Casaubon was determined not to speak to his
+cousin, and that Will's presence at church had served to mark more
+strongly the alienation between them.  Will's coming seemed to her
+quite excusable, nay, she thought it an amiable movement in him towards
+a reconciliation which she herself had been constantly wishing for.  He
+had probably imagined, as she had, that if Mr. Casaubon and he could
+meet easily, they would shake hands and friendly intercourse might
+return.  But now Dorothea felt quite robbed of that hope.  Will was
+banished further than ever, for Mr. Casaubon must have been newly
+embittered by this thrusting upon him of a presence which he refused to
+recognize.
+
+He had not been very well that morning, suffering from some difficulty
+in breathing, and had not preached in consequence; she was not
+surprised, therefore, that he was nearly silent at luncheon, still less
+that he made no allusion to Will Ladislaw.  For her own part she felt
+that she could never again introduce that subject.  They usually spent
+apart the hours between luncheon and dinner on a Sunday; Mr. Casaubon
+in the library dozing chiefly, and Dorothea in her boudoir, where she
+was wont to occupy herself with some of her favorite books.  There was
+a little heap of them on the table in the bow-window--of various sorts,
+from Herodotus, which she was learning to read with Mr. Casaubon, to
+her old companion Pascal, and Keble's "Christian Year." But to-day
+opened one after another, and could read none of them.  Everything
+seemed dreary: the portents before the birth of Cyrus--Jewish
+antiquities--oh dear!--devout epigrams--the sacred chime of favorite
+hymns--all alike were as flat as tunes beaten on wood: even the spring
+flowers and the grass had a dull shiver in them under the afternoon
+clouds that hid the sun fitfully; even the sustaining thoughts which
+had become habits seemed to have in them the weariness of long future
+days in which she would still live with them for her sole companions.
+It was another or rather a fuller sort of companionship that poor
+Dorothea was hungering for, and the hunger had grown from the perpetual
+effort demanded by her married life.  She was always trying to be what
+her husband wished, and never able to repose on his delight in what she
+was.  The thing that she liked, that she spontaneously cared to have,
+seemed to be always excluded from her life; for if it was only granted
+and not shared by her husband it might as well have been denied.  About
+Will Ladislaw there had been a difference between them from the first,
+and it had ended, since Mr. Casaubon had so severely repulsed
+Dorothea's strong feeling about his claims on the family property, by
+her being convinced that she was in the right and her husband in the
+wrong, but that she was helpless.  This afternoon the helplessness was
+more wretchedly benumbing than ever: she longed for objects who could
+be dear to her, and to whom she could be dear.  She longed for work
+which would be directly beneficent like the sunshine and the rain, and
+now it appeared that she was to live more and more in a virtual tomb,
+where there was the apparatus of a ghastly labor producing what would
+never see the light.  Today she had stood at the door of the tomb and
+seen Will Ladislaw receding into the distant world of warm activity and
+fellowship--turning his face towards her as he went.
+
+Books were of no use.  Thinking was of no use.  It was Sunday, and she
+could not have the carriage to go to Celia, who had lately had a baby.
+There was no refuge now from spiritual emptiness and discontent, and
+Dorothea had to bear her bad mood, as she would have borne a headache.
+
+After dinner, at the hour when she usually began to read aloud, Mr.
+Casaubon proposed that they should go into the library, where, he said,
+he had ordered a fire and lights.  He seemed to have revived, and to be
+thinking intently.
+
+In the library Dorothea observed that he had newly arranged a row of
+his note-books on a table, and now he took up and put into her hand a
+well-known volume, which was a table of contents to all the others.
+
+"You will oblige me, my dear," he said, seating himself, "if instead of
+other reading this evening, you will go through this aloud, pencil in
+hand, and at each point where I say 'mark,' will make a cross with your
+pencil.  This is the first step in a sifting process which I have long
+had in view, and as we go on I shall be able to indicate to you certain
+principles of selection whereby you will, I trust, have an intelligent
+participation in my purpose."
+
+This proposal was only one more sign added to many since his memorable
+interview with Lydgate, that Mr. Casaubon's original reluctance to let
+Dorothea work with him had given place to the contrary disposition,
+namely, to demand much interest and labor from her.
+
+After she had read and marked for two hours, he said, "We will take the
+volume up-stairs--and the pencil, if you please--and in case of
+reading in the night, we can pursue this task.  It is not wearisome to
+you, I trust, Dorothea?"
+
+"I prefer always reading what you like best to hear," said Dorothea,
+who told the simple truth; for what she dreaded was to exert herself in
+reading or anything else which left him as joyless as ever.
+
+It was a proof of the force with which certain characteristics in
+Dorothea impressed those around her, that her husband, with all his
+jealousy and suspicion, had gathered implicit trust in the integrity of
+her promises, and her power of devoting herself to her idea of the
+right and best.  Of late he had begun to feel that these qualities were
+a peculiar possession for himself, and he wanted to engross them.
+
+The reading in the night did come.  Dorothea in her young weariness had
+slept soon and fast: she was awakened by a sense of light, which seemed
+to her at first like a sudden vision of sunset after she had climbed a
+steep hill: she opened her eyes and saw her husband wrapped in his warm
+gown seating himself in the arm-chair near the fire-place where the
+embers were still glowing.  He had lit two candles, expecting that
+Dorothea would awake, but not liking to rouse her by more direct means.
+
+"Are you ill, Edward?" she said, rising immediately.
+
+"I felt some uneasiness in a reclining posture.  I will sit here for a
+time."  She threw wood on the fire, wrapped herself up, and said, "You
+would like me to read to you?"
+
+"You would oblige me greatly by doing so, Dorothea," said Mr. Casaubon,
+with a shade more meekness than usual in his polite manner.  "I am
+wakeful: my mind is remarkably lucid."
+
+"I fear that the excitement may be too great for you," said Dorothea,
+remembering Lydgate's cautions.
+
+"No, I am not conscious of undue excitement.  Thought is easy."
+Dorothea dared not insist, and she read for an hour or more on the same
+plan as she had done in the evening, but getting over the pages with
+more quickness.  Mr. Casaubon's mind was more alert, and he seemed to
+anticipate what was coming after a very slight verbal indication,
+saying, "That will do--mark that"--or "Pass on to the next head--I omit
+the second excursus on Crete." Dorothea was amazed to think of the
+bird-like speed with which his mind was surveying the ground where it
+had been creeping for years.  At last he said--
+
+"Close the book now, my dear.  We will resume our work to-morrow.  I
+have deferred it too long, and would gladly see it completed.  But you
+observe that the principle on which my selection is made, is to give
+adequate, and not disproportionate illustration to each of the theses
+enumerated in my introduction, as at present sketched.  You have
+perceived that distinctly, Dorothea?"
+
+"Yes," said Dorothea, rather tremulously.  She felt sick at heart.
+
+"And now I think that I can take some repose," said Mr. Casaubon.  He
+laid down again and begged her to put out the lights.  When she had
+lain down too, and there was a darkness only broken by a dull glow on
+the hearth, he said--
+
+"Before I sleep, I have a request to make, Dorothea."
+
+"What is it?" said Dorothea, with dread in her mind.
+
+"It is that you will let me know, deliberately, whether, in case of my
+death, you will carry out my wishes: whether you will avoid doing what
+I should deprecate, and apply yourself to do what I should desire."
+
+Dorothea was not taken by surprise: many incidents had been leading her
+to the conjecture of some intention on her husband's part which might
+make a new yoke for her.  She did not answer immediately.
+
+"You refuse?" said Mr. Casaubon, with more edge in his tone.
+
+"No, I do not yet refuse," said Dorothea, in a clear voice, the need of
+freedom asserting itself within her; "but it is too solemn--I think it
+is not right--to make a promise when I am ignorant what it will bind me
+to.  Whatever affection prompted I would do without promising."
+
+"But you would use your own judgment: I ask you to obey mine; you
+refuse."
+
+"No, dear, no!" said Dorothea, beseechingly, crushed by opposing fears.
+"But may I wait and reflect a little while?  I desire with my whole
+soul to do what will comfort you; but I cannot give any pledge
+suddenly--still less a pledge to do I know not what."
+
+"You cannot then confide in the nature of my wishes?"
+
+"Grant me till to-morrow," said Dorothea, beseechingly.
+
+"Till to-morrow then," said Mr. Casaubon.
+
+Soon she could hear that he was sleeping, but there was no more sleep
+for her.  While she constrained herself to lie still lest she should
+disturb him, her mind was carrying on a conflict in which imagination
+ranged its forces first on one side and then on the other.  She had no
+presentiment that the power which her husband wished to establish over
+her future action had relation to anything else than his work.  But it
+was clear enough to her that he would expect her to devote herself to
+sifting those mixed heaps of material, which were to be the doubtful
+illustration of principles still more doubtful.  The poor child had
+become altogether unbelieving as to the trustworthiness of that Key
+which had made the ambition and the labor of her husband's life.  It
+was not wonderful that, in spite of her small instruction, her judgment
+in this matter was truer than his: for she looked with unbiassed
+comparison and healthy sense at probabilities on which he had risked
+all his egoism.  And now she pictured to herself the days, and months,
+and years which she must spend in sorting what might be called
+shattered mummies, and fragments of a tradition which was itself a
+mosaic wrought from crushed ruins--sorting them as food for a theory
+which was already withered in the birth like an elfin child.  Doubtless
+a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth
+a-breathing: the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of
+substances, the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and
+Lavoisier is born.  But Mr. Casaubon's theory of the elements which
+made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares
+against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more
+solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in
+sound until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible:
+it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity
+of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate
+notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for
+threading the stars together.  And Dorothea had so often had to check
+her weariness and impatience over this questionable riddle-guessing, as
+it revealed itself to her instead of the fellowship in high knowledge
+which was to make life worthier!  She could understand well enough now
+why her husband had come to cling to her, as possibly the only hope
+left that his labors would ever take a shape in which they could be
+given to the world.  At first it had seemed that he wished to keep even
+her aloof from any close knowledge of what he was doing; but gradually
+the terrible stringency of human need--the prospect of a too speedy
+death--
+
+And here Dorothea's pity turned from her own future to her husband's
+past--nay, to his present hard struggle with a lot which had grown out
+of that past: the lonely labor, the ambition breathing hardly under the
+pressure of self-distrust; the goal receding, and the heavier limbs;
+and now at last the sword visibly trembling above him!  And had she not
+wished to marry him that she might help him in his life's labor?--But
+she had thought the work was to be something greater, which she could
+serve in devoutly for its own sake.  Was it right, even to soothe his
+grief--would it be possible, even if she promised--to work as in a
+treadmill fruitlessly?
+
+And yet, could she deny him?  Could she say, "I refuse to content this
+pining hunger?"  It would be refusing to do for him dead, what she was
+almost sure to do for him living.  If he lived as Lydgate had said he
+might, for fifteen years or more, her life would certainly be spent in
+helping him and obeying him.
+
+Still, there was a deep difference between that devotion to the living
+and that indefinite promise of devotion to the dead.  While he lived,
+he could claim nothing that she would not still be free to remonstrate
+against, and even to refuse.  But--the thought passed through her mind
+more than once, though she could not believe in it--might he not mean
+to demand something more from her than she had been able to imagine,
+since he wanted her pledge to carry out his wishes without telling her
+exactly what they were?  No; his heart was bound up in his work only:
+that was the end for which his failing life was to be eked out by hers.
+
+And now, if she were to say, "No! if you die, I will put no finger to
+your work"--it seemed as if she would be crushing that bruised heart.
+
+For four hours Dorothea lay in this conflict, till she felt ill and
+bewildered, unable to resolve, praying mutely.  Helpless as a child
+which has sobbed and sought too long, she fell into a late morning
+sleep, and when she waked Mr. Casaubon was already up.  Tantripp told
+her that he had read prayers, breakfasted, and was in the library.
+
+"I never saw you look so pale, madam," said Tantripp, a solid-figured
+woman who had been with the sisters at Lausanne.
+
+"Was I ever high-colored, Tantripp?" said Dorothea, smiling faintly.
+
+"Well, not to say high-colored, but with a bloom like a Chiny rose.
+But always smelling those leather books, what can be expected?  Do rest
+a little this morning, madam.  Let me say you are ill and not able to
+go into that close library."
+
+"Oh no, no! let me make haste," said Dorothea.  "Mr. Casaubon wants me
+particularly."
+
+When she went down she felt sure that she should promise to fulfil his
+wishes; but that would be later in the day--not yet.
+
+As Dorothea entered the library, Mr. Casaubon turned round from the
+table where he had been placing some books, and said--
+
+"I was waiting for your appearance, my dear.  I had hoped to set to
+work at once this morning, but I find myself under some indisposition,
+probably from too much excitement yesterday.  I am going now to take a
+turn in the shrubbery, since the air is milder."
+
+"I am glad to hear that," said Dorothea.  "Your mind, I feared, was too
+active last night."
+
+"I would fain have it set at rest on the point I last spoke of,
+Dorothea.  You can now, I hope, give me an answer."
+
+"May I come out to you in the garden presently?" said Dorothea, winning
+a little breathing space in that way.
+
+"I shall be in the Yew-tree Walk for the next half-hour," said Mr.
+Casaubon, and then he left her.
+
+Dorothea, feeling very weary, rang and asked Tantripp to bring her some
+wraps.  She had been sitting still for a few minutes, but not in any
+renewal of the former conflict: she simply felt that she was going to
+say "Yes" to her own doom: she was too weak, too full of dread at the
+thought of inflicting a keen-edged blow on her husband, to do anything
+but submit completely.  She sat still and let Tantripp put on her
+bonnet and shawl, a passivity which was unusual with her, for she liked
+to wait on herself.
+
+"God bless you, madam!" said Tantripp, with an irrepressible movement
+of love towards the beautiful, gentle creature for whom she felt unable
+to do anything more, now that she had finished tying the bonnet.
+
+This was too much for Dorothea's highly-strung feeling, and she burst
+into tears, sobbing against Tantripp's arm.  But soon she checked
+herself, dried her eyes, and went out at the glass door into the
+shrubbery.
+
+"I wish every book in that library was built into a caticom for your
+master," said Tantripp to Pratt, the butler, finding him in the
+breakfast-room. She had been at Rome, and visited the antiquities, as
+we know; and she always declined to call Mr. Casaubon anything but
+"your master," when speaking to the other servants.
+
+Pratt laughed.  He liked his master very well, but he liked Tantripp
+better.
+
+When Dorothea was out on the gravel walks, she lingered among the
+nearer clumps of trees, hesitating, as she had done once before, though
+from a different cause.  Then she had feared lest her effort at
+fellowship should be unwelcome; now she dreaded going to the spot where
+she foresaw that she must bind herself to a fellowship from which she
+shrank.  Neither law nor the world's opinion compelled her to
+this--only her husband's nature and her own compassion, only the ideal
+and not the real yoke of marriage.  She saw clearly enough the whole
+situation, yet she was fettered: she could not smite the stricken soul
+that entreated hers.  If that were weakness, Dorothea was weak.  But
+the half-hour was passing, and she must not delay longer.  When she
+entered the Yew-tree Walk she could not see her husband; but the walk
+had bends, and she went, expecting to catch sight of his figure wrapped
+in a blue cloak, which, with a warm velvet cap, was his outer garment
+on chill days for the garden.  It occurred to her that he might be
+resting in the summer-house, towards which the path diverged a little.
+Turning the angle, she could see him seated on the bench, close to a
+stone table.  His arms were resting on the table, and his brow was
+bowed down on them, the blue cloak being dragged forward and screening
+his face on each side.
+
+"He exhausted himself last night," Dorothea said to herself, thinking
+at first that he was asleep, and that the summer-house was too damp a
+place to rest in.  But then she remembered that of late she had seen
+him take that attitude when she was reading to him, as if he found it
+easier than any other; and that he would sometimes speak, as well as
+listen, with his face down in that way.  She went into the summerhouse
+and said, "I am come, Edward; I am ready."
+
+He took no notice, and she thought that he must be fast asleep.  She
+laid her hand on his shoulder, and repeated, "I am ready!" Still he was
+motionless; and with a sudden confused fear, she leaned down to him,
+took off his velvet cap, and leaned her cheek close to his head, crying
+in a distressed tone--
+
+"Wake, dear, wake!  Listen to me.  I am come to answer." But Dorothea
+never gave her answer.
+
+Later in the day, Lydgate was seated by her bedside, and she was
+talking deliriously, thinking aloud, and recalling what had gone
+through her mind the night before.  She knew him, and called him by his
+name, but appeared to think it right that she should explain everything
+to him; and again, and again, begged him to explain everything to her
+husband.
+
+"Tell him I shall go to him soon: I am ready to promise.  Only,
+thinking about it was so dreadful--it has made me ill.  Not very ill.
+I shall soon be better.  Go and tell him."
+
+But the silence in her husband's ear was never more to be broken.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XLIX.
+
+    A task too strong for wizard spells
+    This squire had brought about;
+    'T is easy dropping stones in wells,
+    But who shall get them out?"
+
+
+"I wish to God we could hinder Dorothea from knowing this," said Sir
+James Chettam, with a little frown on his brow, and an expression of
+intense disgust about his mouth.
+
+He was standing on the hearth-rug in the library at Lowick Grange, and
+speaking to Mr. Brooke.  It was the day after Mr. Casaubon had been
+buried, and Dorothea was not yet able to leave her room.
+
+"That would be difficult, you know, Chettam, as she is an executrix,
+and she likes to go into these things--property, land, that kind of
+thing.  She has her notions, you know," said Mr. Brooke, sticking his
+eye-glasses on nervously, and exploring the edges of a folded paper
+which he held in his hand; "and she would like to act--depend upon it,
+as an executrix Dorothea would want to act.  And she was twenty-one
+last December, you know.  I can hinder nothing."
+
+Sir James looked at the carpet for a minute in silence, and then
+lifting his eyes suddenly fixed them on Mr. Brooke, saying, "I will
+tell you what we can do.  Until Dorothea is well, all business must be
+kept from her, and as soon as she is able to be moved she must come to
+us.  Being with Celia and the baby will be the best thing in the world
+for her, and will pass away the time.  And meanwhile you must get rid
+of Ladislaw: you must send him out of the country." Here Sir James's
+look of disgust returned in all its intensity.
+
+Mr. Brooke put his hands behind him, walked to the window and
+straightened his back with a little shake before he replied.
+
+"That is easily said, Chettam, easily said, you know."
+
+"My dear sir," persisted Sir James, restraining his indignation within
+respectful forms, "it was you who brought him here, and you who keep
+him here--I mean by the occupation you give him."
+
+"Yes, but I can't dismiss him in an instant without assigning reasons,
+my dear Chettam.  Ladislaw has been invaluable, most satisfactory.  I
+consider that I have done this part of the country a service by
+bringing him--by bringing him, you know."  Mr. Brooke ended with a nod,
+turning round to give it.
+
+"It's a pity this part of the country didn't do without him, that's all
+I have to say about it.  At any rate, as Dorothea's brother-in-law, I
+feel warranted in objecting strongly to his being kept here by any
+action on the part of her friends.  You admit, I hope, that I have a
+right to speak about what concerns the dignity of my wife's sister?"
+
+Sir James was getting warm.
+
+"Of course, my dear Chettam, of course.  But you and I have different
+ideas--different--"
+
+"Not about this action of Casaubon's, I should hope," interrupted Sir
+James.  "I say that he has most unfairly compromised Dorothea.  I say
+that there never was a meaner, more ungentlemanly action than this--a
+codicil of this sort to a will which he made at the time of his
+marriage with the knowledge and reliance of her family--a positive
+insult to Dorothea!"
+
+"Well, you know, Casaubon was a little twisted about Ladislaw.
+Ladislaw has told me the reason--dislike of the bent he took, you
+know--Ladislaw didn't think much of Casaubon's notions, Thoth and
+Dagon--that sort of thing: and I fancy that Casaubon didn't like the
+independent position Ladislaw had taken up.  I saw the letters between
+them, you know.  Poor Casaubon was a little buried in books--he didn't
+know the world."
+
+"It's all very well for Ladislaw to put that color on it," said Sir
+James.  "But I believe Casaubon was only jealous of him on Dorothea's
+account, and the world will suppose that she gave him some reason; and
+that is what makes it so abominable--coupling her name with this young
+fellow's."
+
+"My dear Chettam, it won't lead to anything, you know," said Mr.
+Brooke, seating himself and sticking on his eye-glass again.  "It's all
+of a piece with Casaubon's oddity.  This paper, now, 'Synoptical
+Tabulation' and so on, 'for the use of Mrs. Casaubon,' it was locked up
+in the desk with the will.  I suppose he meant Dorothea to publish his
+researches, eh? and she'll do it, you know; she has gone into his
+studies uncommonly."
+
+"My dear sir," said Sir James, impatiently, "that is neither here nor
+there.  The question is, whether you don't see with me the propriety of
+sending young Ladislaw away?"
+
+"Well, no, not the urgency of the thing.  By-and-by, perhaps, it may
+come round.  As to gossip, you know, sending him away won't hinder
+gossip.  People say what they like to say, not what they have chapter
+and verse for," said Mr Brooke, becoming acute about the truths that
+lay on the side of his own wishes.  "I might get rid of Ladislaw up to
+a certain point--take away the 'Pioneer' from him, and that sort of
+thing; but I couldn't send him out of the country if he didn't choose
+to go--didn't choose, you know."
+
+Mr. Brooke, persisting as quietly as if he were only discussing the
+nature of last year's weather, and nodding at the end with his usual
+amenity, was an exasperating form of obstinacy.
+
+"Good God!" said Sir James, with as much passion as he ever showed,
+"let us get him a post; let us spend money on him.  If he could go in
+the suite of some Colonial Governor!  Grampus might take him--and I
+could write to Fulke about it."
+
+"But Ladislaw won't be shipped off like a head of cattle, my dear
+fellow; Ladislaw has his ideas.  It's my opinion that if he were to
+part from me to-morrow, you'd only hear the more of him in the country.
+With his talent for speaking and drawing up documents, there are few
+men who could come up to him as an agitator--an agitator, you know."
+
+"Agitator!" said Sir James, with bitter emphasis, feeling that the
+syllables of this word properly repeated were a sufficient exposure of
+its hatefulness.
+
+"But be reasonable, Chettam.  Dorothea, now.  As you say, she had
+better go to Celia as soon as possible.  She can stay under your roof,
+and in the mean time things may come round quietly.  Don't let us be
+firing off our guns in a hurry, you know.  Standish will keep our
+counsel, and the news will be old before it's known.  Twenty things may
+happen to carry off Ladislaw--without my doing anything, you know."
+
+"Then I am to conclude that you decline to do anything?"
+
+"Decline, Chettam?--no--I didn't say decline.  But I really don't see
+what I could do.  Ladislaw is a gentleman."
+
+"I am glad to hear it!" said Sir James, his irritation making him
+forget himself a little.  "I am sure Casaubon was not."
+
+"Well, it would have been worse if he had made the codicil to hinder
+her from marrying again at all, you know."
+
+"I don't know that," said Sir James.  "It would have been less
+indelicate."
+
+"One of poor Casaubon's freaks!  That attack upset his brain a little.
+It all goes for nothing.  She doesn't _want_ to marry Ladislaw."
+
+"But this codicil is framed so as to make everybody believe that she
+did.  I don't believe anything of the sort about Dorothea," said Sir
+James--then frowningly, "but I suspect Ladislaw.  I tell you frankly,
+I suspect Ladislaw."
+
+"I couldn't take any immediate action on that ground, Chettam.  In
+fact, if it were possible to pack him off--send him to Norfolk
+Island--that sort of thing--it would look all the worse for Dorothea
+to those who knew about it.  It would seem as if we distrusted
+her--distrusted her, you know."
+
+That Mr. Brooke had hit on an undeniable argument, did not tend to
+soothe Sir James.  He put out his hand to reach his hat, implying that
+he did not mean to contend further, and said, still with some heat--
+
+"Well, I can only say that I think Dorothea was sacrificed once,
+because her friends were too careless.  I shall do what I can, as her
+brother, to protect her now."
+
+"You can't do better than get her to Freshitt as soon as possible,
+Chettam.  I approve that plan altogether," said Mr. Brooke, well
+pleased that he had won the argument.  It would have been highly
+inconvenient to him to part with Ladislaw at that time, when a
+dissolution might happen any day, and electors were to be convinced of
+the course by which the interests of the country would be best served.
+Mr. Brooke sincerely believed that this end could be secured by his own
+return to Parliament: he offered the forces of his mind honestly to the
+nation.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER L.
+
+    "'This Loller here wol precilen us somewhat.'
+     'Nay by my father's soule! that schal he nat,'
+      Sayde the Schipman, 'here schal he not preche,
+      We schal no gospel glosen here ne teche.
+      We leven all in the gret God,' quod he.
+      He wolden sowen some diffcultee."
+                                 Canterbury Tales.
+
+
+Dorothea had been safe at Freshitt Hall nearly a week before she had
+asked any dangerous questions.  Every morning now she sat with Celia in
+the prettiest of up-stairs sitting-rooms, opening into a small
+conservatory--Celia all in white and lavender like a bunch of mixed
+violets, watching the remarkable acts of the baby, which were so
+dubious to her inexperienced mind that all conversation was interrupted
+by appeals for their interpretation made to the oracular nurse.
+Dorothea sat by in her widow's dress, with an expression which rather
+provoked Celia, as being much too sad; for not only was baby quite
+well, but really when a husband had been so dull and troublesome while
+he lived, and besides that had--well, well!  Sir James, of course, had
+told Celia everything, with a strong representation how important it
+was that Dorothea should not know it sooner than was inevitable.
+
+But Mr. Brooke had been right in predicting that Dorothea would not
+long remain passive where action had been assigned to her; she knew the
+purport of her husband's will made at the time of their marriage, and
+her mind, as soon as she was clearly conscious of her position, was
+silently occupied with what she ought to do as the owner of Lowick
+Manor with the patronage of the living attached to it.
+
+One morning when her uncle paid his usual visit, though with an unusual
+alacrity in his manner which he accounted for by saying that it was now
+pretty certain Parliament would be dissolved forthwith, Dorothea said--
+
+"Uncle, it is right now that I should consider who is to have the
+living at Lowick.  After Mr. Tucker had been provided for, I never
+heard my husband say that he had any clergyman in his mind as a
+successor to himself.  I think I ought to have the keys now and go to
+Lowick to examine all my husband's papers.  There may be something that
+would throw light on his wishes."
+
+"No hurry, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, quietly.  "By-and-by, you know,
+you can go, if you like.  But I cast my eyes over things in the desks
+and drawers--there was nothing--nothing but deep subjects, you
+know--besides the will.  Everything can be done by-and-by. As to the
+living, I have had an application for interest already--I should say
+rather good.  Mr. Tyke has been strongly recommended to me--I had
+something to do with getting him an appointment before.  An apostolic
+man, I believe--the sort of thing that would suit you, my dear."
+
+"I should like to have fuller knowledge about him, uncle, and judge for
+myself, if Mr. Casaubon has not left any expression of his wishes.  He
+has perhaps made some addition to his will--there may be some
+instructions for me," said Dorothea, who had all the while had this
+conjecture in her mind with relation to her husband's work.
+
+"Nothing about the rectory, my dear--nothing," said Mr. Brooke, rising
+to go away, and putting out his hand to his nieces: "nor about his
+researches, you know.  Nothing in the will."
+
+Dorothea's lip quivered.
+
+"Come, you must not think of these things yet, my dear.  By-and-by, you
+know."
+
+"I am quite well now, uncle; I wish to exert myself."
+
+"Well, well, we shall see.  But I must run away now--I have no end of
+work now--it's a crisis--a political crisis, you know.  And here is
+Celia and her little man--you are an aunt, you know, now, and I am a
+sort of grandfather," said Mr. Brooke, with placid hurry, anxious to
+get away and tell Chettam that it would not be his (Mr. Brooke's) fault
+if Dorothea insisted on looking into everything.
+
+Dorothea sank back in her chair when her uncle had left the room, and
+cast her eyes down meditatively on her crossed hands.
+
+"Look, Dodo! look at him!  Did you ever see anything like that?" said
+Celia, in her comfortable staccato.
+
+"What, Kitty?" said Dorothea, lifting her eyes rather absently.
+
+"What? why, his upper lip; see how he is drawing it down, as if he
+meant to make a face.  Isn't it wonderful!  He may have his little
+thoughts.  I wish nurse were here.  Do look at him."
+
+A large tear which had been for some time gathering, rolled down
+Dorothea's cheek as she looked up and tried to smile.
+
+"Don't be sad, Dodo; kiss baby.  What are you brooding over so?  I am
+sure you did everything, and a great deal too much.  You should be
+happy now."
+
+"I wonder if Sir James would drive me to Lowick.  I want to look over
+everything--to see if there were any words written for me."
+
+"You are not to go till Mr. Lydgate says you may go.  And he has not
+said so yet (here you are, nurse; take baby and walk up and down the
+gallery). Besides, you have got a wrong notion in your head as usual,
+Dodo--I can see that: it vexes me."
+
+"Where am I wrong, Kitty?" said Dorothea, quite meekly.  She was almost
+ready now to think Celia wiser than herself, and was really wondering
+with some fear what her wrong notion was.  Celia felt her advantage,
+and was determined to use it.  None of them knew Dodo as well as she
+did, or knew how to manage her.  Since Celia's baby was born, she had
+had a new sense of her mental solidity and calm wisdom.  It seemed
+clear that where there was a baby, things were right enough, and that
+error, in general, was a mere lack of that central poising force.
+
+"I can see what you are thinking of as well as can be, Dodo," said
+Celia.  "You are wanting to find out if there is anything uncomfortable
+for you to do now, only because Mr. Casaubon wished it.  As if you had
+not been uncomfortable enough before.  And he doesn't deserve it, and
+you will find that out.  He has behaved very badly.  James is as angry
+with him as can be.  And I had better tell you, to prepare you."
+
+"Celia," said Dorothea, entreatingly, "you distress me.  Tell me at
+once what you mean."  It glanced through her mind that Mr. Casaubon
+had left the property away from her--which would not be so very
+distressing.
+
+"Why, he has made a codicil to his will, to say the property was all to
+go away from you if you married--I mean--"
+
+"That is of no consequence," said Dorothea, breaking in impetuously.
+
+"But if you married Mr. Ladislaw, not anybody else," Celia went on with
+persevering quietude.  "Of course that is of no consequence in one
+way--you never _would_ marry Mr. Ladislaw; but that only makes it worse
+of Mr. Casaubon."
+
+The blood rushed to Dorothea's face and neck painfully.  But Celia was
+administering what she thought a sobering dose of fact.  It was taking
+up notions that had done Dodo's health so much harm.  So she went on in
+her neutral tone, as if she had been remarking on baby's robes.
+
+"James says so.  He says it is abominable, and not like a gentleman.
+And there never was a better judge than James.  It is as if Mr.
+Casaubon wanted to make people believe that you would wish to marry Mr.
+Ladislaw--which is ridiculous.  Only James says it was to hinder Mr.
+Ladislaw from wanting to marry you for your money--just as if he ever
+would think of making you an offer.  Mrs. Cadwallader said you might as
+well marry an Italian with white mice!  But I must just go and look at
+baby," Celia added, without the least change of tone, throwing a light
+shawl over her, and tripping away.
+
+Dorothea by this time had turned cold again, and now threw herself back
+helplessly in her chair.  She might have compared her experience at
+that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was
+taking on a new form, that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in which
+memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs.
+Everything was changing its aspect: her husband's conduct, her own
+duteous feeling towards him, every struggle between them--and yet
+more, her whole relation to Will Ladislaw.  Her world was in a state of
+convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself
+was, that she must wait and think anew.  One change terrified her as if
+it had been a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her
+departed husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting
+everything she said and did.  Then again she was conscious of another
+change which also made her tremulous; it was a sudden strange yearning
+of heart towards Will Ladislaw.  It had never before entered her mind
+that he could, under any circumstances, be her lover: conceive the
+effect of the sudden revelation that another had thought of him in that
+light--that perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a
+possibility,--and this with the hurrying, crowding vision of unfitting
+conditions, and questions not soon to be solved.
+
+It seemed a long while--she did not know how long--before she heard
+Celia saying, "That will do, nurse; he will be quiet on my lap now.
+You can go to lunch, and let Garratt stay in the next room." "What I
+think, Dodo," Celia went on, observing nothing more than that Dorothea
+was leaning back in her chair, and likely to be passive, "is that Mr.
+Casaubon was spiteful.  I never did like him, and James never did.  I
+think the corners of his mouth were dreadfully spiteful.  And now he
+has behaved in this way, I am sure religion does not require you to
+make yourself uncomfortable about him.  If he has been taken away, that
+is a mercy, and you ought to be grateful.  We should not grieve, should
+we, baby?" said Celia confidentially to that unconscious centre and
+poise of the world, who had the most remarkable fists all complete even
+to the nails, and hair enough, really, when you took his cap off, to
+make--you didn't know what:--in short, he was Bouddha in a Western
+form.
+
+At this crisis Lydgate was announced, and one of the first things he
+said was, "I fear you are not so well as you were, Mrs. Casaubon; have
+you been agitated? allow me to feel your pulse."  Dorothea's hand was
+of a marble coldness.
+
+"She wants to go to Lowick, to look over papers," said Celia.  "She
+ought not, ought she?"
+
+Lydgate did not speak for a few moments.  Then he said, looking at
+Dorothea.  "I hardly know.  In my opinion Mrs. Casaubon should do what
+would give her the most repose of mind.  That repose will not always
+come from being forbidden to act."
+
+"Thank you," said Dorothea, exerting herself, "I am sure that is wise.
+There are so many things which I ought to attend to.  Why should I sit
+here idle?"  Then, with an effort to recall subjects not connected with
+her agitation, she added, abruptly, "You know every one in Middlemarch,
+I think, Mr. Lydgate.  I shall ask you to tell me a great deal.  I have
+serious things to do now.  I have a living to give away.  You know Mr.
+Tyke and all the--" But Dorothea's effort was too much for her; she
+broke off and burst into sobs.  Lydgate made her drink a dose of sal
+volatile.
+
+"Let Mrs. Casaubon do as she likes," he said to Sir James, whom he
+asked to see before quitting the house.  "She wants perfect freedom, I
+think, more than any other prescription."
+
+His attendance on Dorothea while her brain was excited, had enabled him
+to form some true conclusions concerning the trials of her life.  He
+felt sure that she had been suffering from the strain and conflict of
+self-repression; and that she was likely now to feel herself only in
+another sort of pinfold than that from which she had been released.
+
+Lydgate's advice was all the easier for Sir James to follow when he
+found that Celia had already told Dorothea the unpleasant fact about
+the will.  There was no help for it now--no reason for any further
+delay in the execution of necessary business.  And the next day Sir
+James complied at once with her request that he would drive her to
+Lowick.
+
+"I have no wish to stay there at present," said Dorothea; "I could
+hardly bear it.  I am much happier at Freshitt with Celia.  I shall be
+able to think better about what should be done at Lowick by looking at
+it from a distance.  And I should like to be at the Grange a little
+while with my uncle, and go about in all the old walks and among the
+people in the village."
+
+"Not yet, I think.  Your uncle is having political company, and you are
+better out of the way of such doings," said Sir James, who at that
+moment thought of the Grange chiefly as a haunt of young Ladislaw's.
+But no word passed between him and Dorothea about the objectionable
+part of the will; indeed, both of them felt that the mention of it
+between them would be impossible.  Sir James was shy, even with men,
+about disagreeable subjects; and the one thing that Dorothea would have
+chosen to say, if she had spoken on the matter at all, was forbidden to
+her at present because it seemed to be a further exposure of her
+husband's injustice.  Yet she did wish that Sir James could know what
+had passed between her and her husband about Will Ladislaw's moral
+claim on the property: it would then, she thought, be apparent to him
+as it was to her, that her husband's strange indelicate proviso had
+been chiefly urged by his bitter resistance to that idea of claim, and
+not merely by personal feelings more difficult to talk about.  Also, it
+must be admitted, Dorothea wished that this could be known for Will's
+sake, since her friends seemed to think of him as simply an object of
+Mr. Casaubon's charity.  Why should he be compared with an Italian
+carrying white mice?  That word quoted from Mrs. Cadwallader seemed
+like a mocking travesty wrought in the dark by an impish finger.
+
+At Lowick Dorothea searched desk and drawer--searched all her husband's
+places of deposit for private writing, but found no paper addressed
+especially to her, except that "Synoptical Tabulation," which was
+probably only the beginning of many intended directions for her
+guidance.  In carrying out this bequest of labor to Dorothea, as in all
+else, Mr. Casaubon had been slow and hesitating, oppressed in the plan
+of transmitting his work, as he had been in executing it, by the sense
+of moving heavily in a dim and clogging medium: distrust of Dorothea's
+competence to arrange what he had prepared was subdued only by distrust
+of any other redactor.  But he had come at last to create a trust for
+himself out of Dorothea's nature: she could do what she resolved to do:
+and he willingly imagined her toiling under the fetters of a promise to
+erect a tomb with his name upon it.  (Not that Mr. Casaubon called the
+future volumes a tomb; he called them the Key to all Mythologies.) But
+the months gained on him and left his plans belated: he had only had
+time to ask for that promise by which he sought to keep his cold grasp
+on Dorothea's life.
+
+The grasp had slipped away.  Bound by a pledge given from the depths of
+her pity, she would have been capable of undertaking a toil which her
+judgment whispered was vain for all uses except that consecration of
+faithfulness which is a supreme use.  But now her judgment, instead of
+being controlled by duteous devotion, was made active by the
+imbittering discovery that in her past union there had lurked the
+hidden alienation of secrecy and suspicion.  The living, suffering man
+was no longer before her to awaken her pity: there remained only the
+retrospect of painful subjection to a husband whose thoughts had been
+lower than she had believed, whose exorbitant claims for himself had
+even blinded his scrupulous care for his own character, and made him
+defeat his own pride by shocking men of ordinary honor.  As for the
+property which was the sign of that broken tie, she would have been
+glad to be free from it and have nothing more than her original fortune
+which had been settled on her, if there had not been duties attached to
+ownership, which she ought not to flinch from.  About this property
+many troublous questions insisted on rising: had she not been right in
+thinking that the half of it ought to go to Will Ladislaw?--but was it
+not impossible now for her to do that act of justice?  Mr. Casaubon had
+taken a cruelly effective means of hindering her: even with indignation
+against him in her heart, any act that seemed a triumphant eluding of
+his purpose revolted her.
+
+After collecting papers of business which she wished to examine, she
+locked up again the desks and drawers--all empty of personal words for
+her--empty of any sign that in her husband's lonely brooding his heart
+had gone out to her in excuse or explanation; and she went back to
+Freshitt with the sense that around his last hard demand and his last
+injurious assertion of his power, the silence was unbroken.
+
+Dorothea tried now to turn her thoughts towards immediate duties, and
+one of these was of a kind which others were determined to remind her
+of.  Lydgate's ear had caught eagerly her mention of the living, and as
+soon as he could, he reopened the subject, seeing here a possibility of
+making amends for the casting-vote he had once given with an
+ill-satisfied conscience.  "Instead of telling you anything about Mr.
+Tyke," he said, "I should like to speak of another man--Mr.
+Farebrother, the Vicar of St. Botolph's.  His living is a poor one, and
+gives him a stinted provision for himself and his family.  His mother,
+aunt, and sister all live with him, and depend upon him.  I believe he
+has never married because of them.  I never heard such good preaching
+as his--such plain, easy eloquence.  He would have done to preach at
+St. Paul's Cross after old Latimer.  His talk is just as good about all
+subjects: original, simple, clear.  I think him a remarkable fellow: he
+ought to have done more than he has done."
+
+"Why has he not done more?" said Dorothea, interested now in all who
+had slipped below their own intention.
+
+"That's a hard question," said Lydgate.  "I find myself that it's
+uncommonly difficult to make the right thing work: there are so many
+strings pulling at once.  Farebrother often hints that he has got into
+the wrong profession; he wants a wider range than that of a poor
+clergyman, and I suppose he has no interest to help him on.  He is very
+fond of Natural History and various scientific matters, and he is
+hampered in reconciling these tastes with his position.  He has no
+money to spare--hardly enough to use; and that has led him into
+card-playing--Middlemarch is a great place for whist.  He does play for
+money, and he wins a good deal.  Of course that takes him into company
+a little beneath him, and makes him slack about some things; and yet,
+with all that, looking at him as a whole, I think he is one of the most
+blameless men I ever knew.  He has neither venom nor doubleness in him,
+and those often go with a more correct outside."
+
+"I wonder whether he suffers in his conscience because of that habit,"
+said Dorothea; "I wonder whether he wishes he could leave it off."
+
+"I have no doubt he would leave it off, if he were transplanted into
+plenty: he would be glad of the time for other things."
+
+"My uncle says that Mr. Tyke is spoken of as an apostolic man," said
+Dorothea, meditatively.  She was wishing it were possible to restore
+the times of primitive zeal, and yet thinking of Mr. Farebrother with a
+strong desire to rescue him from his chance-gotten money.
+
+"I don't pretend to say that Farebrother is apostolic," said Lydgate.
+"His position is not quite like that of the Apostles: he is only a
+parson among parishioners whose lives he has to try and make better.
+Practically I find that what is called being apostolic now, is an
+impatience of everything in which the parson doesn't cut the principal
+figure.  I see something of that in Mr. Tyke at the Hospital: a good
+deal of his doctrine is a sort of pinching hard to make people
+uncomfortably aware of him.  Besides, an apostolic man at Lowick!--he
+ought to think, as St. Francis did, that it is needful to preach to the
+birds."
+
+"True," said Dorothea.  "It is hard to imagine what sort of notions our
+farmers and laborers get from their teaching.  I have been looking into
+a volume of sermons by Mr. Tyke: such sermons would be of no use at
+Lowick--I mean, about imputed righteousness and the prophecies in the
+Apocalypse.  I have always been thinking of the different ways in which
+Christianity is taught, and whenever I find one way that makes it a
+wider blessing than any other, I cling to that as the truest--I mean
+that which takes in the most good of all kinds, and brings in the most
+people as sharers in it.  It is surely better to pardon too much, than
+to condemn too much.  But I should like to see Mr. Farebrother and hear
+him preach."
+
+"Do," said Lydgate; "I trust to the effect of that.  He is very much
+beloved, but he has his enemies too: there are always people who can't
+forgive an able man for differing from them.  And that money-winning
+business is really a blot.  You don't, of course, see many Middlemarch
+people: but Mr. Ladislaw, who is constantly seeing Mr. Brooke, is a
+great friend of Mr. Farebrother's old ladies, and would be glad to sing
+the Vicar's praises.  One of the old ladies--Miss Noble, the aunt--is a
+wonderfully quaint picture of self-forgetful goodness, and Ladislaw
+gallants her about sometimes.  I met them one day in a back street: you
+know Ladislaw's look--a sort of Daphnis in coat and waistcoat; and this
+little old maid reaching up to his arm--they looked like a couple
+dropped out of a romantic comedy.  But the best evidence about
+Farebrother is to see him and hear him."
+
+Happily Dorothea was in her private sitting-room when this conversation
+occurred, and there was no one present to make Lydgate's innocent
+introduction of Ladislaw painful to her.  As was usual with him in
+matters of personal gossip, Lydgate had quite forgotten Rosamond's
+remark that she thought Will adored Mrs. Casaubon.  At that moment he
+was only caring for what would recommend the Farebrother family; and he
+had purposely given emphasis to the worst that could be said about the
+Vicar, in order to forestall objections.  In the weeks since Mr.
+Casaubon's death he had hardly seen Ladislaw, and he had heard no rumor
+to warn him that Mr. Brooke's confidential secretary was a dangerous
+subject with Mrs. Casaubon.  When he was gone, his picture of Ladislaw
+lingered in her mind and disputed the ground with that question of the
+Lowick living.  What was Will Ladislaw thinking about her?  Would he
+hear of that fact which made her cheeks burn as they never used to do?
+And how would he feel when he heard it?--But she could see as well as
+possible how he smiled down at the little old maid.  An Italian with
+white mice!--on the contrary, he was a creature who entered into every
+one's feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of
+urging his own with iron resistance.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LI.
+
+    Party is Nature too, and you shall see
+    By force of Logic how they both agree:
+    The Many in the One, the One in Many;
+    All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any:
+    Genus holds species, both are great or small;
+    One genus highest, one not high at all;
+    Each species has its differentia too,
+    This is not That, and He was never You,
+    Though this and that are AYES, and you and he
+    Are like as one to one, or three to three.
+
+
+No gossip about Mr. Casaubon's will had yet reached Ladislaw: the air
+seemed to be filled with the dissolution of Parliament and the coming
+election, as the old wakes and fairs were filled with the rival clatter
+of itinerant shows; and more private noises were taken little notice
+of.  The famous "dry election" was at hand, in which the depths of
+public feeling might be measured by the low flood-mark of drink.  Will
+Ladislaw was one of the busiest at this time; and though Dorothea's
+widowhood was continually in his thought, he was so far from wishing to
+be spoken to on the subject, that when Lydgate sought him out to tell
+him what had passed about the Lowick living, he answered rather
+waspishly--
+
+"Why should you bring me into the matter?  I never see Mrs. Casaubon,
+and am not likely to see her, since she is at Freshitt.  I never go
+there.  It is Tory ground, where I and the 'Pioneer' are no more
+welcome than a poacher and his gun."
+
+The fact was that Will had been made the more susceptible by observing
+that Mr. Brooke, instead of wishing him, as before, to come to the
+Grange oftener than was quite agreeable to himself, seemed now to
+contrive that he should go there as little as possible.  This was a
+shuffling concession of Mr. Brooke's to Sir James Chettam's indignant
+remonstrance; and Will, awake to the slightest hint in this direction,
+concluded that he was to be kept away from the Grange on Dorothea's
+account.  Her friends, then, regarded him with some suspicion?  Their
+fears were quite superfluous: they were very much mistaken if they
+imagined that he would put himself forward as a needy adventurer trying
+to win the favor of a rich woman.
+
+Until now Will had never fully seen the chasm between himself and
+Dorothea--until now that he was come to the brink of it, and saw her on
+the other side.  He began, not without some inward rage, to think of
+going away from the neighborhood: it would be impossible for him to
+show any further interest in Dorothea without subjecting himself to
+disagreeable imputations--perhaps even in her mind, which others might
+try to poison.
+
+"We are forever divided," said Will.  "I might as well be at Rome; she
+would be no farther from me."  But what we call our despair is often
+only the painful eagerness of unfed hope.  There were plenty of reasons
+why he should not go--public reasons why he should not quit his post at
+this crisis, leaving Mr. Brooke in the lurch when he needed "coaching"
+for the election, and when there was so much canvassing, direct and
+indirect, to be carried on.  Will could not like to leave his own
+chessmen in the heat of a game; and any candidate on the right side,
+even if his brain and marrow had been as soft as was consistent with a
+gentlemanly bearing, might help to turn a majority.  To coach Mr.
+Brooke and keep him steadily to the idea that he must pledge himself to
+vote for the actual Reform Bill, instead of insisting on his
+independence and power of pulling up in time, was not an easy task.
+Mr. Farebrother's prophecy of a fourth candidate "in the bag" had not
+yet been fulfilled, neither the Parliamentary Candidate Society nor any
+other power on the watch to secure a reforming majority seeing a worthy
+nodus for interference while there was a second reforming candidate
+like Mr. Brooke, who might be returned at his own expense; and the
+fight lay entirely between Pinkerton the old Tory member, Bagster the
+new Whig member returned at the last election, and Brooke the future
+independent member, who was to fetter himself for this occasion only.
+Mr. Hawley and his party would bend all their forces to the return of
+Pinkerton, and Mr. Brooke's success must depend either on plumpers
+which would leave Bagster in the rear, or on the new minting of Tory
+votes into reforming votes.  The latter means, of course, would be
+preferable.
+
+This prospect of converting votes was a dangerous distraction to Mr.
+Brooke: his impression that waverers were likely to be allured by
+wavering statements, and also the liability of his mind to stick afresh
+at opposing arguments as they turned up in his memory, gave Will
+Ladislaw much trouble.
+
+"You know there are tactics in these things," said Mr. Brooke; "meeting
+people half-way--tempering your ideas--saying, 'Well now, there's
+something in that,' and so on.  I agree with you that this is a
+peculiar occasion--the country with a will of its own--political
+unions--that sort of thing--but we sometimes cut with rather too sharp
+a knife, Ladislaw.  These ten-pound householders, now: why ten?  Draw
+the line somewhere--yes: but why just at ten?  That's a difficult
+question, now, if you go into it."
+
+"Of course it is," said Will, impatiently.  "But if you are to wait
+till we get a logical Bill, you must put yourself forward as a
+revolutionist, and then Middlemarch would not elect you, I fancy.  As
+for trimming, this is not a time for trimming."
+
+Mr. Brooke always ended by agreeing with Ladislaw, who still appeared
+to him a sort of Burke with a leaven of Shelley; but after an interval
+the wisdom of his own methods reasserted itself, and he was again drawn
+into using them with much hopefulness.  At this stage of affairs he was
+in excellent spirits, which even supported him under large advances of
+money; for his powers of convincing and persuading had not yet been
+tested by anything more difficult than a chairman's speech introducing
+other orators, or a dialogue with a Middlemarch voter, from which he
+came away with a sense that he was a tactician by nature, and that it
+was a pity he had not gone earlier into this kind of thing.  He was a
+little conscious of defeat, however, with Mr. Mawmsey, a chief
+representative in Middlemarch of that great social power, the retail
+trader, and naturally one of the most doubtful voters in the
+borough--willing for his own part to supply an equal quality of teas
+and sugars to reformer and anti-reformer, as well as to agree
+impartially with both, and feeling like the burgesses of old that this
+necessity of electing members was a great burthen to a town; for even
+if there were no danger in holding out hopes to all parties beforehand,
+there would be the painful necessity at last of disappointing
+respectable people whose names were on his books.  He was accustomed to
+receive large orders from Mr. Brooke of Tipton; but then, there were
+many of Pinkerton's committee whose opinions had a great weight of
+grocery on their side.  Mr. Mawmsey thinking that Mr. Brooke, as not
+too "clever in his intellects," was the more likely to forgive a grocer
+who gave a hostile vote under pressure, had become confidential in his
+back parlor.
+
+"As to Reform, sir, put it in a family light," he said, rattling the
+small silver in his pocket, and smiling affably.  "Will it support Mrs.
+Mawmsey, and enable her to bring up six children when I am no more?  I
+put the question _fictiously_, knowing what must be the answer.  Very
+well, sir.  I ask you what, as a husband and a father, I am to do when
+gentlemen come to me and say, 'Do as you like, Mawmsey; but if you vote
+against us, I shall get my groceries elsewhere: when I sugar my liquor
+I like to feel that I am benefiting the country by maintaining
+tradesmen of the right color.'  Those very words have been spoken to
+me, sir, in the very chair where you are now sitting.  I don't mean by
+your honorable self, Mr. Brooke."
+
+"No, no, no--that's narrow, you know.  Until my butler complains to me
+of your goods, Mr. Mawmsey," said Mr. Brooke, soothingly, "until I hear
+that you send bad sugars, spices--that sort of thing--I shall never
+order him to go elsewhere."
+
+"Sir, I am your humble servant, and greatly obliged," said Mr. Mawmsey,
+feeling that politics were clearing up a little.  "There would be some
+pleasure in voting for a gentleman who speaks in that honorable manner."
+
+"Well, you know, Mr. Mawmsey, you would find it the right thing to put
+yourself on our side.  This Reform will touch everybody by-and-by--a
+thoroughly popular measure--a sort of A, B, C, you know, that must come
+first before the rest can follow.  I quite agree with you that you've
+got to look at the thing in a family light: but public spirit, now.
+We're all one family, you know--it's all one cupboard.  Such a thing
+as a vote, now: why, it may help to make men's fortunes at the
+Cape--there's no knowing what may be the effect of a vote," Mr. Brooke
+ended, with a sense of being a little out at sea, though finding it
+still enjoyable.  But Mr. Mawmsey answered in a tone of decisive check.
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir, but I can't afford that.  When I give a vote I
+must know what I am doing; I must look to what will be the effects on
+my till and ledger, speaking respectfully.  Prices, I'll admit, are
+what nobody can know the merits of; and the sudden falls after you've
+bought in currants, which are a goods that will not keep--I've never;
+myself seen into the ins and outs there; which is a rebuke to human
+pride.  But as to one family, there's debtor and creditor, I hope;
+they're not going to reform that away; else I should vote for things
+staying as they are.  Few men have less need to cry for change than I
+have, personally speaking--that is, for self and family.  I am not one
+of those who have nothing to lose: I mean as to respectability both in
+parish and private business, and noways in respect of your honorable
+self and custom, which you was good enough to say you would not
+withdraw from me, vote or no vote, while the article sent in was
+satisfactory."
+
+After this conversation Mr. Mawmsey went up and boasted to his wife
+that he had been rather too many for Brooke of Tipton, and that he
+didn't mind so much now about going to the poll.
+
+Mr. Brooke on this occasion abstained from boasting of his tactics to
+Ladislaw, who for his part was glad enough to persuade himself that he
+had no concern with any canvassing except the purely argumentative
+sort, and that he worked no meaner engine than knowledge.  Mr. Brooke,
+necessarily, had his agents, who understood the nature of the
+Middlemarch voter and the means of enlisting his ignorance on the side
+of the Bill--which were remarkably similar to the means of enlisting it
+on the side against the Bill.  Will stopped his ears.  Occasionally
+Parliament, like the rest of our lives, even to our eating and apparel,
+could hardly go on if our imaginations were too active about processes.
+There were plenty of dirty-handed men in the world to do dirty
+business; and Will protested to himself that his share in bringing Mr.
+Brooke through would be quite innocent.
+
+But whether he should succeed in that mode of contributing to the
+majority on the right side was very doubtful to him.  He had written
+out various speeches and memoranda for speeches, but he had begun to
+perceive that Mr. Brooke's mind, if it had the burthen of remembering
+any train of thought, would let it drop, run away in search of it, and
+not easily come back again.  To collect documents is one mode of
+serving your country, and to remember the contents of a document is
+another.  No! the only way in which Mr. Brooke could be coerced into
+thinking of the right arguments at the right time was to be well plied
+with them till they took up all the room in his brain.  But here there
+was the difficulty of finding room, so many things having been taken in
+beforehand.  Mr. Brooke himself observed that his ideas stood rather in
+his way when he was speaking.
+
+However, Ladislaw's coaching was forthwith to be put to the test, for
+before the day of nomination Mr. Brooke was to explain himself to the
+worthy electors of Middlemarch from the balcony of the White Hart,
+which looked out advantageously at an angle of the market-place,
+commanding a large area in front and two converging streets.  It was a
+fine May morning, and everything seemed hopeful: there was some
+prospect of an understanding between Bagster's committee and Brooke's,
+to which Mr. Bulstrode, Mr. Standish as a Liberal lawyer, and such
+manufacturers as Mr. Plymdale and Mr. Vincy, gave a solidity which
+almost counterbalanced Mr. Hawley and his associates who sat for
+Pinkerton at the Green Dragon.  Mr. Brooke, conscious of having
+weakened the blasts of the "Trumpet" against him, by his reforms as a
+landlord in the last half year, and hearing himself cheered a little as
+he drove into the town, felt his heart tolerably light under his
+buff-colored waistcoat.  But with regard to critical occasions, it
+often happens that all moments seem comfortably remote until the last.
+
+"This looks well, eh?" said Mr. Brooke as the crowd gathered.  "I shall
+have a good audience, at any rate.  I like this, now--this kind of
+public made up of one's own neighbors, you know."
+
+The weavers and tanners of Middlemarch, unlike Mr. Mawmsey, had never
+thought of Mr. Brooke as a neighbor, and were not more attached to him
+than if he had been sent in a box from London.  But they listened
+without much disturbance to the speakers who introduced the candidate,
+one of them--a political personage from Brassing, who came to tell
+Middlemarch its duty--spoke so fully, that it was alarming to think
+what the candidate could find to say after him.  Meanwhile the crowd
+became denser, and as the political personage neared the end of his
+speech, Mr. Brooke felt a remarkable change in his sensations while he
+still handled his eye-glass, trifled with documents before him, and
+exchanged remarks with his committee, as a man to whom the moment of
+summons was indifferent.
+
+"I'll take another glass of sherry, Ladislaw," he said, with an easy
+air, to Will, who was close behind him, and presently handed him the
+supposed fortifier.  It was ill-chosen; for Mr. Brooke was an
+abstemious man, and to drink a second glass of sherry quickly at no
+great interval from the first was a surprise to his system which tended
+to scatter his energies instead of collecting them.  Pray pity him: so
+many English gentlemen make themselves miserable by speechifying on
+entirely private grounds!  whereas Mr. Brooke wished to serve his
+country by standing for Parliament--which, indeed, may also be done on
+private grounds, but being once undertaken does absolutely demand some
+speechifying.
+
+It was not about the beginning of his speech that Mr. Brooke was at all
+anxious; this, he felt sure, would be all right; he should have it
+quite pat, cut out as neatly as a set of couplets from Pope.  Embarking
+would be easy, but the vision of open sea that might come after was
+alarming.  "And questions, now," hinted the demon just waking up in his
+stomach, "somebody may put questions about the schedules.--Ladislaw,"
+he continued, aloud, "just hand me the memorandum of the schedules."
+
+When Mr. Brooke presented himself on the balcony, the cheers were quite
+loud enough to counterbalance the yells, groans, brayings, and other
+expressions of adverse theory, which were so moderate that Mr. Standish
+(decidedly an old bird) observed in the ear next to him, "This looks
+dangerous, by God!  Hawley has got some deeper plan than this."  Still,
+the cheers were exhilarating, and no candidate could look more amiable
+than Mr. Brooke, with the memorandum in his breast-pocket, his left
+hand on the rail of the balcony, and his right trifling with his
+eye-glass. The striking points in his appearance were his buff
+waistcoat, short-clipped blond hair, and neutral physiognomy.  He began
+with some confidence.
+
+"Gentlemen--Electors of Middlemarch!"
+
+This was so much the right thing that a little pause after it seemed
+natural.
+
+"I'm uncommonly glad to be here--I was never so proud and happy in my
+life--never so happy, you know."
+
+This was a bold figure of speech, but not exactly the right thing; for,
+unhappily, the pat opening had slipped away--even couplets from Pope
+may be but "fallings from us, vanishings," when fear clutches us, and a
+glass of sherry is hurrying like smoke among our ideas.  Ladislaw, who
+stood at the window behind the speaker, thought, "it's all up now.  The
+only chance is that, since the best thing won't always do, floundering
+may answer for once."  Mr. Brooke, meanwhile, having lost other clews,
+fell back on himself and his qualifications--always an appropriate
+graceful subject for a candidate.
+
+"I am a close neighbor of yours, my good friends--you've known me on
+the bench a good while--I've always gone a good deal into public
+questions--machinery, now, and machine-breaking--you're many of you
+concerned with machinery, and I've been going into that lately.  It
+won't do, you know, breaking machines: everything must go on--trade,
+manufactures, commerce, interchange of staples--that kind of
+thing--since Adam Smith, that must go on.  We must look all over the
+globe:--'Observation with extensive view,' must look everywhere, 'from
+China to Peru,' as somebody says--Johnson, I think, 'The Rambler,' you
+know.  That is what I have done up to a certain point--not as far as
+Peru; but I've not always stayed at home--I saw it wouldn't do.  I've
+been in the Levant, where some of your Middlemarch goods go--and then,
+again, in the Baltic.  The Baltic, now."
+
+Plying among his recollections in this way, Mr. Brooke might have got
+along, easily to himself, and would have come back from the remotest
+seas without trouble; but a diabolical procedure had been set up by the
+enemy.  At one and the same moment there had risen above the shoulders
+of the crowd, nearly opposite Mr. Brooke, and within ten yards of him,
+the effigy of himself: buff-colored waistcoat, eye-glass, and neutral
+physiognomy, painted on rag; and there had arisen, apparently in the
+air, like the note of the cuckoo, a parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of
+his words.  Everybody looked up at the open windows in the houses at
+the opposite angles of the converging streets; but they were either
+blank, or filled by laughing listeners.  The most innocent echo has an
+impish mockery in it when it follows a gravely persistent speaker, and
+this echo was not at all innocent; if it did not follow with the
+precision of a natural echo, it had a wicked choice of the words it
+overtook.  By the time it said, "The Baltic, now," the laugh which had
+been running through the audience became a general shout, and but for
+the sobering effects of party and that great public cause which the
+entanglement of things had identified with "Brooke of Tipton," the
+laugh might have caught his committee.  Mr. Bulstrode asked,
+reprehensively, what the new police was doing; but a voice could not
+well be collared, and an attack on the effigy of the candidate would
+have been too equivocal, since Hawley probably meant it to be pelted.
+
+Mr. Brooke himself was not in a position to be quickly conscious of
+anything except a general slipping away of ideas within himself: he had
+even a little singing in the ears, and he was the only person who had
+not yet taken distinct account of the echo or discerned the image of
+himself.  Few things hold the perceptions more thoroughly captive than
+anxiety about what we have got to say.  Mr. Brooke heard the laughter;
+but he had expected some Tory efforts at disturbance, and he was at
+this moment additionally excited by the tickling, stinging sense that
+his lost exordium was coming back to fetch him from the Baltic.
+
+"That reminds me," he went on, thrusting a hand into his side-pocket,
+with an easy air, "if I wanted a precedent, you know--but we never want
+a precedent for the right thing--but there is Chatham, now; I can't say
+I should have supported Chatham, or Pitt, the younger Pitt--he was not
+a man of ideas, and we want ideas, you know."
+
+"Blast your ideas! we want the Bill," said a loud rough voice from the
+crowd below.
+
+Immediately the invisible Punch, who had hitherto followed Mr. Brooke,
+repeated, "Blast your ideas! we want the Bill." The laugh was louder
+than ever, and for the first time Mr. Brooke being himself silent,
+heard distinctly the mocking echo.  But it seemed to ridicule his
+interrupter, and in that light was encouraging; so he replied with
+amenity--
+
+"There is something in what you say, my good friend, and what do we
+meet for but to speak our minds--freedom of opinion, freedom of the
+press, liberty--that kind of thing?  The Bill, now--you shall have the
+Bill"--here Mr. Brooke paused a moment to fix on his eye-glass and take
+the paper from his breast-pocket, with a sense of being practical and
+coming to particulars.  The invisible Punch followed:--
+
+"You shall have the Bill, Mr. Brooke, per electioneering contest, and a
+seat outside Parliament as delivered, five thousand pounds, seven
+shillings, and fourpence."
+
+Mr. Brooke, amid the roars of laughter, turned red, let his eye-glass
+fall, and looking about him confusedly, saw the image of himself, which
+had come nearer.  The next moment he saw it dolorously bespattered with
+eggs.  His spirit rose a little, and his voice too.
+
+"Buffoonery, tricks, ridicule the test of truth--all that is very
+well"--here an unpleasant egg broke on Mr. Brooke's shoulder, as the
+echo said, "All that is very well;" then came a hail of eggs, chiefly
+aimed at the image, but occasionally hitting the original, as if by
+chance.  There was a stream of new men pushing among the crowd;
+whistles, yells, bellowings, and fifes made all the greater hubbub
+because there was shouting and struggling to put them down.  No voice
+would have had wing enough to rise above the uproar, and Mr. Brooke,
+disagreeably anointed, stood his ground no longer.  The frustration
+would have been less exasperating if it had been less gamesome and
+boyish: a serious assault of which the newspaper reporter "can aver
+that it endangered the learned gentleman's ribs," or can respectfully
+bear witness to "the soles of that gentleman's boots having been
+visible above the railing," has perhaps more consolations attached to
+it.
+
+Mr. Brooke re-entered the committee-room, saying, as carelessly as he
+could, "This is a little too bad, you know.  I should have got the ear
+of the people by-and-by--but they didn't give me time.  I should have
+gone into the Bill by-and-by, you know," he added, glancing at
+Ladislaw.  "However, things will come all right at the nomination."
+
+But it was not resolved unanimously that things would come right; on
+the contrary, the committee looked rather grim, and the political
+personage from Brassing was writing busily, as if he were brewing new
+devices.
+
+"It was Bowyer who did it," said Mr. Standish, evasively.  "I know it
+as well as if he had been advertised.  He's uncommonly good at
+ventriloquism, and he did it uncommonly well, by God!  Hawley has been
+having him to dinner lately: there's a fund of talent in Bowyer."
+
+"Well, you know, you never mentioned him to me, Standish, else I would
+have invited him to dine," said poor Mr. Brooke, who had gone through a
+great deal of inviting for the good of his country.
+
+"There's not a more paltry fellow in Middlemarch than Bowyer," said
+Ladislaw, indignantly, "but it seems as if the paltry fellows were
+always to turn the scale."
+
+Will was thoroughly out of temper with himself as well as with his
+"principal," and he went to shut himself in his rooms with a
+half-formed resolve to throw up the "Pioneer" and Mr. Brooke together.
+Why should he stay?  If the impassable gulf between himself and
+Dorothea were ever to be filled up, it must rather be by his going away
+and getting into a thoroughly different position than by staying here
+and slipping into deserved contempt as an understrapper of Brooke's.
+Then came the young dream of wonders that he might do--in five years,
+for example: political writing, political speaking, would get a higher
+value now public life was going to be wider and more national, and they
+might give him such distinction that he would not seem to be asking
+Dorothea to step down to him.  Five years:--if he could only be sure
+that she cared for him more than for others; if he could only make her
+aware that he stood aloof until he could tell his love without lowering
+himself--then he could go away easily, and begin a career which at
+five-and-twenty seemed probable enough in the inward order of things,
+where talent brings fame, and fame everything else which is delightful.
+He could speak and he could write; he could master any subject if he
+chose, and he meant always to take the side of reason and justice, on
+which he would carry all his ardor.  Why should he not one day be
+lifted above the shoulders of the crowd, and feel that he had won that
+eminence well?  Without doubt he would leave Middlemarch, go to town,
+and make himself fit for celebrity by "eating his dinners."
+
+But not immediately: not until some kind of sign had passed between him
+and Dorothea.  He could not be satisfied until she knew why, even if he
+were the man she would choose to marry, he would not marry her.  Hence
+he must keep his post and bear with Mr. Brooke a little longer.
+
+But he soon had reason to suspect that Mr. Brooke had anticipated him
+in the wish to break up their connection.  Deputations without and
+voices within had concurred in inducing that philanthropist to take a
+stronger measure than usual for the good of mankind; namely, to
+withdraw in favor of another candidate, to whom he left the advantages
+of his canvassing machinery.  He himself called this a strong measure,
+but observed that his health was less capable of sustaining excitement
+than he had imagined.
+
+"I have felt uneasy about the chest--it won't do to carry that too
+far," he said to Ladislaw in explaining the affair.  "I must pull up.
+Poor Casaubon was a warning, you know.  I've made some heavy advances,
+but I've dug a channel.  It's rather coarse work--this electioneering,
+eh, Ladislaw? dare say you are tired of it.  However, we have dug a
+channel with the 'Pioneer'--put things in a track, and so on.  A more
+ordinary man than you might carry it on now--more ordinary, you know."
+
+"Do you wish me to give it up?" said Will, the quick color coming in
+his face, as he rose from the writing-table, and took a turn of three
+steps with his hands in his pockets.  "I am ready to do so whenever you
+wish it."
+
+"As to wishing, my dear Ladislaw, I have the highest opinion of your
+powers, you know.  But about the 'Pioneer,' I have been consulting a
+little with some of the men on our side, and they are inclined to take
+it into their hands--indemnify me to a certain extent--carry it on, in
+fact.  And under the circumstances, you might like to give up--might
+find a better field.  These people might not take that high view of you
+which I have always taken, as an alter ego, a right hand--though I
+always looked forward to your doing something else.  I think of having
+a run into France.  But I'll write you any letters, you know--to
+Althorpe and people of that kind.  I've met Althorpe."
+
+"I am exceedingly obliged to you," said Ladislaw, proudly.  "Since you
+are going to part with the 'Pioneer,' I need not trouble you about the
+steps I shall take.  I may choose to continue here for the present."
+
+After Mr. Brooke had left him Will said to himself, "The rest of the
+family have been urging him to get rid of me, and he doesn't care now
+about my going.  I shall stay as long as I like.  I shall go of my own
+movements and not because they are afraid of me."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LII.
+
+                                 "His heart
+    The lowliest duties on itself did lay."
+                                 --WORDSWORTH.
+
+
+On that June evening when Mr. Farebrother knew that he was to have the
+Lowick living, there was joy in the old fashioned parlor, and even the
+portraits of the great lawyers seemed to look on with satisfaction.
+His mother left her tea and toast untouched, but sat with her usual
+pretty primness, only showing her emotion by that flush in the cheeks
+and brightness in the eyes which give an old woman a touching momentary
+identity with her far-off youthful self, and saying decisively--
+
+"The greatest comfort, Camden, is that you have deserved it."
+
+"When a man gets a good berth, mother, half the deserving must come
+after," said the son, brimful of pleasure, and not trying to conceal
+it.  The gladness in his face was of that active kind which seems to
+have energy enough not only to flash outwardly, but to light up busy
+vision within: one seemed to see thoughts, as well as delight, in his
+glances.
+
+"Now, aunt," he went on, rubbing his hands and looking at Miss Noble,
+who was making tender little beaver-like noises, "There shall be
+sugar-candy always on the table for you to steal and give to the
+children, and you shall have a great many new stockings to make
+presents of, and you shall darn your own more than ever!"
+
+Miss Noble nodded at her nephew with a subdued half-frightened laugh,
+conscious of having already dropped an additional lump of sugar into
+her basket on the strength of the new preferment.
+
+"As for you, Winny"--the Vicar went on--"I shall make no difficulty
+about your marrying any Lowick bachelor--Mr. Solomon Featherstone, for
+example, as soon as I find you are in love with him."
+
+Miss Winifred, who had been looking at her brother all the while and
+crying heartily, which was her way of rejoicing, smiled through her
+tears and said, "You must set me the example, Cam: _you_ must marry
+now."
+
+"With all my heart.  But who is in love with me?  I am a seedy old
+fellow," said the Vicar, rising, pushing his chair away and looking
+down at himself.  "What do you say, mother?"
+
+"You are a handsome man, Camden: though not so fine a figure of a man
+as your father," said the old lady.
+
+"I wish you would marry Miss Garth, brother," said Miss Winifred.  "She
+would make us so lively at Lowick."
+
+"Very fine! You talk as if young women were tied up to be chosen, like
+poultry at market; as if I had only to ask and everybody would have
+me," said the Vicar, not caring to specify.
+
+"We don't want everybody," said Miss Winifred.  "But _you_ would like
+Miss Garth, mother, shouldn't you?"
+
+"My son's choice shall be mine," said Mrs. Farebrother, with majestic
+discretion, "and a wife would be most welcome, Camden.  You will want
+your whist at home when we go to Lowick, and Henrietta Noble never was
+a whist-player." (Mrs. Farebrother always called her tiny old sister by
+that magnificent name.)
+
+"I shall do without whist now, mother."
+
+"Why so, Camden?  In my time whist was thought an undeniable amusement
+for a good churchman," said Mrs. Farebrother, innocent of the meaning
+that whist had for her son, and speaking rather sharply, as at some
+dangerous countenancing of new doctrine.
+
+"I shall be too busy for whist; I shall have two parishes," said the
+Vicar, preferring not to discuss the virtues of that game.
+
+He had already said to Dorothea, "I don't feel bound to give up St.
+Botolph's. It is protest enough against the pluralism they want to
+reform if I give somebody else most of the money.  The stronger thing
+is not to give up power, but to use it well."
+
+"I have thought of that," said Dorothea.  "So far as self is concerned,
+I think it would be easier to give up power and money than to keep
+them.  It seems very unfitting that I should have this patronage, yet I
+felt that I ought not to let it be used by some one else instead of me."
+
+"It is I who am bound to act so that you will not regret your power,"
+said Mr. Farebrother.
+
+His was one of the natures in which conscience gets the more active
+when the yoke of life ceases to gall them.  He made no display of
+humility on the subject, but in his heart he felt rather ashamed that
+his conduct had shown laches which others who did not get benefices
+were free from.
+
+"I used often to wish I had been something else than a clergyman," he
+said to Lydgate, "but perhaps it will be better to try and make as good
+a clergyman out of myself as I can.  That is the well-beneficed point
+of view, you perceive, from which difficulties are much simplified," he
+ended, smiling.
+
+The Vicar did feel then as if his share of duties would be easy.  But
+Duty has a trick of behaving unexpectedly--something like a heavy
+friend whom we have amiably asked to visit us, and who breaks his leg
+within our gates.
+
+Hardly a week later, Duty presented itself in his study under the
+disguise of Fred Vincy, now returned from Omnibus College with his
+bachelor's degree.
+
+"I am ashamed to trouble you, Mr. Farebrother," said Fred, whose fair
+open face was propitiating, "but you are the only friend I can consult.
+I told you everything once before, and you were so good that I can't
+help coming to you again."
+
+"Sit down, Fred, I'm ready to hear and do anything I can," said the
+Vicar, who was busy packing some small objects for removal, and went on
+with his work.
+
+"I wanted to tell you--" Fred hesitated an instant and then went on
+plungingly, "I might go into the Church now; and really, look where I
+may, I can't see anything else to do.  I don't like it, but I know it's
+uncommonly hard on my father to say so, after he has spent a good deal
+of money in educating me for it." Fred paused again an instant, and
+then repeated, "and I can't see anything else to do."
+
+"I did talk to your father about it, Fred, but I made little way with
+him.  He said it was too late.  But you have got over one bridge now:
+what are your other difficulties?"
+
+"Merely that I don't like it.  I don't like divinity, and preaching,
+and feeling obliged to look serious.  I like riding across country, and
+doing as other men do.  I don't mean that I want to be a bad fellow in
+any way; but I've no taste for the sort of thing people expect of a
+clergyman.  And yet what else am I to do?  My father can't spare me any
+capital, else I might go into farming.  And he has no room for me in
+his trade.  And of course I can't begin to study for law or physic now,
+when my father wants me to earn something.  It's all very well to say
+I'm wrong to go into the Church; but those who say so might as well
+tell me to go into the backwoods."
+
+Fred's voice had taken a tone of grumbling remonstrance, and Mr.
+Farebrother might have been inclined to smile if his mind had not been
+too busy in imagining more than Fred told him.
+
+"Have you any difficulties about doctrines--about the Articles?" he
+said, trying hard to think of the question simply for Fred's sake.
+
+"No; I suppose the Articles are right.  I am not prepared with any
+arguments to disprove them, and much better, cleverer fellows than I am
+go in for them entirely.  I think it would be rather ridiculous in me
+to urge scruples of that sort, as if I were a judge," said Fred, quite
+simply.
+
+"I suppose, then, it has occurred to you that you might be a fair
+parish priest without being much of a divine?"
+
+"Of course, if I am obliged to be a clergyman, I shall try and do my
+duty, though I mayn't like it.  Do you think any body ought to blame
+me?"
+
+"For going into the Church under the circumstances?  That depends on
+your conscience, Fred--how far you have counted the cost, and seen what
+your position will require of you.  I can only tell you about myself,
+that I have always been too lax, and have been uneasy in consequence."
+
+"But there is another hindrance," said Fred, coloring.  "I did not tell
+you before, though perhaps I may have said things that made you guess
+it.  There is somebody I am very fond of: I have loved her ever since
+we were children."
+
+"Miss Garth, I suppose?" said the Vicar, examining some labels very
+closely.
+
+"Yes.  I shouldn't mind anything if she would have me.  And I know I
+could be a good fellow then."
+
+"And you think she returns the feeling?"
+
+"She never will say so; and a good while ago she made me promise not to
+speak to her about it again.  And she has set her mind especially
+against my being a clergyman; I know that.  But I can't give her up.  I
+do think she cares about me.  I saw Mrs. Garth last night, and she said
+that Mary was staying at Lowick Rectory with Miss Farebrother."
+
+"Yes, she is very kindly helping my sister.  Do you wish to go there?"
+
+"No, I want to ask a great favor of you.  I am ashamed to bother you in
+this way; but Mary might listen to what you said, if you mentioned the
+subject to her--I mean about my going into the Church."
+
+"That is rather a delicate task, my dear Fred.  I shall have to
+presuppose your attachment to her; and to enter on the subject as you
+wish me to do, will be asking her to tell me whether she returns it."
+
+"That is what I want her to tell you," said Fred, bluntly.  "I don't
+know what to do, unless I can get at her feeling."
+
+"You mean that you would be guided by that as to your going into the
+Church?"
+
+"If Mary said she would never have me I might as well go wrong in one
+way as another."
+
+"That is nonsense, Fred.  Men outlive their love, but they don't
+outlive the consequences of their recklessness."
+
+"Not my sort of love: I have never been without loving Mary.  If I had
+to give her up, it would be like beginning to live on wooden legs."
+
+"Will she not be hurt at my intrusion?"
+
+"No, I feel sure she will not.  She respects you more than any one, and
+she would not put you off with fun as she does me.  Of course I could
+not have told any one else, or asked any one else to speak to her, but
+you.  There is no one else who could be such a friend to both of us."
+Fred paused a moment, and then said, rather complainingly, "And she
+ought to acknowledge that I have worked in order to pass.  She ought to
+believe that I would exert myself for her sake."
+
+There was a moment's silence before Mr. Farebrother laid down his work,
+and putting out his hand to Fred said--
+
+"Very well, my boy.  I will do what you wish."
+
+That very day Mr. Farebrother went to Lowick parsonage on the nag which
+he had just set up.  "Decidedly I am an old stalk," he thought, "the
+young growths are pushing me aside."
+
+He found Mary in the garden gathering roses and sprinkling the petals
+on a sheet.  The sun was low, and tall trees sent their shadows across
+the grassy walks where Mary was moving without bonnet or parasol.  She
+did not observe Mr. Farebrother's approach along the grass, and had
+just stooped down to lecture a small black-and-tan terrier, which would
+persist in walking on the sheet and smelling at the rose-leaves as Mary
+sprinkled them.  She took his fore-paws in one hand, and lifted up the
+forefinger of the other, while the dog wrinkled his brows and looked
+embarrassed.  "Fly, Fly, I am ashamed of you," Mary was saying in a
+grave contralto.  "This is not becoming in a sensible dog; anybody
+would think you were a silly young gentleman."
+
+"You are unmerciful to young gentlemen, Miss Garth," said the Vicar,
+within two yards of her.
+
+Mary started up and blushed.  "It always answers to reason with Fly,"
+she said, laughingly.
+
+"But not with young gentlemen?"
+
+"Oh, with some, I suppose; since some of them turn into excellent men."
+
+"I am glad of that admission, because I want at this very moment to
+interest you in a young gentleman."
+
+"Not a silly one, I hope," said Mary, beginning to pluck the roses
+again, and feeling her heart beat uncomfortably.
+
+"No; though perhaps wisdom is not his strong point, but rather
+affection and sincerity.  However, wisdom lies more in those two
+qualities than people are apt to imagine.  I hope you know by those
+marks what young gentleman I mean."
+
+"Yes, I think I do," said Mary, bravely, her face getting more serious,
+and her hands cold; "it must be Fred Vincy."
+
+"He has asked me to consult you about his going into the Church.  I
+hope you will not think that I consented to take a liberty in promising
+to do so."
+
+"On the contrary, Mr. Farebrother," said Mary, giving up the roses, and
+folding her arms, but unable to look up, "whenever you have anything to
+say to me I feel honored."
+
+"But before I enter on that question, let me just touch a point on
+which your father took me into confidence; by the way, it was that very
+evening on which I once before fulfilled a mission from Fred, just
+after he had gone to college.  Mr. Garth told me what happened on the
+night of Featherstone's death--how you refused to burn the will; and he
+said that you had some heart-prickings on that subject, because you had
+been the innocent means of hindering Fred from getting his ten thousand
+pounds.  I have kept that in mind, and I have heard something that may
+relieve you on that score--may show you that no sin-offering is
+demanded from you there."
+
+Mr. Farebrother paused a moment and looked at Mary.  He meant to give
+Fred his full advantage, but it would be well, he thought, to clear her
+mind of any superstitions, such as women sometimes follow when they do
+a man the wrong of marrying him as an act of atonement.  Mary's cheeks
+had begun to burn a little, and she was mute.
+
+"I mean, that your action made no real difference to Fred's lot.  I
+find that the first will would not have been legally good after the
+burning of the last; it would not have stood if it had been disputed,
+and you may be sure it would have been disputed.  So, on that score,
+you may feel your mind free."
+
+"Thank you, Mr. Farebrother," said Mary, earnestly.  "I am grateful to
+you for remembering my feelings."
+
+"Well, now I may go on.  Fred, you know, has taken his degree.  He has
+worked his way so far, and now the question is, what is he to do?  That
+question is so difficult that he is inclined to follow his father's
+wishes and enter the Church, though you know better than I do that he
+was quite set against that formerly.  I have questioned him on the
+subject, and I confess I see no insuperable objection to his being a
+clergyman, as things go.  He says that he could turn his mind to doing
+his best in that vocation, on one condition.  If that condition were
+fulfilled I would do my utmost in helping Fred on.  After a time--not,
+of course, at first--he might be with me as my curate, and he would
+have so much to do that his stipend would be nearly what I used to get
+as vicar.  But I repeat that there is a condition without which all
+this good cannot come to pass.  He has opened his heart to me, Miss
+Garth, and asked me to plead for him.  The condition lies entirely in
+your feeling."
+
+Mary looked so much moved, that he said after a moment, "Let us walk a
+little;" and when they were walking he added, "To speak quite plainly,
+Fred will not take any course which would lessen the chance that you
+would consent to be his wife; but with that prospect, he will try his
+best at anything you approve."
+
+"I cannot possibly say that I will ever be his wife, Mr. Farebrother:
+but I certainly never will be his wife if he becomes a clergyman.  What
+you say is most generous and kind; I don't mean for a moment to correct
+your judgment.  It is only that I have my girlish, mocking way of
+looking at things," said Mary, with a returning sparkle of playfulness
+in her answer which only made its modesty more charming.
+
+"He wishes me to report exactly what you think," said Mr. Farebrother.
+
+"I could not love a man who is ridiculous," said Mary, not choosing to
+go deeper.  "Fred has sense and knowledge enough to make him
+respectable, if he likes, in some good worldly business, but I can
+never imagine him preaching and exhorting, and pronouncing blessings,
+and praying by the sick, without feeling as if I were looking at a
+caricature.  His being a clergyman would be only for gentility's sake,
+and I think there is nothing more contemptible than such imbecile
+gentility.  I used to think that of Mr. Crowse, with his empty face and
+neat umbrella, and mincing little speeches.  What right have such men
+to represent Christianity--as if it were an institution for getting up
+idiots genteelly--as if--" Mary checked herself.  She had been carried
+along as if she had been speaking to Fred instead of Mr. Farebrother.
+
+"Young women are severe: they don't feel the stress of action as men
+do, though perhaps I ought to make you an exception there.  But you
+don't put Fred Vincy on so low a level as that?"
+
+"No, indeed, he has plenty of sense, but I think he would not show it
+as a clergyman.  He would be a piece of professional affectation."
+
+"Then the answer is quite decided.  As a clergyman he could have no
+hope?"
+
+Mary shook her head.
+
+"But if he braved all the difficulties of getting his bread in some
+other way--will you give him the support of hope?  May he count on
+winning you?"
+
+"I think Fred ought not to need telling again what I have already said
+to him," Mary answered, with a slight resentment in her manner.  "I
+mean that he ought not to put such questions until he has done
+something worthy, instead of saying that he could do it."
+
+Mr. Farebrother was silent for a minute or more, and then, as they
+turned and paused under the shadow of a maple at the end of a grassy
+walk, said, "I understand that you resist any attempt to fetter you,
+but either your feeling for Fred Vincy excludes your entertaining
+another attachment, or it does not: either he may count on your
+remaining single until he shall have earned your hand, or he may in any
+case be disappointed.  Pardon me, Mary--you know I used to catechise
+you under that name--but when the state of a woman's affections touches
+the happiness of another life--of more lives than one--I think it would
+be the nobler course for her to be perfectly direct and open."
+
+Mary in her turn was silent, wondering not at Mr. Farebrother's manner
+but at his tone, which had a grave restrained emotion in it.  When the
+strange idea flashed across her that his words had reference to
+himself, she was incredulous, and ashamed of entertaining it.  She had
+never thought that any man could love her except Fred, who had espoused
+her with the umbrella ring, when she wore socks and little strapped
+shoes; still less that she could be of any importance to Mr.
+Farebrother, the cleverest man in her narrow circle.  She had only time
+to feel that all this was hazy and perhaps illusory; but one thing was
+clear and determined--her answer.
+
+"Since you think it my duty, Mr. Farebrother, I will tell you that I
+have too strong a feeling for Fred to give him up for any one else.  I
+should never be quite happy if I thought he was unhappy for the loss of
+me.  It has taken such deep root in me--my gratitude to him for always
+loving me best, and minding so much if I hurt myself, from the time
+when we were very little.  I cannot imagine any new feeling coming to
+make that weaker.  I should like better than anything to see him worthy
+of every one's respect.  But please tell him I will not promise to
+marry him till then: I should shame and grieve my father and mother.
+He is free to choose some one else."
+
+"Then I have fulfilled my commission thoroughly," said Mr. Farebrother,
+putting out his hand to Mary, "and I shall ride back to Middlemarch
+forthwith.  With this prospect before him, we shall get Fred into the
+right niche somehow, and I hope I shall live to join your hands.  God
+bless you!"
+
+"Oh, please stay, and let me give you some tea," said Mary.  Her eyes
+filled with tears, for something indefinable, something like the
+resolute suppression of a pain in Mr. Farebrother's manner, made her
+feel suddenly miserable, as she had once felt when she saw her father's
+hands trembling in a moment of trouble.
+
+"No, my dear, no.  I must get back."
+
+In three minutes the Vicar was on horseback again, having gone
+magnanimously through a duty much harder than the renunciation of
+whist, or even than the writing of penitential meditations.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIII.
+
+    It is but a shallow haste which concludeth insincerity from
+    what outsiders call inconsistency--putting a dead mechanism
+    of "ifs" and "therefores" for the living myriad of hidden
+    suckers whereby the belief and the conduct are wrought into
+    mutual sustainment.
+
+
+Mr. Bulstrode, when he was hoping to acquire a new interest in Lowick,
+had naturally had an especial wish that the new clergyman should be one
+whom he thoroughly approved; and he believed it to be a chastisement
+and admonition directed to his own shortcomings and those of the nation
+at large, that just about the time when he came in possession of the
+deeds which made him the proprietor of Stone Court, Mr. Farebrother
+"read himself" into the quaint little church and preached his first
+sermon to the congregation of farmers, laborers, and village artisans.
+It was not that Mr. Bulstrode intended to frequent Lowick Church or to
+reside at Stone Court for a good while to come: he had bought the
+excellent farm and fine homestead simply as a retreat which he might
+gradually enlarge as to the land and beautify as to the dwelling, until
+it should be conducive to the divine glory that he should enter on it
+as a residence, partially withdrawing from his present exertions in the
+administration of business, and throwing more conspicuously on the side
+of Gospel truth the weight of local landed proprietorship, which
+Providence might increase by unforeseen occasions of purchase.  A
+strong leading in this direction seemed to have been given in the
+surprising facility of getting Stone Court, when every one had expected
+that Mr. Rigg Featherstone would have clung to it as the Garden of
+Eden.  That was what poor old Peter himself had expected; having often,
+in imagination, looked up through the sods above him, and, unobstructed
+by perspective, seen his frog-faced legatee enjoying the fine old
+place to the perpetual surprise and disappointment of other survivors.
+
+But how little we know what would make paradise for our neighbors!  We
+judge from our own desires, and our neighbors themselves are not always
+open enough even to throw out a hint of theirs.  The cool and judicious
+Joshua Rigg had not allowed his parent to perceive that Stone Court was
+anything less than the chief good in his estimation, and he had
+certainly wished to call it his own.  But as Warren Hastings looked at
+gold and thought of buying Daylesford, so Joshua Rigg looked at Stone
+Court and thought of buying gold.  He had a very distinct and intense
+vision of his chief good, the vigorous greed which he had inherited
+having taken a special form by dint of circumstance: and his chief good
+was to be a moneychanger.  From his earliest employment as an
+errand-boy in a seaport, he had looked through the windows of the
+moneychangers as other boys look through the windows of the
+pastry-cooks; the fascination had wrought itself gradually into a deep
+special passion; he meant, when he had property, to do many things, one
+of them being to marry a genteel young person; but these were all
+accidents and joys that imagination could dispense with.  The one joy
+after which his soul thirsted was to have a money-changer's shop on a
+much-frequented quay, to have locks all round him of which he held the
+keys, and to look sublimely cool as he handled the breeding coins of
+all nations, while helpless Cupidity looked at him enviously from the
+other side of an iron lattice.  The strength of that passion had been a
+power enabling him to master all the knowledge necessary to gratify it.
+And when others were thinking that he had settled at Stone Court for
+life, Joshua himself was thinking that the moment now was not far off
+when he should settle on the North Quay with the best appointments in
+safes and locks.
+
+Enough.  We are concerned with looking at Joshua Rigg's sale of his
+land from Mr. Bulstrode's point of view, and he interpreted it as a
+cheering dispensation conveying perhaps a sanction to a purpose which
+he had for some time entertained without external encouragement; he
+interpreted it thus, but not too confidently, offering up his
+thanksgiving in guarded phraseology.  His doubts did not arise from the
+possible relations of the event to Joshua Rigg's destiny, which
+belonged to the unmapped regions not taken under the providential
+government, except perhaps in an imperfect colonial way; but they arose
+from reflecting that this dispensation too might be a chastisement for
+himself, as Mr. Farebrother's induction to the living clearly was.
+
+This was not what Mr. Bulstrode said to any man for the sake of
+deceiving him: it was what he said to himself--it was as genuinely his
+mode of explaining events as any theory of yours may be, if you happen
+to disagree with him.  For the egoism which enters into our theories
+does not affect their sincerity; rather, the more our egoism is
+satisfied, the more robust is our belief.
+
+However, whether for sanction or for chastisement, Mr. Bulstrode,
+hardly fifteen months after the death of Peter Featherstone, had become
+the proprietor of Stone Court, and what Peter would say "if he were
+worthy to know," had become an inexhaustible and consolatory subject of
+conversation to his disappointed relatives.  The tables were now turned
+on that dear brother departed, and to contemplate the frustration of
+his cunning by the superior cunning of things in general was a cud of
+delight to Solomon.  Mrs. Waule had a melancholy triumph in the proof
+that it did not answer to make false Featherstones and cut off the
+genuine; and Sister Martha receiving the news in the Chalky Flats said,
+"Dear, dear! then the Almighty could have been none so pleased with the
+almshouses after all."
+
+Affectionate Mrs. Bulstrode was particularly glad of the advantage
+which her husband's health was likely to get from the purchase of Stone
+Court.  Few days passed without his riding thither and looking over
+some part of the farm with the bailiff, and the evenings were delicious
+in that quiet spot, when the new hay-ricks lately set up were sending
+forth odors to mingle with the breath of the rich old garden.  One
+evening, while the sun was still above the horizon and burning in
+golden lamps among the great walnut boughs, Mr. Bulstrode was pausing
+on horseback outside the front gate waiting for Caleb Garth, who had
+met him by appointment to give an opinion on a question of stable
+drainage, and was now advising the bailiff in the rick-yard.
+
+Mr. Bulstrode was conscious of being in a good spiritual frame and more
+than usually serene, under the influence of his innocent recreation.
+He was doctrinally convinced that there was a total absence of merit in
+himself; but that doctrinal conviction may be held without pain when
+the sense of demerit does not take a distinct shape in memory and
+revive the tingling of shame or the pang of remorse.  Nay, it may be
+held with intense satisfaction when the depth of our sinning is but a
+measure for the depth of forgiveness, and a clenching proof that we are
+peculiar instruments of the divine intention.  The memory has as many
+moods as the temper, and shifts its scenery like a diorama.  At this
+moment Mr. Bulstrode felt as if the sunshine were all one with that of
+far-off evenings when he was a very young man and used to go out
+preaching beyond Highbury.  And he would willingly have had that
+service of exhortation in prospect now.  The texts were there still,
+and so was his own facility in expounding them.  His brief reverie was
+interrupted by the return of Caleb Garth, who also was on horseback,
+and was just shaking his bridle before starting, when he exclaimed--
+
+"Bless my heart! what's this fellow in black coming along the lane?
+He's like one of those men one sees about after the races."
+
+Mr. Bulstrode turned his horse and looked along the lane, but made no
+reply.  The comer was our slight acquaintance Mr. Raffles, whose
+appearance presented no other change than such as was due to a suit of
+black and a crape hat-band. He was within three yards of the horseman
+now, and they could see the flash of recognition in his face as he
+whirled his stick upward, looking all the while at Mr. Bulstrode, and
+at last exclaiming:--
+
+"By Jove, Nick, it's you!  I couldn't be mistaken, though the
+five-and-twenty years have played old Boguy with us both!  How are you,
+eh? you didn't expect to see _me_ here.  Come, shake us by the hand."
+To say that Mr. Raffles' manner was rather excited would be only one
+mode of saying that it was evening.  Caleb Garth could see that there
+was a moment of struggle and hesitation in Mr. Bulstrode, but it ended
+in his putting out his hand coldly to Raffles and saying--
+
+"I did not indeed expect to see you in this remote country place."
+
+"Well, it belongs to a stepson of mine," said Raffles, adjusting
+himself in a swaggering attitude.  "I came to see him here before.  I'm
+not so surprised at seeing you, old fellow, because I picked up a
+letter--what you may call a providential thing.  It's uncommonly
+fortunate I met you, though; for I don't care about seeing my stepson:
+he's not affectionate, and his poor mother's gone now.  To tell the
+truth, I came out of love to you, Nick: I came to get your address,
+for--look here!"  Raffles drew a crumpled paper from his pocket.
+
+Almost any other man than Caleb Garth might have been tempted to linger
+on the spot for the sake of hearing all he could about a man whose
+acquaintance with Bulstrode seemed to imply passages in the banker's
+life so unlike anything that was known of him in Middlemarch that they
+must have the nature of a secret to pique curiosity.  But Caleb was
+peculiar: certain human tendencies which are commonly strong were
+almost absent from his mind; and one of these was curiosity about
+personal affairs.  Especially if there was anything discreditable to be
+found out concerning another man, Caleb preferred not to know it; and
+if he had to tell anybody under him that his evil doings were
+discovered, he was more embarrassed than the culprit.  He now spurred
+his horse, and saying, "I wish you good evening, Mr. Bulstrode; I must
+be getting home," set off at a trot.
+
+"You didn't put your full address to this letter," Raffles continued.
+"That was not like the first-rate man of business you used to be.  'The
+Shrubs,'--they may be anywhere: you live near at hand, eh?--have cut
+the London concern altogether--perhaps turned country squire--have a
+rural mansion to invite me to.  Lord, how many years it is ago!  The
+old lady must have been dead a pretty long while--gone to glory without
+the pain of knowing how poor her daughter was, eh?  But, by Jove!
+you're very pale and pasty, Nick.  Come, if you're going home, I'll
+walk by your side."
+
+Mr. Bulstrode's usual paleness had in fact taken an almost deathly hue.
+Five minutes before, the expanse of his life had been submerged in its
+evening sunshine which shone backward to its remembered morning: sin
+seemed to be a question of doctrine and inward penitence, humiliation
+an exercise of the closet, the bearing of his deeds a matter of private
+vision adjusted solely by spiritual relations and conceptions of the
+divine purposes.  And now, as if by some hideous magic, this loud red
+figure had risen before him in unmanageable solidity--an incorporate
+past which had not entered into his imagination of chastisements.  But
+Mr. Bulstrode's thought was busy, and he was not a man to act or speak
+rashly.
+
+"I was going home," he said, "but I can defer my ride a little.  And
+you can, if you please, rest here."
+
+"Thank you," said Raffles, making a grimace.  "I don't care now about
+seeing my stepson.  I'd rather go home with you."
+
+"Your stepson, if Mr. Rigg Featherstone was he, is here no longer.  I
+am master here now."
+
+Raffles opened wide eyes, and gave a long whistle of surprise, before
+he said, "Well then, I've no objection.  I've had enough walking from
+the coach-road. I never was much of a walker, or rider either.  What I
+like is a smart vehicle and a spirited cob.  I was always a little
+heavy in the saddle.  What a pleasant surprise it must be to you to see
+me, old fellow!" he continued, as they turned towards the house.  "You
+don't say so; but you never took your luck heartily--you were always
+thinking of improving the occasion--you'd such a gift for improving
+your luck."
+
+Mr. Raffles seemed greatly to enjoy his own wit, and swung his leg in a
+swaggering manner which was rather too much for his companion's
+judicious patience.
+
+"If I remember rightly," Mr. Bulstrode observed, with chill anger, "our
+acquaintance many years ago had not the sort of intimacy which you are
+now assuming, Mr. Raffles.  Any services you desire of me will be the
+more readily rendered if you will avoid a tone of familiarity which did
+not lie in our former intercourse, and can hardly be warranted by more
+than twenty years of separation."
+
+"You don't like being called Nick?  Why, I always called you Nick in my
+heart, and though lost to sight, to memory dear.  By Jove! my feelings
+have ripened for you like fine old cognac.  I hope you've got some in
+the house now.  Josh filled my flask well the last time."
+
+Mr. Bulstrode had not yet fully learned that even the desire for cognac
+was not stronger in Raffles than the desire to torment, and that a hint
+of annoyance always served him as a fresh cue.  But it was at least
+clear that further objection was useless, and Mr. Bulstrode, in giving
+orders to the housekeeper for the accommodation of the guest, had a
+resolute air of quietude.
+
+There was the comfort of thinking that this housekeeper had been in the
+service of Rigg also, and might accept the idea that Mr. Bulstrode
+entertained Raffles merely as a friend of her former master.
+
+When there was food and drink spread before his visitor in the
+wainscoted parlor, and no witness in the room, Mr. Bulstrode said--
+
+"Your habits and mine are so different, Mr. Raffles, that we can hardly
+enjoy each other's society.  The wisest plan for both of us will
+therefore be to part as soon as possible.  Since you say that you
+wished to meet me, you probably considered that you had some business
+to transact with me.  But under the circumstances I will invite you to
+remain here for the night, and I will myself ride over here early
+to-morrow morning--before breakfast, in fact, when I can receive any
+Communication you have to make to me."
+
+"With all my heart," said Raffles; "this is a comfortable place--a
+little dull for a continuance; but I can put up with it for a night,
+with this good liquor and the prospect of seeing you again in the
+morning.  You're a much better host than my stepson was; but Josh owed
+me a bit of a grudge for marrying his mother; and between you and me
+there was never anything but kindness."
+
+Mr. Bulstrode, hoping that the peculiar mixture of joviality and
+sneering in Raffles' manner was a good deal the effect of drink, had
+determined to wait till he was quite sober before he spent more words
+upon him.  But he rode home with a terribly lucid vision of the
+difficulty there would be in arranging any result that could be
+permanently counted on with this man.  It was inevitable that he should
+wish to get rid of John Raffles, though his reappearance could not be
+regarded as lying outside the divine plan.  The spirit of evil might
+have sent him to threaten Mr. Bulstrode's subversion as an instrument
+of good; but the threat must have been permitted, and was a
+chastisement of a new kind.  It was an hour of anguish for him very
+different from the hours in which his struggle had been securely
+private, and which had ended with a sense that his secret misdeeds were
+pardoned and his services accepted.  Those misdeeds even when
+committed--had they not been half sanctified by the singleness of his
+desire to devote himself and all he possessed to the furtherance of the
+divine scheme?  And was he after all to become a mere stone of
+stumbling and a rock of offence?  For who would understand the work
+within him?  Who would not, when there was the pretext of casting
+disgrace upon him, confound his whole life and the truths he had
+espoused, in one heap of obloquy?
+
+In his closest meditations the life-long habit of Mr. Bulstrode's mind
+clad his most egoistic terrors in doctrinal references to superhuman
+ends.  But even while we are talking and meditating about the earth's
+orbit and the solar system, what we feel and adjust our movements to is
+the stable earth and the changing day.  And now within all the
+automatic succession of theoretic phrases--distinct and inmost as the
+shiver and the ache of oncoming fever when we are discussing abstract
+pain, was the forecast of disgrace in the presence of his neighbors and
+of his own wife.  For the pain, as well as the public estimate of
+disgrace, depends on the amount of previous profession.  To men who
+only aim at escaping felony, nothing short of the prisoner's dock is
+disgrace.  But Mr. Bulstrode had aimed at being an eminent Christian.
+
+It was not more than half-past seven in the morning when he again
+reached Stone Court.  The fine old place never looked more like a
+delightful home than at that moment; the great white lilies were in
+flower, the nasturtiums, their pretty leaves all silvered with dew,
+were running away over the low stone wall; the very noises all around
+had a heart of peace within them.  But everything was spoiled for the
+owner as he walked on the gravel in front and awaited the descent of
+Mr. Raffles, with whom he was condemned to breakfast.
+
+It was not long before they were seated together in the wainscoted
+parlor over their tea and toast, which was as much as Raffles cared to
+take at that early hour.  The difference between his morning and
+evening self was not so great as his companion had imagined that it
+might be; the delight in tormenting was perhaps even the stronger
+because his spirits were rather less highly pitched.  Certainly his
+manners seemed more disagreeable by the morning light.
+
+"As I have little time to spare, Mr. Raffles," said the banker, who
+could hardly do more than sip his tea and break his toast without
+eating it, "I shall be obliged if you will mention at once the ground
+on which you wished to meet with me.  I presume that you have a home
+elsewhere and will be glad to return to it."
+
+"Why, if a man has got any heart, doesn't he want to see an old friend,
+Nick?--I must call you Nick--we always did call you young Nick when we
+knew you meant to marry the old widow.  Some said you had a handsome
+family likeness to old Nick, but that was your mother's fault, calling
+you Nicholas.  Aren't you glad to see me again?  I expected an invite
+to stay with you at some pretty place.  My own establishment is broken
+up now my wife's dead.  I've no particular attachment to any spot; I
+would as soon settle hereabout as anywhere."
+
+"May I ask why you returned from America?  I considered that the strong
+wish you expressed to go there, when an adequate sum was furnished, was
+tantamount to an engagement that you would remain there for life."
+
+"Never knew that a wish to go to a place was the same thing as a wish
+to stay.  But I did stay a matter of ten years; it didn't suit me to
+stay any longer.  And I'm not going again, Nick." Here Mr. Raffles
+winked slowly as he looked at Mr. Bulstrode.
+
+"Do you wish to be settled in any business?  What is your calling now?"
+
+"Thank you, my calling is to enjoy myself as much as I can.  I don't
+care about working any more.  If I did anything it would be a little
+travelling in the tobacco line--or something of that sort, which takes
+a man into agreeable company.  But not without an independence to fall
+back upon.  That's what I want: I'm not so strong as I was, Nick,
+though I've got more color than you.  I want an independence."
+
+"That could be supplied to you, if you would engage to keep at a
+distance," said Mr. Bulstrode, perhaps with a little too much eagerness
+in his undertone.
+
+"That must be as it suits my convenience," said Raffles coolly.  "I see
+no reason why I shouldn't make a few acquaintances hereabout.  I'm not
+ashamed of myself as company for anybody.  I dropped my portmanteau at
+the turnpike when I got down--change of linen--genuine--honor bright--more
+than fronts and wristbands; and with this suit of mourning, straps
+and everything, I should do you credit among the nobs here."  Mr.
+Raffles had pushed away his chair and looked down at himself,
+particularly at his straps.  His chief intention was to annoy
+Bulstrode, but he really thought that his appearance now would produce
+a good effect, and that he was not only handsome and witty, but clad in
+a mourning style which implied solid connections.
+
+"If you intend to rely on me in any way, Mr. Raffles," said Bulstrode,
+after a moment's pause, "you will expect to meet my wishes."
+
+"Ah, to be sure," said Raffles, with a mocking cordiality.  "Didn't I
+always do it?  Lord, you made a pretty thing out of me, and I got but
+little.  I've often thought since, I might have done better by telling
+the old woman that I'd found her daughter and her grandchild: it would
+have suited my feelings better; I've got a soft place in my heart.  But
+you've buried the old lady by this time, I suppose--it's all one to her
+now.  And you've got your fortune out of that profitable business which
+had such a blessing on it.  You've taken to being a nob, buying land,
+being a country bashaw.  Still in the Dissenting line, eh?  Still
+godly?  Or taken to the Church as more genteel?"
+
+This time Mr. Raffles' slow wink and slight protrusion of his tongue
+was worse than a nightmare, because it held the certitude that it was
+not a nightmare, but a waking misery.  Mr. Bulstrode felt a shuddering
+nausea, and did not speak, but was considering diligently whether he
+should not leave Raffles to do as he would, and simply defy him as a
+slanderer.  The man would soon show himself disreputable enough to make
+people disbelieve him.  "But not when he tells any ugly-looking truth
+about _you_," said discerning consciousness.  And again: it seemed no
+wrong to keep Raffles at a distance, but Mr. Bulstrode shrank from the
+direct falsehood of denying true statements.  It was one thing to look
+back on forgiven sins, nay, to explain questionable conformity to lax
+customs, and another to enter deliberately on the necessity of
+falsehood.
+
+But since Bulstrode did not speak, Raffles ran on, by way of using time
+to the utmost.
+
+"I've not had such fine luck as you, by Jove!  Things went confoundedly
+with me in New York; those Yankees are cool hands, and a man of
+gentlemanly feelings has no chance with them.  I married when I came
+back--a nice woman in the tobacco trade--very fond of me--but the
+trade was restricted, as we say.  She had been settled there a good
+many years by a friend; but there was a son too much in the case.  Josh
+and I never hit it off.  However, I made the most of the position, and
+I've always taken my glass in good company.  It's been all on the
+square with me; I'm as open as the day.  You won't take it ill of me
+that I didn't look you up before.  I've got a complaint that makes me a
+little dilatory.  I thought you were trading and praying away in London
+still, and didn't find you there.  But you see I was sent to you,
+Nick--perhaps for a blessing to both of us."
+
+Mr. Raffles ended with a jocose snuffle: no man felt his intellect more
+superior to religious cant.  And if the cunning which calculates on the
+meanest feelings in men could be called intellect, he had his share,
+for under the blurting rallying tone with which he spoke to Bulstrode,
+there was an evident selection of statements, as if they had been so
+many moves at chess.  Meanwhile Bulstrode had determined on his move,
+and he said, with gathered resolution--
+
+"You will do well to reflect, Mr. Raffles, that it is possible for a
+man to overreach himself in the effort to secure undue advantage.
+Although I am not in any way bound to you, I am willing to supply you
+with a regular annuity--in quarterly payments--so long as you fulfil a
+promise to remain at a distance from this neighborhood.  It is in your
+power to choose.  If you insist on remaining here, even for a short
+time, you will get nothing from me.  I shall decline to know you."
+
+"Ha, ha!" said Raffles, with an affected explosion, "that reminds me of
+a droll dog of a thief who declined to know the constable."
+
+"Your allusions are lost on me sir," said Bulstrode, with white heat;
+"the law has no hold on me either through your agency or any other."
+
+"You can't understand a joke, my good fellow.  I only meant that I
+should never decline to know you.  But let us be serious.  Your
+quarterly payment won't quite suit me.  I like my freedom."
+
+Here Raffles rose and stalked once or twice up and down the room,
+swinging his leg, and assuming an air of masterly meditation.  At last
+he stopped opposite Bulstrode, and said, "I'll tell you what!  Give us
+a couple of hundreds--come, that's modest--and I'll go away--honor
+bright!--pick up my portmanteau and go away.  But I shall not give up
+my Liberty for a dirty annuity.  I shall come and go where I like.
+Perhaps it may suit me to stay away, and correspond with a friend;
+perhaps not.  Have you the money with you?"
+
+"No, I have one hundred," said Bulstrode, feeling the immediate
+riddance too great a relief to be rejected on the ground of future
+uncertainties.  "I will forward you the other if you will mention an
+address."
+
+"No, I'll wait here till you bring it," said Raffles.  "I'll take a
+stroll and have a snack, and you'll be back by that time."
+
+Mr. Bulstrode's sickly body, shattered by the agitations he had gone
+through since the last evening, made him feel abjectly in the power of
+this loud invulnerable man.  At that moment he snatched at a temporary
+repose to be won on any terms.  He was rising to do what Raffles
+suggested, when the latter said, lifting up his finger as if with a
+sudden recollection--
+
+"I did have another look after Sarah again, though I didn't tell you;
+I'd a tender conscience about that pretty young woman.  I didn't find
+her, but I found out her husband's name, and I made a note of it.  But
+hang it, I lost my pocketbook.  However, if I heard it, I should know
+it again.  I've got my faculties as if I was in my prime, but names
+wear out, by Jove!  Sometimes I'm no better than a confounded tax-paper
+before the names are filled in.  However, if I hear of her and her
+family, you shall know, Nick.  You'd like to do something for her, now
+she's your step-daughter."
+
+"Doubtless," said Mr. Bulstrode, with the usual steady look of his
+light-gray eyes; "though that might reduce my power of assisting you."
+
+As he walked out of the room, Raffles winked slowly at his back, and
+then turned towards the window to watch the banker riding away--virtually
+at his command.  His lips first curled with a smile and then opened
+with a short triumphant laugh.
+
+"But what the deuce was the name?" he presently said, half aloud,
+scratching his head, and wrinkling his brows horizontally.  He had not
+really cared or thought about this point of forgetfulness until it
+occurred to him in his invention of annoyances for Bulstrode.
+
+"It began with L; it was almost all l's I fancy," he went on, with a
+sense that he was getting hold of the slippery name.  But the hold was
+too slight, and he soon got tired of this mental chase; for few men
+were more impatient of private occupation or more in need of making
+themselves continually heard than Mr. Raffles.  He preferred using his
+time in pleasant conversation with the bailiff and the housekeeper,
+from whom he gathered as much as he wanted to know about Mr.
+Bulstrode's position in Middlemarch.
+
+After all, however, there was a dull space of time which needed
+relieving with bread and cheese and ale, and when he was seated alone
+with these resources in the wainscoted parlor, he suddenly slapped his
+knee, and exclaimed, "Ladislaw!"  That action of memory which he had
+tried to set going, and had abandoned in despair, had suddenly
+completed itself without conscious effort--a common experience,
+agreeable as a completed sneeze, even if the name remembered is of no
+value.  Raffles immediately took out his pocket-book, and wrote down
+the name, not because he expected to use it, but merely for the sake of
+not being at a loss if he ever did happen to want it.  He was not going
+to tell Bulstrode: there was no actual good in telling, and to a mind
+like that of Mr. Raffles there is always probable good in a secret.
+
+He was satisfied with his present success, and by three o'clock that
+day he had taken up his portmanteau at the turnpike and mounted the
+coach, relieving Mr. Bulstrode's eyes of an ugly black spot on the
+landscape at Stone Court, but not relieving him of the dread that the
+black spot might reappear and become inseparable even from the vision
+of his hearth.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VI.
+
+
+
+
+
+THE WIDOW AND THE WIFE.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIV.
+
+    "Negli occhi porta la mia donna Amore;
+         Per che si fa gentil ciò ch'ella mira:
+         Ov'ella passa, ogni uom ver lei si gira,
+         E cui saluta fa tremar lo core.
+
+     Sicchè, bassando il viso, tutto smore,
+         E d'ogni suo difetto allor sospira:
+         Fuggon dinanzi a lei Superbia ed Ira:
+         Aiutatemi, donne, a farle onore.
+
+     Ogni dolcezza, ogni pensiero umile
+         Nasce nel core a chi parlar la sente;
+         Ond'è beato chi prima la vide.
+     Quel ch'ella par quand' un poco sorride,
+         Non si può dicer, nè tener a mente,
+         Si è nuovo miracolo gentile."
+                        --DANTE: la Vita Nuova.
+
+
+By that delightful morning when the hay-ricks at Stone Court were
+scenting the air quite impartially, as if Mr. Raffles had been a guest
+worthy of finest incense, Dorothea had again taken up her abode at
+Lowick Manor.  After three months Freshitt had become rather
+oppressive: to sit like a model for Saint Catherine looking rapturously
+at Celia's baby would not do for many hours in the day, and to remain
+in that momentous babe's presence with persistent disregard was a
+course that could not have been tolerated in a childless sister.
+Dorothea would have been capable of carrying baby joyfully for a mile
+if there had been need, and of loving it the more tenderly for that
+labor; but to an aunt who does not recognize her infant nephew as
+Bouddha, and has nothing to do for him but to admire, his behavior is
+apt to appear monotonous, and the interest of watching him exhaustible.
+This possibility was quite hidden from Celia, who felt that Dorothea's
+childless widowhood fell in quite prettily with the birth of little
+Arthur (baby was named after Mr. Brooke).
+
+"Dodo is just the creature not to mind about having anything of her
+own--children or anything!" said Celia to her husband.  "And if she
+had had a baby, it never could have been such a dear as Arthur.  Could
+it, James?
+
+"Not if it had been like Casaubon," said Sir James, conscious of some
+indirectness in his answer, and of holding a strictly private opinion
+as to the perfections of his first-born.
+
+"No! just imagine!  Really it was a mercy," said Celia; "and I think it
+is very nice for Dodo to be a widow.  She can be just as fond of our
+baby as if it were her own, and she can have as many notions of her own
+as she likes."
+
+"It is a pity she was not a queen," said the devout Sir James.
+
+"But what should we have been then?  We must have been something else,"
+said Celia, objecting to so laborious a flight of imagination.  "I like
+her better as she is."
+
+Hence, when she found that Dorothea was making arrangements for her
+final departure to Lowick, Celia raised her eyebrows with
+disappointment, and in her quiet unemphatic way shot a needle-arrow of
+sarcasm.
+
+"What will you do at Lowick, Dodo?  You say yourself there is nothing
+to be done there: everybody is so clean and well off, it makes you
+quite melancholy.  And here you have been so happy going all about
+Tipton with Mr. Garth into the worst backyards.  And now uncle is
+abroad, you and Mr. Garth can have it all your own way; and I am sure
+James does everything you tell him."
+
+"I shall often come here, and I shall see how baby grows all the
+better," said Dorothea.
+
+"But you will never see him washed," said Celia; "and that is quite the
+best part of the day."  She was almost pouting: it did seem to her very
+hard in Dodo to go away from the baby when she might stay.
+
+"Dear Kitty, I will come and stay all night on purpose," said Dorothea;
+"but I want to be alone now, and in my own home.  I wish to know the
+Farebrothers better, and to talk to Mr. Farebrother about what there is
+to be done in Middlemarch."
+
+Dorothea's native strength of will was no longer all converted into
+resolute submission.  She had a great yearning to be at Lowick, and was
+simply determined to go, not feeling bound to tell all her reasons.
+But every one around her disapproved.  Sir James was much pained, and
+offered that they should all migrate to Cheltenham for a few months
+with the sacred ark, otherwise called a cradle: at that period a man
+could hardly know what to propose if Cheltenham were rejected.
+
+The Dowager Lady Chettam, just returned from a visit to her daughter in
+town, wished, at least, that Mrs. Vigo should be written to, and
+invited to accept the office of companion to Mrs. Casaubon: it was not
+credible that Dorothea as a young widow would think of living alone in
+the house at Lowick.  Mrs. Vigo had been reader and secretary to royal
+personages, and in point of knowledge and sentiments even Dorothea
+could have nothing to object to her.
+
+Mrs. Cadwallader said, privately, "You will certainly go mad in that
+house alone, my dear.  You will see visions.  We have all got to exert
+ourselves a little to keep sane, and call things by the same names as
+other people call them by.  To be sure, for younger sons and women who
+have no money, it is a sort of provision to go mad: they are taken care
+of then.  But you must not run into that.  I dare say you are a little
+bored here with our good dowager; but think what a bore you might
+become yourself to your fellow-creatures if you were always playing
+tragedy queen and taking things sublimely.  Sitting alone in that
+library at Lowick you may fancy yourself ruling the weather; you must
+get a few people round you who wouldn't believe you if you told them.
+That is a good lowering medicine."
+
+"I never called everything by the same name that all the people about
+me did," said Dorothea, stoutly.
+
+"But I suppose you have found out your mistake, my dear," said Mrs.
+Cadwallader, "and that is a proof of sanity."
+
+Dorothea was aware of the sting, but it did not hurt her.  "No," she
+said, "I still think that the greater part of the world is mistaken
+about many things.  Surely one may be sane and yet think so, since the
+greater part of the world has often had to come round from its opinion."
+
+Mrs. Cadwallader said no more on that point to Dorothea, but to her
+husband she remarked, "It will be well for her to marry again as soon
+as it is proper, if one could get her among the right people.  Of
+course the Chettams would not wish it.  But I see clearly a husband is
+the best thing to keep her in order.  If we were not so poor I would
+invite Lord Triton.  He will be marquis some day, and there is no
+denying that she would make a good marchioness: she looks handsomer
+than ever in her mourning."
+
+"My dear Elinor, do let the poor woman alone.  Such contrivances are of
+no use," said the easy Rector.
+
+"No use?  How are matches made, except by bringing men and women
+together?  And it is a shame that her uncle should have run away and
+shut up the Grange just now.  There ought to be plenty of eligible
+matches invited to Freshitt and the Grange.  Lord Triton is precisely
+the man: full of plans for making the people happy in a soft-headed
+sort of way.  That would just suit Mrs. Casaubon."
+
+"Let Mrs. Casaubon choose for herself, Elinor."
+
+"That is the nonsense you wise men talk!  How can she choose if she has
+no variety to choose from?  A woman's choice usually means taking the
+only man she can get.  Mark my words, Humphrey.  If her friends don't
+exert themselves, there will be a worse business than the Casaubon
+business yet."
+
+"For heaven's sake don't touch on that topic, Elinor! It is a very sore
+point with Sir James. He would be deeply offended if you entered on it
+to him unnecessarily."
+
+"I have never entered on it," said Mrs Cadwallader, opening her hands.
+"Celia told me all about the will at the beginning, without any asking
+of mine."
+
+"Yes, yes; but they want the thing hushed up, and I understand that the
+young fellow is going out of the neighborhood."
+
+Mrs. Cadwallader said nothing, but gave her husband three significant
+nods, with a very sarcastic expression in her dark eyes.
+
+Dorothea quietly persisted in spite of remonstrance and persuasion.  So
+by the end of June the shutters were all opened at Lowick Manor, and
+the morning gazed calmly into the library, shining on the rows of
+note-books as it shines on the weary waste planted with huge stones,
+the mute memorial of a forgotten faith; and the evening laden with
+roses entered silently into the blue-green boudoir where Dorothea chose
+oftenest to sit.  At first she walked into every room, questioning the
+eighteen months of her married life, and carrying on her thoughts as if
+they were a speech to be heard by her husband.  Then, she lingered in
+the library and could not be at rest till she had carefully ranged all
+the note-books as she imagined that he would wish to see them, in
+orderly sequence.  The pity which had been the restraining compelling
+motive in her life with him still clung about his image, even while she
+remonstrated with him in indignant thought and told him that he was
+unjust.  One little act of hers may perhaps be smiled at as
+superstitious.  The Synoptical Tabulation for the use of Mrs. Casaubon,
+she carefully enclosed and sealed, writing within the envelope, "I
+could not use it.  Do you not see now that I could not submit my soul
+to yours, by working hopelessly at what I have no belief in--Dorothea?"
+Then she deposited the paper in her own desk.
+
+That silent colloquy was perhaps only the more earnest because
+underneath and through it all there was always the deep longing which
+had really determined her to come to Lowick.  The longing was to see
+Will Ladislaw.  She did not know any good that could come of their
+meeting: she was helpless; her hands had been tied from making up to
+him for any unfairness in his lot.  But her soul thirsted to see him.
+How could it be otherwise?  If a princess in the days of enchantment
+had seen a four-footed creature from among those which live in herds
+come to her once and again with a human gaze which rested upon her with
+choice and beseeching, what would she think of in her journeying, what
+would she look for when the herds passed her?  Surely for the gaze
+which had found her, and which she would know again.  Life would be no
+better than candle-light tinsel and daylight rubbish if our spirits
+were not touched by what has been, to issues of longing and constancy.
+It was true that Dorothea wanted to know the Farebrothers better, and
+especially to talk to the new rector, but also true that remembering
+what Lydgate had told her about Will Ladislaw and little Miss Noble,
+she counted on Will's coming to Lowick to see the Farebrother family.
+The very first Sunday, _before_ she entered the church, she saw him as
+she had seen him the last time she was there, alone in the clergyman's
+pew; but _when_ she entered his figure was gone.
+
+In the week-days when she went to see the ladies at the Rectory, she
+listened in vain for some word that they might let fall about Will; but
+it seemed to her that Mrs. Farebrother talked of every one else in the
+neighborhood and out of it.
+
+"Probably some of Mr. Farebrother's Middlemarch hearers may follow him
+to Lowick sometimes.  Do you not think so?" said Dorothea, rather
+despising herself for having a secret motive in asking the question.
+
+"If they are wise they will, Mrs. Casaubon," said the old lady.  "I see
+that you set a right value on my son's preaching.  His grandfather on
+my side was an excellent clergyman, but his father was in the law:--most
+exemplary and honest nevertheless, which is a reason for our never
+being rich.  They say Fortune is a woman and capricious.  But sometimes
+she is a good woman and gives to those who merit, which has been the
+case with you, Mrs. Casaubon, who have given a living to my son."
+
+Mrs. Farebrother recurred to her knitting with a dignified satisfaction
+in her neat little effort at oratory, but this was not what Dorothea
+wanted to hear.  Poor thing! she did not even know whether Will
+Ladislaw was still at Middlemarch, and there was no one whom she dared
+to ask, unless it were Lydgate.  But just now she could not see Lydgate
+without sending for him or going to seek him.  Perhaps Will Ladislaw,
+having heard of that strange ban against him left by Mr. Casaubon, had
+felt it better that he and she should not meet again, and perhaps she
+was wrong to wish for a meeting that others might find many good
+reasons against.  Still "I do wish it" came at the end of those wise
+reflections as naturally as a sob after holding the breath.  And the
+meeting did happen, but in a formal way quite unexpected by her.
+
+One morning, about eleven, Dorothea was seated in her boudoir with a
+map of the land attached to the manor and other papers before her,
+which were to help her in making an exact statement for herself of her
+income and affairs.  She had not yet applied herself to her work, but
+was seated with her hands folded on her lap, looking out along the
+avenue of limes to the distant fields.  Every leaf was at rest in the
+sunshine, the familiar scene was changeless, and seemed to represent
+the prospect of her life, full of motiveless ease--motiveless, if her
+own energy could not seek out reasons for ardent action.  The widow's
+cap of those times made an oval frame for the face, and had a crown
+standing up; the dress was an experiment in the utmost laying on of
+crape; but this heavy solemnity of clothing made her face look all the
+younger, with its recovered bloom, and the sweet, inquiring candor of
+her eyes.
+
+Her reverie was broken by Tantripp, who came to say that Mr. Ladislaw
+was below, and begged permission to see Madam if it were not too early.
+
+"I will see him," said Dorothea, rising immediately.  "Let him be shown
+into the drawing-room."
+
+The drawing-room was the most neutral room in the house to her--the
+one least associated with the trials of her married life: the damask
+matched the wood-work, which was all white and gold; there were two
+tall mirrors and tables with nothing on them--in brief, it was a room
+where you had no reason for sitting in one place rather than in
+another.  It was below the boudoir, and had also a bow-window looking
+out on the avenue.  But when Pratt showed Will Ladislaw into it the
+window was open; and a winged visitor, buzzing in and out now and then
+without minding the furniture, made the room look less formal and
+uninhabited.
+
+"Glad to see you here again, sir," said Pratt, lingering to adjust a
+blind.
+
+"I am only come to say good-by, Pratt," said Will, who wished even the
+butler to know that he was too proud to hang about Mrs. Casaubon now
+she was a rich widow.
+
+"Very sorry to hear it, sir," said Pratt, retiring.  Of course, as a
+servant who was to be told nothing, he knew the fact of which Ladislaw
+was still ignorant, and had drawn his inferences; indeed, had not
+differed from his betrothed Tantripp when she said, "Your master was as
+jealous as a fiend--and no reason.  Madam would look higher than Mr.
+Ladislaw, else I don't know her.  Mrs. Cadwallader's maid says there's
+a lord coming who is to marry her when the mourning's over."
+
+There were not many moments for Will to walk about with his hat in his
+hand before Dorothea entered.  The meeting was very different from that
+first meeting in Rome when Will had been embarrassed and Dorothea calm.
+This time he felt miserable but determined, while she was in a state of
+agitation which could not be hidden.  Just outside the door she had
+felt that this longed-for meeting was after all too difficult, and when
+she saw Will advancing towards her, the deep blush which was rare in
+her came with painful suddenness.  Neither of them knew how it was, but
+neither of them spoke.  She gave her hand for a moment, and then they
+went to sit down near the window, she on one settee and he on another
+opposite.  Will was peculiarly uneasy: it seemed to him not like
+Dorothea that the mere fact of her being a widow should cause such a
+change in her manner of receiving him; and he knew of no other
+condition which could have affected their previous relation to each
+other--except that, as his imagination at once told him, her friends
+might have been poisoning her mind with their suspicions of him.
+
+"I hope I have not presumed too much in calling," said Will; "I could
+not bear to leave the neighborhood and begin a new life without seeing
+you to say good-by."
+
+"Presumed?  Surely not.  I should have thought it unkind if you had not
+wished to see me," said Dorothea, her habit of speaking with perfect
+genuineness asserting itself through all her uncertainty and agitation.
+"Are you going away immediately?"
+
+"Very soon, I think.  I intend to go to town and eat my dinners as a
+barrister, since, they say, that is the preparation for all public
+business.  There will be a great deal of political work to be done
+by-and-by, and I mean to try and do some of it.  Other men have managed
+to win an honorable position for themselves without family or money."
+
+"And that will make it all the more honorable," said Dorothea,
+ardently.  "Besides, you have so many talents.  I have heard from my
+uncle how well you speak in public, so that every one is sorry when you
+leave off, and how clearly you can explain things.  And you care that
+justice should be done to every one.  I am so glad.  When we were in
+Rome, I thought you only cared for poetry and art, and the things that
+adorn life for us who are well off.  But now I know you think about the
+rest of the world."
+
+While she was speaking Dorothea had lost her personal embarrassment,
+and had become like her former self.  She looked at Will with a direct
+glance, full of delighted confidence.
+
+"You approve of my going away for years, then, and never coming here
+again till I have made myself of some mark in the world?" said Will,
+trying hard to reconcile the utmost pride with the utmost effort to get
+an expression of strong feeling from Dorothea.
+
+She was not aware how long it was before she answered.  She had turned
+her head and was looking out of the window on the rose-bushes, which
+seemed to have in them the summers of all the years when Will would be
+away.  This was not judicious behavior.  But Dorothea never thought of
+studying her manners: she thought only of bowing to a sad necessity
+which divided her from Will.  Those first words of his about his
+intentions had seemed to make everything clear to her: he knew, she
+supposed, all about Mr. Casaubon's final conduct in relation to him,
+and it had come to him with the same sort of shock as to herself.  He
+had never felt more than friendship for her--had never had anything in
+his mind to justify what she felt to be her husband's outrage on the
+feelings of both: and that friendship he still felt.  Something which
+may be called an inward silent sob had gone on in Dorothea before she
+said with a pure voice, just trembling in the last words as if only
+from its liquid flexibility--
+
+"Yes, it must be right for you to do as you say.  I shall be very happy
+when I hear that you have made your value felt.  But you must have
+patience.  It will perhaps be a long while."
+
+Will never quite knew how it was that he saved himself from falling
+down at her feet, when the "long while" came forth with its gentle
+tremor.  He used to say that the horrible hue and surface of her crape
+dress was most likely the sufficient controlling force.  He sat still,
+however, and only said--
+
+"I shall never hear from you.  And you will forget all about me."
+
+"No," said Dorothea, "I shall never forget you.  I have never forgotten
+any one whom I once knew.  My life has never been crowded, and seems
+not likely to be so.  And I have a great deal of space for memory at
+Lowick, haven't I?"  She smiled.
+
+"Good God!"  Will burst out passionately, rising, with his hat still in
+his hand, and walking away to a marble table, where he suddenly turned
+and leaned his back against it.  The blood had mounted to his face and
+neck, and he looked almost angry.  It had seemed to him as if they were
+like two creatures slowly turning to marble in each other's presence,
+while their hearts were conscious and their eyes were yearning.  But
+there was no help for it.  It should never be true of him that in this
+meeting to which he had come with bitter resolution he had ended by a
+confession which might be interpreted into asking for her fortune.
+Moreover, it was actually true that he was fearful of the effect which
+such confessions might have on Dorothea herself.
+
+She looked at him from that distance in some trouble, imagining that
+there might have been an offence in her words.  But all the while there
+was a current of thought in her about his probable want of money, and
+the impossibility of her helping him.  If her uncle had been at home,
+something might have been done through him!  It was this preoccupation
+with the hardship of Will's wanting money, while she had what ought to
+have been his share, which led her to say, seeing that he remained
+silent and looked away from her--
+
+"I wonder whether you would like to have that miniature which hangs
+up-stairs--I mean that beautiful miniature of your grandmother.  I
+think it is not right for me to keep it, if you would wish to have it.
+It is wonderfully like you."
+
+"You are very good," said Will, irritably.  "No; I don't mind about it.
+It is not very consoling to have one's own likeness.  It would be more
+consoling if others wanted to have it."
+
+"I thought you would like to cherish her memory--I thought--" Dorothea
+broke off an instant, her imagination suddenly warning her away from
+Aunt Julia's history--"you would surely like to have the miniature as a
+family memorial."
+
+"Why should I have that, when I have nothing else!  A man with only a
+portmanteau for his stowage must keep his memorials in his head."
+
+Will spoke at random: he was merely venting his petulance; it was a
+little too exasperating to have his grandmother's portrait offered him
+at that moment.  But to Dorothea's feeling his words had a peculiar
+sting.  She rose and said with a touch of indignation as well as
+hauteur--
+
+"You are much the happier of us two, Mr. Ladislaw, to have nothing."
+
+Will was startled.  Whatever the words might be, the tone seemed like a
+dismissal; and quitting his leaning posture, he walked a little way
+towards her.  Their eyes met, but with a strange questioning gravity.
+Something was keeping their minds aloof, and each was left to
+conjecture what was in the other.  Will had really never thought of
+himself as having a claim of inheritance on the property which was held
+by Dorothea, and would have required a narrative to make him understand
+her present feeling.
+
+"I never felt it a misfortune to have nothing till now," he said.  "But
+poverty may be as bad as leprosy, if it divides us from what we most
+care for."
+
+The words cut Dorothea to the heart, and made her relent.  She answered
+in a tone of sad fellowship.
+
+"Sorrow comes in so many ways.  Two years ago I had no notion of
+that--I mean of the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our
+hands, and makes us silent when we long to speak.  I used to despise
+women a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better
+things.  I was very fond of doing as I liked, but I have almost given
+it up," she ended, smiling playfully.
+
+"I have not given up doing as I like, but I can very seldom do it,"
+said Will.  He was standing two yards from her with his mind full of
+contradictory desires and resolves--desiring some unmistakable proof
+that she loved him, and yet dreading the position into which such a
+proof might bring him.  "The thing one most longs for may be surrounded
+with conditions that would be intolerable."
+
+At this moment Pratt entered and said, "Sir James Chettam is in the
+library, madam."
+
+"Ask Sir James to come in here," said Dorothea, immediately.  It was as
+if the same electric shock had passed through her and Will.  Each of
+them felt proudly resistant, and neither looked at the other, while
+they awaited Sir James's entrance.
+
+After shaking hands with Dorothea, he bowed as slightly as possible to
+Ladislaw, who repaid the slightness exactly, and then going towards
+Dorothea, said--
+
+"I must say good-by, Mrs. Casaubon; and probably for a long while."
+
+Dorothea put out her hand and said her good-by cordially.  The sense
+that Sir James was depreciating Will, and behaving rudely to him,
+roused her resolution and dignity: there was no touch of confusion in
+her manner.  And when Will had left the room, she looked with such calm
+self-possession at Sir James, saying, "How is Celia?" that he was
+obliged to behave as if nothing had annoyed him.  And what would be the
+use of behaving otherwise?  Indeed, Sir James shrank with so much
+dislike from the association even in thought of Dorothea with Ladislaw
+as her possible lover, that he would himself have wished to avoid an
+outward show of displeasure which would have recognized the
+disagreeable possibility.  If any one had asked him why he shrank in
+that way, I am not sure that he would at first have said anything
+fuller or more precise than "_That_ Ladislaw!"--though on reflection
+he might have urged that Mr. Casaubon's codicil, barring Dorothea's
+marriage with Will, except under a penalty, was enough to cast
+unfitness over any relation at all between them.  His aversion was all
+the stronger because he felt himself unable to interfere.
+
+But Sir James was a power in a way unguessed by himself.  Entering at
+that moment, he was an incorporation of the strongest reasons through
+which Will's pride became a repellent force, keeping him asunder from
+Dorothea.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LV.
+
+    Hath she her faults?  I would you had them too.
+    They are the fruity must of soundest wine;
+    Or say, they are regenerating fire
+    Such as hath turned the dense black element
+    Into a crystal pathway for the sun.
+
+
+If youth is the season of hope, it is often so only in the sense that
+our elders are hopeful about us; for no age is so apt as youth to think
+its emotions, partings, and resolves are the last of their kind.  Each
+crisis seems final, simply because it is new.  We are told that the
+oldest inhabitants in Peru do not cease to be agitated by the
+earthquakes, but they probably see beyond each shock, and reflect that
+there are plenty more to come.
+
+To Dorothea, still in that time of youth when the eyes with their long
+full lashes look out after their rain of tears unsoiled and unwearied
+as a freshly opened passion-flower, that morning's parting with Will
+Ladislaw seemed to be the close of their personal relations.  He was
+going away into the distance of unknown years, and if ever he came back
+he would be another man.  The actual state of his mind--his proud
+resolve to give the lie beforehand to any suspicion that he would play
+the needy adventurer seeking a rich woman--lay quite out of her
+imagination, and she had interpreted all his behavior easily enough by
+her supposition that Mr. Casaubon's codicil seemed to him, as it did to
+her, a gross and cruel interdict on any active friendship between them.
+Their young delight in speaking to each other, and saying what no one
+else would care to hear, was forever ended, and become a treasure of
+the past.  For this very reason she dwelt on it without inward check.
+That unique happiness too was dead, and in its shadowed silent chamber
+she might vent the passionate grief which she herself wondered at.  For
+the first time she took down the miniature from the wall and kept it
+before her, liking to blend the woman who had been too hardly judged
+with the grandson whom her own heart and judgment defended.  Can any
+one who has rejoiced in woman's tenderness think it a reproach to her
+that she took the little oval picture in her palm and made a bed for it
+there, and leaned her cheek upon it, as if that would soothe the
+creatures who had suffered unjust condemnation?  She did not know then
+that it was Love who had come to her briefly, as in a dream before
+awaking, with the hues of morning on his wings--that it was Love to
+whom she was sobbing her farewell as his image was banished by the
+blameless rigor of irresistible day.  She only felt that there was
+something irrevocably amiss and lost in her lot, and her thoughts about
+the future were the more readily shapen into resolve.  Ardent souls,
+ready to construct their coming lives, are apt to commit themselves to
+the fulfilment of their own visions.
+
+One day that she went to Freshitt to fulfil her promise of staying all
+night and seeing baby washed, Mrs. Cadwallader came to dine, the Rector
+being gone on a fishing excursion.  It was a warm evening, and even in
+the delightful drawing-room, where the fine old turf sloped from the
+open window towards a lilied pool and well-planted mounds, the heat was
+enough to make Celia in her white muslin and light curls reflect with
+pity on what Dodo must feel in her black dress and close cap.  But this
+was not until some episodes with baby were over, and had left her mind
+at leisure.  She had seated herself and taken up a fan for some time
+before she said, in her quiet guttural--
+
+"Dear Dodo, do throw off that cap.  I am sure your dress must make you
+feel ill."
+
+"I am so used to the cap--it has become a sort of shell," said
+Dorothea, smiling.  "I feel rather bare and exposed when it is off."
+
+"I must see you without it; it makes us all warm," said Celia, throwing
+down her fan, and going to Dorothea.  It was a pretty picture to see
+this little lady in white muslin unfastening the widow's cap from her
+more majestic sister, and tossing it on to a chair.  Just as the coils
+and braids of dark-brown hair had been set free, Sir James entered the
+room.  He looked at the released head, and said, "Ah!" in a tone of
+satisfaction.
+
+"It was I who did it, James," said Celia.  "Dodo need not make such a
+slavery of her mourning; she need not wear that cap any more among her
+friends."
+
+"My dear Celia," said Lady Chettam, "a widow must wear her mourning at
+least a year."
+
+"Not if she marries again before the end of it," said Mrs. Cadwallader,
+who had some pleasure in startling her good friend the Dowager.  Sir
+James was annoyed, and leaned forward to play with Celia's Maltese dog.
+
+"That is very rare, I hope," said Lady Chettam, in a tone intended to
+guard against such events.  "No friend of ours ever committed herself
+in that way except Mrs. Beevor, and it was very painful to Lord
+Grinsell when she did so.  Her first husband was objectionable, which
+made it the greater wonder.  And severely she was punished for it.
+They said Captain Beevor dragged her about by the hair, and held up
+loaded pistols at her."
+
+"Oh, if she took the wrong man!" said Mrs. Cadwallader, who was in a
+decidedly wicked mood.  "Marriage is always bad then, first or second.
+Priority is a poor recommendation in a husband if he has got no other.
+I would rather have a good second husband than an indifferent first."
+
+"My dear, your clever tongue runs away with you," said Lady Chettam.
+"I am sure you would be the last woman to marry again prematurely, if
+our dear Rector were taken away."
+
+"Oh, I make no vows; it might be a necessary economy.  It is lawful to
+marry again, I suppose; else we might as well be Hindoos instead of
+Christians.  Of course if a woman accepts the wrong man, she must take
+the consequences, and one who does it twice over deserves her fate.
+But if she can marry blood, beauty, and bravery--the sooner the
+better."
+
+"I think the subject of our conversation is very ill-chosen," said Sir
+James, with a look of disgust.  "Suppose we change it."
+
+"Not on my account, Sir James," said Dorothea, determined not to lose
+the opportunity of freeing herself from certain oblique references to
+excellent matches.  "If you are speaking on my behalf, I can assure you
+that no question can be more indifferent and impersonal to me than
+second marriage.  It is no more to me than if you talked of women going
+fox-hunting: whether it is admirable in them or not, I shall not follow
+them.  Pray let Mrs. Cadwallader amuse herself on that subject as much
+as on any other."
+
+"My dear Mrs. Casaubon," said Lady Chettam, in her stateliest way, "you
+do not, I hope, think there was any allusion to you in my mentioning
+Mrs. Beevor.  It was only an instance that occurred to me.  She was
+step-daughter to Lord Grinsell: he married Mrs. Teveroy for his second
+wife.  There could be no possible allusion to you."
+
+"Oh no," said Celia.  "Nobody chose the subject; it all came out of
+Dodo's cap.  Mrs. Cadwallader only said what was quite true.  A woman
+could not be married in a widow's cap, James."
+
+"Hush, my dear!" said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "I will not offend again.  I
+will not even refer to Dido or Zenobia.  Only what are we to talk
+about?  I, for my part, object to the discussion of Human Nature,
+because that is the nature of rectors' wives."
+
+Later in the evening, after Mrs. Cadwallader was gone, Celia said
+privately to Dorothea, "Really, Dodo, taking your cap off made you like
+yourself again in more ways than one.  You spoke up just as you used to
+do, when anything was said to displease you.  But I could hardly make
+out whether it was James that you thought wrong, or Mrs. Cadwallader."
+
+"Neither," said Dorothea.  "James spoke out of delicacy to me, but he
+was mistaken in supposing that I minded what Mrs. Cadwallader said.  I
+should only mind if there were a law obliging me to take any piece of
+blood and beauty that she or anybody else recommended."
+
+"But you know, Dodo, if you ever did marry, it would be all the better
+to have blood and beauty," said Celia, reflecting that Mr. Casaubon had
+not been richly endowed with those gifts, and that it would be well to
+caution Dorothea in time.
+
+"Don't be anxious, Kitty; I have quite other thoughts about my life.  I
+shall never marry again," said Dorothea, touching her sister's chin,
+and looking at her with indulgent affection.  Celia was nursing her
+baby, and Dorothea had come to say good-night to her.
+
+"Really--quite?" said Celia.  "Not anybody at all--if he were very
+wonderful indeed?"
+
+Dorothea shook her head slowly.  "Not anybody at all.  I have
+delightful plans.  I should like to take a great deal of land, and
+drain it, and make a little colony, where everybody should work, and
+all the work should be done well.  I should know every one of the
+people and be their friend.  I am going to have great consultations
+with Mr. Garth: he can tell me almost everything I want to know."
+
+"Then you _will_ be happy, if you have a plan, Dodo?" said Celia.
+"Perhaps little Arthur will like plans when he grows up, and then he
+can help you."
+
+Sir James was informed that same night that Dorothea was really quite
+set against marrying anybody at all, and was going to take to "all
+sorts of plans," just like what she used to have.  Sir James made no
+remark.  To his secret feeling there was something repulsive in a
+woman's second marriage, and no match would prevent him from feeling it
+a sort of desecration for Dorothea.  He was aware that the world would
+regard such a sentiment as preposterous, especially in relation to a
+woman of one-and-twenty; the practice of "the world" being to treat of
+a young widow's second marriage as certain and probably near, and to
+smile with meaning if the widow acts accordingly.  But if Dorothea did
+choose to espouse her solitude, he felt that the resolution would well
+become her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVI.
+
+    "How happy is he born and taught
+     That serveth not another's will;
+     Whose armor is his honest thought,
+     And simple truth his only skill!
+        .   .   .   .   .   .   .
+     This man is freed from servile bands
+     Of hope to rise or fear to fall;
+     Lord of himself though not of lands;
+     And having nothing yet hath all."
+                             --SIR HENRY WOTTON.
+
+
+Dorothea's confidence in Caleb Garth's knowledge, which had begun on
+her hearing that he approved of her cottages, had grown fast during her
+stay at Freshitt, Sir James having induced her to take rides over the
+two estates in company with himself and Caleb, who quite returned her
+admiration, and told his wife that Mrs. Casaubon had a head for
+business most uncommon in a woman.  It must be remembered that by
+"business" Caleb never meant money transactions, but the skilful
+application of labor.
+
+"Most uncommon!" repeated Caleb.  "She said a thing I often used to
+think myself when I was a lad:--'Mr. Garth, I should like to feel, if I
+lived to be old, that I had improved a great piece of land and built a
+great many good cottages, because the work is of a healthy kind while
+it is being done, and after it is done, men are the better for it.'
+Those were the very words: she sees into things in that way."
+
+"But womanly, I hope," said Mrs. Garth, half suspecting that Mrs.
+Casaubon might not hold the true principle of subordination.
+
+"Oh, you can't think!" said Caleb, shaking his head.  "You would like
+to hear her speak, Susan.  She speaks in such plain words, and a voice
+like music.  Bless me! it reminds me of bits in the 'Messiah'--'and
+straightway there appeared a multitude of the heavenly host, praising
+God and saying;' it has a tone with it that satisfies your ear."
+
+Caleb was very fond of music, and when he could afford it went to hear
+an oratorio that came within his reach, returning from it with a
+profound reverence for this mighty structure of tones, which made him
+sit meditatively, looking on the floor and throwing much unutterable
+language into his outstretched hands.
+
+With this good understanding between them, it was natural that Dorothea
+asked Mr. Garth to undertake any business connected with the three
+farms and the numerous tenements attached to Lowick Manor; indeed, his
+expectation of getting work for two was being fast fulfilled.  As he
+said, "Business breeds."  And one form of business which was beginning
+to breed just then was the construction of railways.  A projected line
+was to run through Lowick parish where the cattle had hitherto grazed
+in a peace unbroken by astonishment; and thus it happened that the
+infant struggles of the railway system entered into the affairs of
+Caleb Garth, and determined the course of this history with regard to
+two persons who were dear to him.  The submarine railway may have its
+difficulties; but the bed of the sea is not divided among various
+landed proprietors with claims for damages not only measurable but
+sentimental.  In the hundred to which Middlemarch belonged railways
+were as exciting a topic as the Reform Bill or the imminent horrors of
+Cholera, and those who held the most decided views on the subject were
+women and landholders.  Women both old and young regarded travelling by
+steam as presumptuous and dangerous, and argued against it by saying
+that nothing should induce them to get into a railway carriage; while
+proprietors, differing from each other in their arguments as much as
+Mr. Solomon Featherstone differed from Lord Medlicote, were yet
+unanimous in the opinion that in selling land, whether to the Enemy of
+mankind or to a company obliged to purchase, these pernicious agencies
+must be made to pay a very high price to landowners for permission to
+injure mankind.
+
+But the slower wits, such as Mr. Solomon and Mrs. Waule, who both
+occupied land of their own, took a long time to arrive at this
+conclusion, their minds halting at the vivid conception of what it
+would be to cut the Big Pasture in two, and turn it into three-cornered
+bits, which would be "nohow;" while accommodation-bridges and high
+payments were remote and incredible.
+
+"The cows will all cast their calves, brother," said Mrs. Waule, in a
+tone of deep melancholy, "if the railway comes across the Near Close;
+and I shouldn't wonder at the mare too, if she was in foal.  It's a
+poor tale if a widow's property is to be spaded away, and the law say
+nothing to it.  What's to hinder 'em from cutting right and left if
+they begin?  It's well known, _I_ can't fight."
+
+"The best way would be to say nothing, and set somebody on to send 'em
+away with a flea in their ear, when they came spying and measuring,"
+said Solomon.  "Folks did that about Brassing, by what I can
+understand.  It's all a pretence, if the truth was known, about their
+being forced to take one way.  Let 'em go cutting in another parish.
+And I don't believe in any pay to make amends for bringing a lot of
+ruffians to trample your crops.  Where's a company's pocket?"
+
+"Brother Peter, God forgive him, got money out of a company," said Mrs.
+Waule.  "But that was for the manganese.  That wasn't for railways to
+blow you to pieces right and left."
+
+"Well, there's this to be said, Jane," Mr. Solomon concluded, lowering
+his voice in a cautious manner--"the more spokes we put in their wheel,
+the more they'll pay us to let 'em go on, if they must come whether or
+not."
+
+This reasoning of Mr. Solomon's was perhaps less thorough than he
+imagined, his cunning bearing about the same relation to the course of
+railways as the cunning of a diplomatist bears to the general chill or
+catarrh of the solar system.  But he set about acting on his views in a
+thoroughly diplomatic manner, by stimulating suspicion.  His side of
+Lowick was the most remote from the village, and the houses of the
+laboring people were either lone cottages or were collected in a hamlet
+called Frick, where a water-mill and some stone-pits made a little
+centre of slow, heavy-shouldered industry.
+
+In the absence of any precise idea as to what railways were, public
+opinion in Frick was against them; for the human mind in that grassy
+corner had not the proverbial tendency to admire the unknown, holding
+rather that it was likely to be against the poor man, and that
+suspicion was the only wise attitude with regard to it.  Even the rumor
+of Reform had not yet excited any millennial expectations in Frick,
+there being no definite promise in it, as of gratuitous grains to
+fatten Hiram Ford's pig, or of a publican at the "Weights and Scales"
+who would brew beer for nothing, or of an offer on the part of the
+three neighboring farmers to raise wages during winter.  And without
+distinct good of this kind in its promises, Reform seemed on a footing
+with the bragging of pedlers, which was a hint for distrust to every
+knowing person.  The men of Frick were not ill-fed, and were less given
+to fanaticism than to a strong muscular suspicion; less inclined to
+believe that they were peculiarly cared for by heaven, than to regard
+heaven itself as rather disposed to take them in--a disposition
+observable in the weather.
+
+Thus the mind of Frick was exactly of the sort for Mr. Solomon
+Featherstone to work upon, he having more plenteous ideas of the same
+order, with a suspicion of heaven and earth which was better fed and
+more entirely at leisure.  Solomon was overseer of the roads at that
+time, and on his slow-paced cob often took his rounds by Frick to look
+at the workmen getting the stones there, pausing with a mysterious
+deliberation, which might have misled you into supposing that he had
+some other reason for staying than the mere want of impulse to move.
+After looking for a long while at any work that was going on, he would
+raise his eyes a little and look at the horizon; finally he would shake
+his bridle, touch his horse with the whip, and get it to move slowly
+onward.  The hour-hand of a clock was quick by comparison with Mr.
+Solomon, who had an agreeable sense that he could afford to be slow.
+He was in the habit of pausing for a cautious, vaguely designing chat
+with every hedger or ditcher on his way, and was especially willing to
+listen even to news which he had heard before, feeling himself at an
+advantage over all narrators in partially disbelieving them.  One day,
+however, he got into a dialogue with Hiram Ford, a wagoner, in which he
+himself contributed information.  He wished to know whether Hiram had
+seen fellows with staves and instruments spying about: they called
+themselves railroad people, but there was no telling what they were or
+what they meant to do.  The least they pretended was that they were
+going to cut Lowick Parish into sixes and sevens.
+
+"Why, there'll be no stirrin' from one pla-ace to another," said Hiram,
+thinking of his wagon and horses.
+
+"Not a bit," said Mr. Solomon.  "And cutting up fine land such as this
+parish!  Let 'em go into Tipton, say I. But there's no knowing what
+there is at the bottom of it.  Traffic is what they put for'ard; but
+it's to do harm to the land and the poor man in the long-run."
+
+"Why, they're Lunnon chaps, I reckon," said Hiram, who had a dim notion
+of London as a centre of hostility to the country.
+
+"Ay, to be sure.  And in some parts against Brassing, by what I've
+heard say, the folks fell on 'em when they were spying, and broke their
+peep-holes as they carry, and drove 'em away, so as they knew better
+than come again."
+
+"It war good foon, I'd be bound," said Hiram, whose fun was much
+restricted by circumstances.
+
+"Well, I wouldn't meddle with 'em myself," said Solomon.  "But some say
+this country's seen its best days, and the sign is, as it's being
+overrun with these fellows trampling right and left, and wanting to cut
+it up into railways; and all for the big traffic to swallow up the
+little, so as there shan't be a team left on the land, nor a whip to
+crack."
+
+"I'll crack _my_ whip about their ear'n, afore they bring it to that,
+though," said Hiram, while Mr. Solomon, shaking his bridle, moved
+onward.
+
+Nettle-seed needs no digging.  The ruin of this countryside by
+railroads was discussed, not only at the "Weights and Scales," but in
+the hay-field, where the muster of working hands gave opportunities for
+talk such as were rarely had through the rural year.
+
+One morning, not long after that interview between Mr. Farebrother and
+Mary Garth, in which she confessed to him her feeling for Fred Vincy,
+it happened that her father had some business which took him to
+Yoddrell's farm in the direction of Frick: it was to measure and value
+an outlying piece of land belonging to Lowick Manor, which Caleb
+expected to dispose of advantageously for Dorothea (it must be
+confessed that his bias was towards getting the best possible terms
+from railroad companies). He put up his gig at Yoddrell's, and in
+walking with his assistant and measuring-chain to the scene of his
+work, he encountered the party of the company's agents, who were
+adjusting their spirit-level. After a little chat he left them,
+observing that by-and-by they would reach him again where he was going
+to measure.  It was one of those gray mornings after light rains, which
+become delicious about twelve o'clock, when the clouds part a little,
+and the scent of the earth is sweet along the lanes and by the
+hedgerows.
+
+The scent would have been sweeter to Fred Vincy, who was coming along
+the lanes on horseback, if his mind had not been worried by
+unsuccessful efforts to imagine what he was to do, with his father on
+one side expecting him straightway to enter the Church, with Mary on
+the other threatening to forsake him if he did enter it, and with the
+working-day world showing no eager need whatever of a young gentleman
+without capital and generally unskilled.  It was the harder to Fred's
+disposition because his father, satisfied that he was no longer
+rebellious, was in good humor with him, and had sent him on this
+pleasant ride to see after some greyhounds.  Even when he had fixed on
+what he should do, there would be the task of telling his father.  But
+it must be admitted that the fixing, which had to come first, was the
+more difficult task:--what secular avocation on earth was there for a
+young man (whose friends could not get him an "appointment") which was
+at once gentlemanly, lucrative, and to be followed without special
+knowledge?  Riding along the lanes by Frick in this mood, and
+slackening his pace while he reflected whether he should venture to go
+round by Lowick Parsonage to call on Mary, he could see over the hedges
+from one field to another.  Suddenly a noise roused his attention, and
+on the far side of a field on his left hand he could see six or seven
+men in smock-frocks with hay-forks in their hands making an offensive
+approach towards the four railway agents who were facing them, while
+Caleb Garth and his assistant were hastening across the field to join
+the threatened group.  Fred, delayed a few moments by having to find
+the gate, could not gallop up to the spot before the party in
+smock-frocks, whose work of turning the hay had not been too pressing
+after swallowing their mid-day beer, were driving the men in coats
+before them with their hay-forks; while Caleb Garth's assistant, a lad
+of seventeen, who had snatched up the spirit-level at Caleb's order,
+had been knocked down and seemed to be lying helpless.  The coated men
+had the advantage as runners, and Fred covered their retreat by getting
+in front of the smock-frocks and charging them suddenly enough to throw
+their chase into confusion.  "What do you confounded fools mean?"
+shouted Fred, pursuing the divided group in a zigzag, and cutting right
+and left with his whip.  "I'll swear to every one of you before the
+magistrate.  You've knocked the lad down and killed him, for what I
+know.  You'll every one of you be hanged at the next assizes, if you
+don't mind," said Fred, who afterwards laughed heartily as he
+remembered his own phrases.
+
+The laborers had been driven through the gate-way into their hay-field,
+and Fred had checked his horse, when Hiram Ford, observing himself at a
+safe challenging distance, turned back and shouted a defiance which he
+did not know to be Homeric.
+
+"Yo're a coward, yo are.  Yo git off your horse, young measter, and
+I'll have a round wi' ye, I wull.  Yo daredn't come on wi'out your hoss
+an' whip.  I'd soon knock the breath out on ye, I would."
+
+"Wait a minute, and I'll come back presently, and have a round with you
+all in turn, if you like," said Fred, who felt confidence in his power
+of boxing with his dearly beloved brethren.  But just now he wanted to
+hasten back to Caleb and the prostrate youth.
+
+The lad's ankle was strained, and he was in much pain from it, but he
+was no further hurt, and Fred placed him on the horse that he might
+ride to Yoddrell's and be taken care of there.
+
+"Let them put the horse in the stable, and tell the surveyors they can
+come back for their traps," said Fred.  "The ground is clear now."
+
+"No, no," said Caleb, "here's a breakage.  They'll have to give up for
+to-day, and it will be as well.  Here, take the things before you on
+the horse, Tom.  They'll see you coming, and they'll turn back."
+
+"I'm glad I happened to be here at the right moment, Mr. Garth," said
+Fred, as Tom rode away.  "No knowing what might have happened if the
+cavalry had not come up in time."
+
+"Ay, ay, it was lucky," said Caleb, speaking rather absently, and
+looking towards the spot where he had been at work at the moment of
+interruption.  "But--deuce take it--this is what comes of men being
+fools--I'm hindered of my day's work.  I can't get along without
+somebody to help me with the measuring-chain. However!" He was
+beginning to move towards the spot with a look of vexation, as if he
+had forgotten Fred's presence, but suddenly he turned round and said
+quickly, "What have you got to do to-day, young fellow?"
+
+"Nothing, Mr. Garth.  I'll help you with pleasure--can I?" said Fred,
+with a sense that he should be courting Mary when he was helping her
+father.
+
+"Well, you mustn't mind stooping and getting hot."
+
+"I don't mind anything.  Only I want to go first and have a round with
+that hulky fellow who turned to challenge me.  It would be a good
+lesson for him.  I shall not be five minutes."
+
+"Nonsense!" said Caleb, with his most peremptory intonation.  "I shall
+go and speak to the men myself.  It's all ignorance.  Somebody has been
+telling them lies.  The poor fools don't know any better."
+
+"I shall go with you, then," said Fred.
+
+"No, no; stay where you are.  I don't want your young blood.  I can
+take care of myself."
+
+Caleb was a powerful man and knew little of any fear except the fear of
+hurting others and the fear of having to speechify.  But he felt it his
+duty at this moment to try and give a little harangue.  There was a
+striking mixture in him--which came from his having always been a
+hard-working man himself--of rigorous notions about workmen and
+practical indulgence towards them.  To do a good day's work and to do
+it well, he held to be part of their welfare, as it was the chief part
+of his own happiness; but he had a strong sense of fellowship with
+them.  When he advanced towards the laborers they had not gone to work
+again, but were standing in that form of rural grouping which consists
+in each turning a shoulder towards the other, at a distance of two or
+three yards.  They looked rather sulkily at Caleb, who walked quickly
+with one hand in his pocket and the other thrust between the buttons of
+his waistcoat, and had his every-day mild air when he paused among them.
+
+"Why, my lads, how's this?" he began, taking as usual to brief phrases,
+which seemed pregnant to himself, because he had many thoughts lying
+under them, like the abundant roots of a plant that just manages to
+peep above the water.  "How came you to make such a mistake as this?
+Somebody has been telling you lies.  You thought those men up there
+wanted to do mischief."
+
+"Aw!" was the answer, dropped at intervals by each according to his
+degree of unreadiness.
+
+"Nonsense!  No such thing!  They're looking out to see which way the
+railroad is to take.  Now, my lads, you can't hinder the railroad: it
+will be made whether you like it or not.  And if you go fighting
+against it, you'll get yourselves into trouble.  The law gives those
+men leave to come here on the land.  The owner has nothing to say
+against it, and if you meddle with them you'll have to do with the
+constable and Justice Blakesley, and with the handcuffs and Middlemarch
+jail.  And you might be in for it now, if anybody informed against you."
+
+Caleb paused here, and perhaps the greatest orator could not have
+chosen either his pause or his images better for the occasion.
+
+"But come, you didn't mean any harm.  Somebody told you the railroad
+was a bad thing.  That was a lie.  It may do a bit of harm here and
+there, to this and to that; and so does the sun in heaven.  But the
+railway's a good thing."
+
+"Aw! good for the big folks to make money out on," said old Timothy
+Cooper, who had stayed behind turning his hay while the others had been
+gone on their spree;--"I'n seen lots o' things turn up sin' I war a
+young un--the war an' the peace, and the canells, an' the oald King
+George, an' the Regen', an' the new King George, an' the new un as has
+got a new ne-ame--an' it's been all aloike to the poor mon.  What's the
+canells been t' him?  They'n brought him neyther me-at nor be-acon, nor
+wage to lay by, if he didn't save it wi' clemmin' his own inside.
+Times ha' got wusser for him sin' I war a young un.  An' so it'll be
+wi' the railroads.  They'll on'y leave the poor mon furder behind.  But
+them are fools as meddle, and so I told the chaps here.  This is the
+big folks's world, this is.  But yo're for the big folks, Muster Garth,
+yo are."
+
+Timothy was a wiry old laborer, of a type lingering in those times--who
+had his savings in a stocking-foot, lived in a lone cottage, and was
+not to be wrought on by any oratory, having as little of the feudal
+spirit, and believing as little, as if he had not been totally
+unacquainted with the Age of Reason and the Rights of Man.  Caleb was
+in a difficulty known to any person attempting in dark times and
+unassisted by miracle to reason with rustics who are in possession of
+an undeniable truth which they know through a hard process of feeling,
+and can let it fall like a giant's club on your neatly carved argument
+for a social benefit which they do not feel.  Caleb had no cant at
+command, even if he could have chosen to use it; and he had been
+accustomed to meet all such difficulties in no other way than by doing
+his "business" faithfully.  He answered--
+
+"If you don't think well of me, Tim, never mind; that's neither here
+nor there now.  Things may be bad for the poor man--bad they are; but I
+want the lads here not to do what will make things worse for
+themselves.  The cattle may have a heavy load, but it won't help 'em to
+throw it over into the roadside pit, when it's partly their own fodder."
+
+"We war on'y for a bit o' foon," said Hiram, who was beginning to see
+consequences.  "That war all we war arter."
+
+"Well, promise me not to meddle again, and I'll see that nobody informs
+against you."
+
+"I'n ne'er meddled, an' I'n no call to promise," said Timothy.
+
+"No, but the rest.  Come, I'm as hard at work as any of you to-day, and
+I can't spare much time.  Say you'll be quiet without the constable."
+
+"Aw, we wooant meddle--they may do as they loike for oos"--were the
+forms in which Caleb got his pledges; and then he hastened back to
+Fred, who had followed him, and watched him in the gateway.
+
+They went to work, and Fred helped vigorously.  His spirits had risen,
+and he heartily enjoyed a good slip in the moist earth under the
+hedgerow, which soiled his perfect summer trousers.  Was it his
+successful onset which had elated him, or the satisfaction of helping
+Mary's father?  Something more.  The accidents of the morning had
+helped his frustrated imagination to shape an employment for himself
+which had several attractions.  I am not sure that certain fibres in
+Mr. Garth's mind had not resumed their old vibration towards the very
+end which now revealed itself to Fred.  For the effective accident is
+but the touch of fire where there is oil and tow; and it always
+appeared to Fred that the railway brought the needed touch.  But they
+went on in silence except when their business demanded speech.  At
+last, when they had finished and were walking away, Mr. Garth said--
+
+"A young fellow needn't be a B. A. to do this sort of work, eh, Fred?"
+
+"I wish I had taken to it before I had thought of being a B. A.," said
+Fred.  He paused a moment, and then added, more hesitatingly, "Do you
+think I am too old to learn your business, Mr. Garth?"
+
+"My business is of many sorts, my boy," said Mr. Garth, smiling.  "A
+good deal of what I know can only come from experience: you can't learn
+it off as you learn things out of a book.  But you are young enough to
+lay a foundation yet."  Caleb pronounced the last sentence
+emphatically, but paused in some uncertainty.  He had been under the
+impression lately that Fred had made up his mind to enter the Church.
+
+"You do think I could do some good at it, if I were to try?" said Fred,
+more eagerly.
+
+"That depends," said Caleb, turning his head on one side and lowering
+his voice, with the air of a man who felt himself to be saying
+something deeply religious.  "You must be sure of two things: you must
+love your work, and not be always looking over the edge of it, wanting
+your play to begin.  And the other is, you must not be ashamed of your
+work, and think it would be more honorable to you to be doing something
+else.  You must have a pride in your own work and in learning to do it
+well, and not be always saying, There's this and there's that--if I had
+this or that to do, I might make something of it.  No matter what a man
+is--I wouldn't give twopence for him"--here Caleb's mouth looked
+bitter, and he snapped his fingers--"whether he was the prime minister
+or the rick-thatcher, if he didn't do well what he undertook to do."
+
+"I can never feel that I should do that in being a clergyman," said
+Fred, meaning to take a step in argument.
+
+"Then let it alone, my boy," said Caleb, abruptly, "else you'll never
+be easy.  Or, if you _are_ easy, you'll be a poor stick."
+
+"That is very nearly what Mary thinks about it," said Fred, coloring.
+"I think you must know what I feel for Mary, Mr. Garth: I hope it does
+not displease you that I have always loved her better than any one
+else, and that I shall never love any one as I love her."
+
+The expression of Caleb's face was visibly softening while Fred spoke.
+But he swung his head with a solemn slowness, and said--
+
+"That makes things more serious, Fred, if you want to take Mary's
+happiness into your keeping."
+
+"I know that, Mr. Garth," said Fred, eagerly, "and I would do anything
+for _her_.  She says she will never have me if I go into the Church;
+and I shall be the most miserable devil in the world if I lose all hope
+of Mary.  Really, if I could get some other profession,
+business--anything that I am at all fit for, I would work hard, I would
+deserve your good opinion.  I should like to have to do with outdoor
+things.  I know a good deal about land and cattle already.  I used to
+believe, you know--though you will think me rather foolish for it--that
+I should have land of my own.  I am sure knowledge of that sort would
+come easily to me, especially if I could be under you in any way."
+
+"Softly, my boy," said Caleb, having the image of "Susan" before his
+eyes.  "What have you said to your father about all this?"
+
+"Nothing, yet; but I must tell him.  I am only waiting to know what I
+can do instead of entering the Church.  I am very sorry to disappoint
+him, but a man ought to be allowed to judge for himself when he is
+four-and-twenty. How could I know when I was fifteen, what it would be
+right for me to do now?  My education was a mistake."
+
+"But hearken to this, Fred," said Caleb.  "Are you sure Mary is fond of
+you, or would ever have you?"
+
+"I asked Mr. Farebrother to talk to her, because she had forbidden
+me--I didn't know what else to do," said Fred, apologetically.  "And he
+says that I have every reason to hope, if I can put myself in an
+honorable position--I mean, out of the Church. I dare say you think it
+unwarrantable in me, Mr. Garth, to be troubling you and obtruding my
+own wishes about Mary, before I have done anything at all for myself.
+Of course I have not the least claim--indeed, I have already a debt to
+you which will never be discharged, even when I have been, able to pay
+it in the shape of money."
+
+"Yes, my boy, you have a claim," said Caleb, with much feeling in his
+voice.  "The young ones have always a claim on the old to help them
+forward.  I was young myself once and had to do without much help; but
+help would have been welcome to me, if it had been only for the
+fellow-feeling's sake.  But I must consider.  Come to me to-morrow at
+the office, at nine o'clock. At the office, mind."
+
+Mr. Garth would take no important step without consulting Susan, but it
+must be confessed that before he reached home he had taken his
+resolution.  With regard to a large number of matters about which other
+men are decided or obstinate, he was the most easily manageable man in
+the world.  He never knew what meat he would choose, and if Susan had
+said that they ought to live in a four-roomed cottage, in order to
+save, he would have said, "Let us go," without inquiring into details.
+But where Caleb's feeling and judgment strongly pronounced, he was a
+ruler; and in spite of his mildness and timidity in reproving, every
+one about him knew that on the exceptional occasions when he chose, he
+was absolute.  He never, indeed, chose to be absolute except on some
+one else's behalf.  On ninety-nine points Mrs. Garth decided, but on
+the hundredth she was often aware that she would have to perform the
+singularly difficult task of carrying out her own principle, and to
+make herself subordinate.
+
+"It is come round as I thought, Susan," said Caleb, when they were
+seated alone in the evening.  He had already narrated the adventure
+which had brought about Fred's sharing in his work, but had kept back
+the further result.  "The children _are_ fond of each other--I mean,
+Fred and Mary."
+
+Mrs. Garth laid her work on her knee, and fixed her penetrating eyes
+anxiously on her husband.
+
+"After we'd done our work, Fred poured it all out to me.  He can't bear
+to be a clergyman, and Mary says she won't have him if he is one; and
+the lad would like to be under me and give his mind to business.  And
+I've determined to take him and make a man of him."
+
+"Caleb!" said Mrs. Garth, in a deep contralto, expressive of resigned
+astonishment.
+
+"It's a fine thing to do," said Mr. Garth, settling himself firmly
+against the back of his chair, and grasping the elbows.  "I shall have
+trouble with him, but I think I shall carry it through.  The lad loves
+Mary, and a true love for a good woman is a great thing, Susan.  It
+shapes many a rough fellow."
+
+"Has Mary spoken to you on the subject?" said Mrs Garth, secretly a
+little hurt that she had to be informed on it herself.
+
+"Not a word.  I asked her about Fred once; I gave her a bit of a
+warning.  But she assured me she would never marry an idle
+self-indulgent man--nothing since.  But it seems Fred set on Mr.
+Farebrother to talk to her, because she had forbidden him to speak
+himself, and Mr. Farebrother has found out that she is fond of Fred,
+but says he must not be a clergyman.  Fred's heart is fixed on Mary,
+that I can see: it gives me a good opinion of the lad--and we always
+liked him, Susan."
+
+"It is a pity for Mary, I think," said Mrs. Garth.
+
+"Why--a pity?"
+
+"Because, Caleb, she might have had a man who is worth twenty Fred
+Vincy's."
+
+"Ah?" said Caleb, with surprise.
+
+"I firmly believe that Mr. Farebrother is attached to her, and meant to
+make her an offer; but of course, now that Fred has used him as an
+envoy, there is an end to that better prospect." There was a severe
+precision in Mrs. Garth's utterance.  She was vexed and disappointed,
+but she was bent on abstaining from useless words.
+
+Caleb was silent a few moments under a conflict of feelings.  He looked
+at the floor and moved his head and hands in accompaniment to some
+inward argumentation.  At last he said--
+
+"That would have made me very proud and happy, Susan, and I should have
+been glad for your sake.  I've always felt that your belongings have
+never been on a level with you.  But you took me, though I was a plain
+man."
+
+"I took the best and cleverest man I had ever known," said Mrs. Garth,
+convinced that _she_ would never have loved any one who came short of
+that mark.
+
+"Well, perhaps others thought you might have done better.  But it would
+have been worse for me.  And that is what touches me close about Fred.
+The lad is good at bottom, and clever enough to do, if he's put in the
+right way; and he loves and honors my daughter beyond anything, and she
+has given him a sort of promise according to what he turns out.  I say,
+that young man's soul is in my hand; and I'll do the best I can for
+him, so help me God!  It's my duty, Susan."
+
+Mrs. Garth was not given to tears, but there was a large one rolling
+down her face before her husband had finished.  It came from the
+pressure of various feelings, in which there was much affection and
+some vexation.  She wiped it away quickly, saying--
+
+"Few men besides you would think it a duty to add to their anxieties in
+that way, Caleb."
+
+"That signifies nothing--what other men would think.  I've got a clear
+feeling inside me, and that I shall follow; and I hope your heart will
+go with me, Susan, in making everything as light as can be to Mary,
+poor child."
+
+Caleb, leaning back in his chair, looked with anxious appeal towards
+his wife.  She rose and kissed him, saying, "God bless you, Caleb!  Our
+children have a good father."
+
+But she went out and had a hearty cry to make up for the suppression of
+her words.  She felt sure that her husband's conduct would be
+misunderstood, and about Fred she was rational and unhopeful.  Which
+would turn out to have the more foresight in it--her rationality or
+Caleb's ardent generosity?
+
+When Fred went to the office the next morning, there was a test to be
+gone through which he was not prepared for.
+
+"Now Fred," said Caleb, "you will have some desk-work. I have always
+done a good deal of writing myself, but I can't do without help, and as
+I want you to understand the accounts and get the values into your
+head, I mean to do without another clerk.  So you must buckle to.  How
+are you at writing and arithmetic?"
+
+Fred felt an awkward movement of the heart; he had not thought of
+desk-work; but he was in a resolute mood, and not going to shrink.
+"I'm not afraid of arithmetic, Mr. Garth: it always came easily to me.
+I think you know my writing."
+
+"Let us see," said Caleb, taking up a pen, examining it carefully and
+handing it, well dipped, to Fred with a sheet of ruled paper.  "Copy me
+a line or two of that valuation, with the figures at the end."
+
+At that time the opinion existed that it was beneath a gentleman to
+write legibly, or with a hand in the least suitable to a clerk.  Fred
+wrote the lines demanded in a hand as gentlemanly as that of any
+viscount or bishop of the day: the vowels were all alike and the
+consonants only distinguishable as turning up or down, the strokes had
+a blotted solidity and the letters disdained to keep the line--in
+short, it was a manuscript of that venerable kind easy to interpret
+when you know beforehand what the writer means.
+
+As Caleb looked on, his visage showed a growing depression, but when
+Fred handed him the paper he gave something like a snarl, and rapped
+the paper passionately with the back of his hand.  Bad work like this
+dispelled all Caleb's mildness.
+
+"The deuce!" he exclaimed, snarlingly.  "To think that this is a
+country where a man's education may cost hundreds and hundreds, and it
+turns you out this!"  Then in a more pathetic tone, pushing up his
+spectacles and looking at the unfortunate scribe, "The Lord have mercy
+on us, Fred, I can't put up with this!"
+
+"What can I do, Mr. Garth?" said Fred, whose spirits had sunk very low,
+not only at the estimate of his handwriting, but at the vision of
+himself as liable to be ranked with office clerks.
+
+"Do?  Why, you must learn to form your letters and keep the line.
+What's the use of writing at all if nobody can understand it?" asked
+Caleb, energetically, quite preoccupied with the bad quality of the
+work.  "Is there so little business in the world that you must be
+sending puzzles over the country?  But that's the way people are
+brought up.  I should lose no end of time with the letters some people
+send me, if Susan did not make them out for me.  It's disgusting." Here
+Caleb tossed the paper from him.
+
+Any stranger peeping into the office at that moment might have wondered
+what was the drama between the indignant man of business, and the
+fine-looking young fellow whose blond complexion was getting rather
+patchy as he bit his lip with mortification.  Fred was struggling with
+many thoughts.  Mr. Garth had been so kind and encouraging at the
+beginning of their interview, that gratitude and hopefulness had been
+at a high pitch, and the downfall was proportionate.  He had not
+thought of desk-work--in fact, like the majority of young gentlemen, he
+wanted an occupation which should be free from disagreeables.  I cannot
+tell what might have been the consequences if he had not distinctly
+promised himself that he would go to Lowick to see Mary and tell her
+that he was engaged to work under her father.  He did not like to
+disappoint himself there.
+
+"I am very sorry," were all the words that he could muster.  But Mr.
+Garth was already relenting.
+
+"We must make the best of it, Fred," he began, with a return to his
+usual quiet tone.  "Every man can learn to write.  I taught myself.  Go
+at it with a will, and sit up at night if the day-time isn't enough.
+We'll be patient, my boy.  Callum shall go on with the books for a bit,
+while you are learning.  But now I must be off," said Caleb, rising.
+"You must let your father know our agreement.  You'll save me Callum's
+salary, you know, when you can write; and I can afford to give you
+eighty pounds for the first year, and more after."
+
+When Fred made the necessary disclosure to his parents, the relative
+effect on the two was a surprise which entered very deeply into his
+memory.  He went straight from Mr. Garth's office to the warehouse,
+rightly feeling that the most respectful way in which he could behave
+to his father was to make the painful communication as gravely and
+formally as possible.  Moreover, the decision would be more certainly
+understood to be final, if the interview took place in his father's
+gravest hours, which were always those spent in his private room at the
+warehouse.
+
+Fred entered on the subject directly, and declared briefly what he had
+done and was resolved to do, expressing at the end his regret that he
+should be the cause of disappointment to his father, and taking the
+blame on his own deficiencies.  The regret was genuine, and inspired
+Fred with strong, simple words.
+
+Mr. Vincy listened in profound surprise without uttering even an
+exclamation, a silence which in his impatient temperament was a sign of
+unusual emotion.  He had not been in good spirits about trade that
+morning, and the slight bitterness in his lips grew intense as he
+listened.  When Fred had ended, there was a pause of nearly a minute,
+during which Mr. Vincy replaced a book in his desk and turned the key
+emphatically.  Then he looked at his son steadily, and said--
+
+"So you've made up your mind at last, sir?"
+
+"Yes, father."
+
+"Very well; stick to it.  I've no more to say.  You've thrown away your
+education, and gone down a step in life, when I had given you the means
+of rising, that's all."
+
+"I am very sorry that we differ, father.  I think I can be quite as
+much of a gentleman at the work I have undertaken, as if I had been a
+curate.  But I am grateful to you for wishing to do the best for me."
+
+"Very well; I have no more to say.  I wash my hands of you.  I only
+hope, when you have a son of your own he will make a better return for
+the pains you spend on him."
+
+This was very cutting to Fred.  His father was using that unfair
+advantage possessed by us all when we are in a pathetic situation and
+see our own past as if it were simply part of the pathos.  In reality,
+Mr. Vincy's wishes about his son had had a great deal of pride,
+inconsiderateness, and egoistic folly in them.  But still the
+disappointed father held a strong lever; and Fred felt as if he were
+being banished with a malediction.
+
+"I hope you will not object to my remaining at home, sir?" he said,
+after rising to go; "I shall have a sufficient salary to pay for my
+board, as of course I should wish to do."
+
+"Board be hanged!" said Mr. Vincy, recovering himself in his disgust at
+the notion that Fred's keep would be missed at his table.  "Of course
+your mother will want you to stay.  But I shall keep no horse for you,
+you understand; and you will pay your own tailor.  You will do with a
+suit or two less, I fancy, when you have to pay for 'em."
+
+Fred lingered; there was still something to be said.  At last it came.
+
+"I hope you will shake hands with me, father, and forgive me the
+vexation I have caused you."
+
+Mr. Vincy from his chair threw a quick glance upward at his son, who
+had advanced near to him, and then gave his hand, saying hurriedly,
+"Yes, yes, let us say no more."
+
+Fred went through much more narrative and explanation with his mother,
+but she was inconsolable, having before her eyes what perhaps her
+husband had never thought of, the certainty that Fred would marry Mary
+Garth, that her life would henceforth be spoiled by a perpetual
+infusion of Garths and their ways, and that her darling boy, with his
+beautiful face and stylish air "beyond anybody else's son in
+Middlemarch," would be sure to get like that family in plainness of
+appearance and carelessness about his clothes.  To her it seemed that
+there was a Garth conspiracy to get possession of the desirable Fred,
+but she dared not enlarge on this opinion, because a slight hint of it
+had made him "fly out" at her as he had never done before.  Her temper
+was too sweet for her to show any anger, but she felt that her
+happiness had received a bruise, and for several days merely to look at
+Fred made her cry a little as if he were the subject of some baleful
+prophecy.  Perhaps she was the slower to recover her usual cheerfulness
+because Fred had warned her that she must not reopen the sore question
+with his father, who had accepted his decision and forgiven him.  If
+her husband had been vehement against Fred, she would have been urged
+into defence of her darling.  It was the end of the fourth day when Mr.
+Vincy said to her--
+
+"Come, Lucy, my dear, don't be so down-hearted. You always have spoiled
+the boy, and you must go on spoiling him."
+
+"Nothing ever did cut me so before, Vincy," said the wife, her fair
+throat and chin beginning to tremble again, "only his illness."
+
+"Pooh, pooh, never mind!  We must expect to have trouble with our
+children.  Don't make it worse by letting me see you out of spirits."
+
+"Well, I won't," said Mrs. Vincy, roused by this appeal and adjusting
+herself with a little shake as of a bird which lays down its ruffled
+plumage.
+
+"It won't do to begin making a fuss about one," said Mr. Vincy, wishing
+to combine a little grumbling with domestic cheerfulness.  "There's
+Rosamond as well as Fred."
+
+"Yes, poor thing.  I'm sure I felt for her being disappointed of her
+baby; but she got over it nicely."
+
+"Baby, pooh!  I can see Lydgate is making a mess of his practice, and
+getting into debt too, by what I hear.  I shall have Rosamond coming to
+me with a pretty tale one of these days.  But they'll get no money from
+me, I know.  Let _his_ family help him.  I never did like that
+marriage.  But it's no use talking.  Ring the bell for lemons, and
+don't look dull any more, Lucy.  I'll drive you and Louisa to Riverston
+to-morrow."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVII.
+
+    They numbered scarce eight summers when a name
+        Rose on their souls and stirred such motions there
+    As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame
+        At penetration of the quickening air:
+    His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu,
+        Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor,
+    Making the little world their childhood knew
+        Large with a land of mountain lake and scaur,
+    And larger yet with wonder love belief
+        Toward Walter Scott who living far away
+    Sent them this wealth of joy and noble grief.
+        The book and they must part, but day by day,
+            In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran
+            They wrote the tale, from Tully Veolan.
+
+
+The evening that Fred Vincy walked to Lowick parsonage (he had begun to
+see that this was a world in which even a spirited young man must
+sometimes walk for want of a horse to carry him) he set out at five
+o'clock and called on Mrs. Garth by the way, wishing to assure himself
+that she accepted their new relations willingly.
+
+He found the family group, dogs and cats included, under the great
+apple-tree in the orchard.  It was a festival with Mrs. Garth, for her
+eldest son, Christy, her peculiar joy and pride, had come home for a
+short holiday--Christy, who held it the most desirable thing in the
+world to be a tutor, to study all literatures and be a regenerate
+Porson, and who was an incorporate criticism on poor Fred, a sort of
+object-lesson given to him by the educational mother.  Christy himself,
+a square-browed, broad-shouldered masculine edition of his mother not
+much higher than Fred's shoulder--which made it the harder that he
+should be held superior--was always as simple as possible, and thought
+no more of Fred's disinclination to scholarship than of a giraffe's,
+wishing that he himself were more of the same height.  He was lying on
+the ground now by his mother's chair, with his straw hat laid flat over
+his eyes, while Jim on the other side was reading aloud from that
+beloved writer who has made a chief part in the happiness of many young
+lives.  The volume was "Ivanhoe," and Jim was in the great archery
+scene at the tournament, but suffered much interruption from Ben, who
+had fetched his own old bow and arrows, and was making himself
+dreadfully disagreeable, Letty thought, by begging all present to
+observe his random shots, which no one wished to do except Brownie, the
+active-minded but probably shallow mongrel, while the grizzled
+Newfoundland lying in the sun looked on with the dull-eyed neutrality
+of extreme old age.  Letty herself, showing as to her mouth and
+pinafore some slight signs that she had been assisting at the gathering
+of the cherries which stood in a coral-heap on the tea-table, was now
+seated on the grass, listening open-eyed to the reading.
+
+But the centre of interest was changed for all by the arrival of Fred
+Vincy.  When, seating himself on a garden-stool, he said that he was on
+his way to Lowick Parsonage, Ben, who had thrown down his bow, and
+snatched up a reluctant half-grown kitten instead, strode across Fred's
+outstretched leg, and said "Take me!"
+
+"Oh, and me too," said Letty.
+
+"You can't keep up with Fred and me," said Ben.
+
+"Yes, I can.  Mother, please say that I am to go," urged Letty, whose
+life was much checkered by resistance to her depreciation as a girl.
+
+"I shall stay with Christy," observed Jim; as much as to say that he
+had the advantage of those simpletons; whereupon Letty put her hand up
+to her head and looked with jealous indecision from the one to the
+other.
+
+"Let us all go and see Mary," said Christy, opening his arms.
+
+"No, my dear child, we must not go in a swarm to the parsonage.  And
+that old Glasgow suit of yours would never do.  Besides, your father
+will come home.  We must let Fred go alone.  He can tell Mary that you
+are here, and she will come back to-morrow."
+
+Christy glanced at his own threadbare knees, and then at Fred's
+beautiful white trousers.  Certainly Fred's tailoring suggested the
+advantages of an English university, and he had a graceful way even of
+looking warm and of pushing his hair back with his handkerchief.
+
+"Children, run away," said Mrs. Garth; "it is too warm to hang about
+your friends.  Take your brother and show him the rabbits."
+
+The eldest understood, and led off the children immediately.  Fred felt
+that Mrs. Garth wished to give him an opportunity of saying anything he
+had to say, but he could only begin by observing--
+
+"How glad you must be to have Christy here!"
+
+"Yes; he has come sooner than I expected.  He got down from the coach
+at nine o'clock, just after his father went out.  I am longing for
+Caleb to come and hear what wonderful progress Christy is making.  He
+has paid his expenses for the last year by giving lessons, carrying on
+hard study at the same time.  He hopes soon to get a private tutorship
+and go abroad."
+
+"He is a great fellow," said Fred, to whom these cheerful truths had a
+medicinal taste, "and no trouble to anybody." After a slight pause, he
+added, "But I fear you will think that I am going to be a great deal of
+trouble to Mr. Garth."
+
+"Caleb likes taking trouble: he is one of those men who always do more
+than any one would have thought of asking them to do," answered Mrs.
+Garth.  She was knitting, and could either look at Fred or not, as she
+chose--always an advantage when one is bent on loading speech with
+salutary meaning; and though Mrs. Garth intended to be duly reserved,
+she did wish to say something that Fred might be the better for.
+
+"I know you think me very undeserving, Mrs. Garth, and with good
+reason," said Fred, his spirit rising a little at the perception of
+something like a disposition to lecture him.  "I happen to have behaved
+just the worst to the people I can't help wishing for the most from.
+But while two men like Mr. Garth and Mr. Farebrother have not given me
+up, I don't see why I should give myself up."  Fred thought it might be
+well to suggest these masculine examples to Mrs. Garth.
+
+"Assuredly," said she, with gathering emphasis.  "A young man for whom
+two such elders had devoted themselves would indeed be culpable if he
+threw himself away and made their sacrifices vain."
+
+Fred wondered a little at this strong language, but only said, "I hope
+it will not be so with me, Mrs. Garth, since I have some encouragement
+to believe that I may win Mary.  Mr. Garth has told you about that?
+You were not surprised, I dare say?"  Fred ended, innocently referring
+only to his own love as probably evident enough.
+
+"Not surprised that Mary has given you encouragement?" returned Mrs.
+Garth, who thought it would be well for Fred to be more alive to the
+fact that Mary's friends could not possibly have wished this
+beforehand, whatever the Vincys might suppose.  "Yes, I confess I was
+surprised."
+
+"She never did give me any--not the least in the world, when I talked
+to her myself," said Fred, eager to vindicate Mary.  "But when I asked
+Mr. Farebrother to speak for me, she allowed him to tell me there was a
+hope."
+
+The power of admonition which had begun to stir in Mrs. Garth had not
+yet discharged itself.  It was a little too provoking even for _her_
+self-control that this blooming youngster should flourish on the
+disappointments of sadder and wiser people--making a meal of a
+nightingale and never knowing it--and that all the while his family
+should suppose that hers was in eager need of this sprig; and her
+vexation had fermented the more actively because of its total
+repression towards her husband.  Exemplary wives will sometimes find
+scapegoats in this way.  She now said with energetic decision, "You
+made a great mistake, Fred, in asking Mr. Farebrother to speak for you."
+
+"Did I?" said Fred, reddening instantaneously.  He was alarmed, but at
+a loss to know what Mrs. Garth meant, and added, in an apologetic tone,
+"Mr. Farebrother has always been such a friend of ours; and Mary, I
+knew, would listen to him gravely; and he took it on himself quite
+readily."
+
+"Yes, young people are usually blind to everything but their own
+wishes, and seldom imagine how much those wishes cost others," said
+Mrs. Garth. She did not mean to go beyond this salutary general
+doctrine, and threw her indignation into a needless unwinding of her
+worsted, knitting her brow at it with a grand air.
+
+"I cannot conceive how it could be any pain to Mr. Farebrother," said
+Fred, who nevertheless felt that surprising conceptions were beginning
+to form themselves.
+
+"Precisely; you cannot conceive," said Mrs. Garth, cutting her words as
+neatly as possible.
+
+For a moment Fred looked at the horizon with a dismayed anxiety, and
+then turning with a quick movement said almost sharply--
+
+"Do you mean to say, Mrs. Garth, that Mr. Farebrother is in love with
+Mary?"
+
+"And if it were so, Fred, I think you are the last person who ought to
+be surprised," returned Mrs. Garth, laying her knitting down beside her
+and folding her arms.  It was an unwonted sign of emotion in her that
+she should put her work out of her hands.  In fact her feelings were
+divided between the satisfaction of giving Fred his discipline and the
+sense of having gone a little too far.  Fred took his hat and stick and
+rose quickly.
+
+"Then you think I am standing in his way, and in Mary's too?" he said,
+in a tone which seemed to demand an answer.
+
+Mrs. Garth could not speak immediately.  She had brought herself into
+the unpleasant position of being called on to say what she really felt,
+yet what she knew there were strong reasons for concealing.  And to her
+the consciousness of having exceeded in words was peculiarly
+mortifying.  Besides, Fred had given out unexpected electricity, and he
+now added, "Mr. Garth seemed pleased that Mary should be attached to
+me.  He could not have known anything of this."
+
+Mrs. Garth felt a severe twinge at this mention of her husband, the
+fear that Caleb might think her in the wrong not being easily
+endurable.  She answered, wanting to check unintended consequences--
+
+"I spoke from inference only.  I am not aware that Mary knows anything
+of the matter."
+
+But she hesitated to beg that he would keep entire silence on a subject
+which she had herself unnecessarily mentioned, not being used to stoop
+in that way; and while she was hesitating there was already a rush of
+unintended consequences under the apple-tree where the tea-things
+stood.  Ben, bouncing across the grass with Brownie at his heels, and
+seeing the kitten dragging the knitting by a lengthening line of wool,
+shouted and clapped his hands; Brownie barked, the kitten, desperate,
+jumped on the tea-table and upset the milk, then jumped down again and
+swept half the cherries with it; and Ben, snatching up the half-knitted
+sock-top, fitted it over the kitten's head as a new source of madness,
+while Letty arriving cried out to her mother against this cruelty--it
+was a history as full of sensation as "This is the house that Jack
+built." Mrs. Garth was obliged to interfere, the other young ones came
+up and the tete-a-tete with Fred was ended.  He got away as soon as he
+could, and Mrs. Garth could only imply some retractation of her
+severity by saying "God bless you" when she shook hands with him.
+
+She was unpleasantly conscious that she had been on the verge of
+speaking as "one of the foolish women speaketh"--telling first and
+entreating silence after.  But she had not entreated silence, and to
+prevent Caleb's blame she determined to blame herself and confess all
+to him that very night.  It was curious what an awful tribunal the mild
+Caleb's was to her, whenever he set it up.  But she meant to point out
+to him that the revelation might do Fred Vincy a great deal of good.
+
+No doubt it was having a strong effect on him as he walked to Lowick.
+Fred's light hopeful nature had perhaps never had so much of a bruise
+as from this suggestion that if he had been out of the way Mary might
+have made a thoroughly good match.  Also he was piqued that he had been
+what he called such a stupid lout as to ask that intervention from Mr.
+Farebrother.  But it was not in a lover's nature--it was not in
+Fred's, that the new anxiety raised about Mary's feeling should not
+surmount every other.  Notwithstanding his trust in Mr. Farebrother's
+generosity, notwithstanding what Mary had said to him, Fred could not
+help feeling that he had a rival: it was a new consciousness, and he
+objected to it extremely, not being in the least ready to give up Mary
+for her good, being ready rather to fight for her with any man
+whatsoever.  But the fighting with Mr. Farebrother must be of a
+metaphorical kind, which was much more difficult to Fred than the
+muscular.  Certainly this experience was a discipline for Fred hardly
+less sharp than his disappointment about his uncle's will.  The iron
+had not entered into his soul, but he had begun to imagine what the
+sharp edge would be.  It did not once occur to Fred that Mrs. Garth
+might be mistaken about Mr. Farebrother, but he suspected that she
+might be wrong about Mary.  Mary had been staying at the parsonage
+lately, and her mother might know very little of what had been passing
+in her mind.
+
+He did not feel easier when he found her looking cheerful with the
+three ladies in the drawing-room. They were in animated discussion on
+some subject which was dropped when he entered, and Mary was copying
+the labels from a heap of shallow cabinet drawers, in a minute
+handwriting which she was skilled in.  Mr. Farebrother was somewhere in
+the village, and the three ladies knew nothing of Fred's peculiar
+relation to Mary: it was impossible for either of them to propose that
+they should walk round the garden, and Fred predicted to himself that
+he should have to go away without saying a word to her in private.  He
+told her first of Christy's arrival and then of his own engagement with
+her father; and he was comforted by seeing that this latter news
+touched her keenly.  She said hurriedly, "I am so glad," and then bent
+over her writing to hinder any one from noticing her face.  But here
+was a subject which Mrs. Farebrother could not let pass.
+
+"You don't mean, my dear Miss Garth, that you are glad to hear of a
+young man giving up the Church for which he was educated: you only mean
+that things being so, you are glad that he should be under an excellent
+man like your father."
+
+"No, really, Mrs. Farebrother, I am glad of both, I fear," said Mary,
+cleverly getting rid of one rebellious tear.  "I have a dreadfully
+secular mind.  I never liked any clergyman except the Vicar of
+Wakefield and Mr. Farebrother."
+
+"Now why, my dear?" said Mrs. Farebrother, pausing on her large wooden
+knitting-needles and looking at Mary.  "You have always a good reason
+for your opinions, but this astonishes me.  Of course I put out of the
+question those who preach new doctrine.  But why should you dislike
+clergymen?"
+
+"Oh dear," said Mary, her face breaking into merriment as she seemed to
+consider a moment, "I don't like their neckcloths."
+
+"Why, you don't like Camden's, then," said Miss Winifred, in some
+anxiety.
+
+"Yes, I do," said Mary.  "I don't like the other clergymen's
+neckcloths, because it is they who wear them."
+
+"How very puzzling!" said Miss Noble, feeling that her own intellect
+was probably deficient.
+
+"My dear, you are joking.  You would have better reasons than these for
+slighting so respectable a class of men," said Mrs. Farebrother,
+majestically.
+
+"Miss Garth has such severe notions of what people should be that it is
+difficult to satisfy her," said Fred.
+
+"Well, I am glad at least that she makes an exception in favor of my
+son," said the old lady.
+
+Mary was wondering at Fred's piqued tone, when Mr. Farebrother came in
+and had to hear the news about the engagement under Mr. Garth.  At the
+end he said with quiet satisfaction, "_That_ is right;" and then bent
+to look at Mary's labels and praise her handwriting.  Fred felt
+horribly jealous--was glad, of course, that Mr. Farebrother was so
+estimable, but wished that he had been ugly and fat as men at forty
+sometimes are.  It was clear what the end would be, since Mary openly
+placed Farebrother above everybody, and these women were all evidently
+encouraging the affair.  He was feeling sure that he should have no
+chance of speaking to Mary, when Mr. Farebrother said--
+
+"Fred, help me to carry these drawers back into my study--you have
+never seen my fine new study.  Pray come too, Miss Garth.  I want you
+to see a stupendous spider I found this morning."
+
+Mary at once saw the Vicar's intention.  He had never since the
+memorable evening deviated from his old pastoral kindness towards her,
+and her momentary wonder and doubt had quite gone to sleep.  Mary was
+accustomed to think rather rigorously of what was probable, and if a
+belief flattered her vanity she felt warned to dismiss it as
+ridiculous, having early had much exercise in such dismissals.  It was
+as she had foreseen: when Fred had been asked to admire the fittings of
+the study, and she had been asked to admire the spider, Mr. Farebrother
+said--
+
+"Wait here a minute or two.  I am going to look out an engraving which
+Fred is tall enough to hang for me.  I shall be back in a few minutes."
+And then he went out.  Nevertheless, the first word Fred said to Mary
+was--
+
+"It is of no use, whatever I do, Mary.  You are sure to marry
+Farebrother at last."  There was some rage in his tone.
+
+"What do you mean, Fred?"  Mary exclaimed indignantly, blushing deeply,
+and surprised out of all her readiness in reply.
+
+"It is impossible that you should not see it all clearly enough--you
+who see everything."
+
+"I only see that you are behaving very ill, Fred, in speaking so of Mr.
+Farebrother after he has pleaded your cause in every way.  How can you
+have taken up such an idea?"
+
+Fred was rather deep, in spite of his irritation.  If Mary had really
+been unsuspicious, there was no good in telling her what Mrs. Garth had
+said.
+
+"It follows as a matter of course," he replied.  "When you are
+continually seeing a man who beats me in everything, and whom you set
+up above everybody, I can have no fair chance."
+
+"You are very ungrateful, Fred," said Mary.  "I wish I had never told
+Mr. Farebrother that I cared for you in the least."
+
+"No, I am not ungrateful; I should be the happiest fellow in the world
+if it were not for this.  I told your father everything, and he was
+very kind; he treated me as if I were his son.  I could go at the work
+with a will, writing and everything, if it were not for this."
+
+"For this? for what?" said Mary, imagining now that something specific
+must have been said or done.
+
+"This dreadful certainty that I shall be bowled out by Farebrother."
+Mary was appeased by her inclination to laugh.
+
+"Fred," she said, peeping round to catch his eyes, which were sulkily
+turned away from her, "you are too delightfully ridiculous.  If you
+were not such a charming simpleton, what a temptation this would be to
+play the wicked coquette, and let you suppose that somebody besides you
+has made love to me."
+
+"Do you really like me best, Mary?" said Fred, turning eyes full of
+affection on her, and trying to take her hand.
+
+"I don't like you at all at this moment," said Mary, retreating, and
+putting her hands behind her.  "I only said that no mortal ever made
+love to me besides you.  And that is no argument that a very wise man
+ever will," she ended, merrily.
+
+"I wish you would tell me that you could not possibly ever think of
+him," said Fred.
+
+"Never dare to mention this any more to me, Fred," said Mary, getting
+serious again.  "I don't know whether it is more stupid or ungenerous
+in you not to see that Mr. Farebrother has left us together on purpose
+that we might speak freely.  I am disappointed that you should be so
+blind to his delicate feeling."
+
+There was no time to say any more before Mr. Farebrother came back with
+the engraving; and Fred had to return to the drawing-room still with a
+jealous dread in his heart, but yet with comforting arguments from
+Mary's words and manner.  The result of the conversation was on the
+whole more painful to Mary: inevitably her attention had taken a new
+attitude, and she saw the possibility of new interpretations.  She was
+in a position in which she seemed to herself to be slighting Mr.
+Farebrother, and this, in relation to a man who is much honored, is
+always dangerous to the firmness of a grateful woman.  To have a reason
+for going home the next day was a relief, for Mary earnestly desired to
+be always clear that she loved Fred best.  When a tender affection has
+been storing itself in us through many of our years, the idea that we
+could accept any exchange for it seems to be a cheapening of our lives.
+And we can set a watch over our affections and our constancy as we can
+over other treasures.
+
+"Fred has lost all his other expectations; he must keep this," Mary
+said to herself, with a smile curling her lips.  It was impossible to
+help fleeting visions of another kind--new dignities and an
+acknowledged value of which she had often felt the absence.  But these
+things with Fred outside them, Fred forsaken and looking sad for the
+want of her, could never tempt her deliberate thought.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LVIII.
+
+    "For there can live no hatred in thine eye,
+     Therefore in that I cannot know thy change:
+     In many's looks the false heart's history
+     Is writ in moods and frowns and wrinkles strange:
+     But Heaven in thy creation did decree
+     That in thy face sweet love should ever dwell:
+     Whate'er thy thoughts or thy heart's workings be
+     Thy looks should nothing thence but sweetness tell."
+                                       --SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.
+
+
+At the time when Mr. Vincy uttered that presentiment about Rosamond,
+she herself had never had the idea that she should be driven to make
+the sort of appeal which he foresaw.  She had not yet had any anxiety
+about ways and means, although her domestic life had been expensive as
+well as eventful.  Her baby had been born prematurely, and all the
+embroidered robes and caps had to be laid by in darkness.  This
+misfortune was attributed entirely to her having persisted in going out
+on horseback one day when her husband had desired her not to do so; but
+it must not be supposed that she had shown temper on the occasion, or
+rudely told him that she would do as she liked.
+
+What led her particularly to desire horse-exercise was a visit from
+Captain Lydgate, the baronet's third son, who, I am sorry to say, was
+detested by our Tertius of that name as a vapid fop "parting his hair
+from brow to nape in a despicable fashion" (not followed by Tertius
+himself), and showing an ignorant security that he knew the proper
+thing to say on every topic.  Lydgate inwardly cursed his own folly
+that he had drawn down this visit by consenting to go to his uncle's on
+the wedding-tour, and he made himself rather disagreeable to Rosamond
+by saying so in private.  For to Rosamond this visit was a source of
+unprecedented but gracefully concealed exultation.  She was so
+intensely conscious of having a cousin who was a baronet's son staying
+in the house, that she imagined the knowledge of what was implied by
+his presence to be diffused through all other minds; and when she
+introduced Captain Lydgate to her guests, she had a placid sense that
+his rank penetrated them as if it had been an odor.  The satisfaction
+was enough for the time to melt away some disappointment in the
+conditions of marriage with a medical man even of good birth: it seemed
+now that her marriage was visibly as well as ideally floating her above
+the Middlemarch level, and the future looked bright with letters and
+visits to and from Quallingham, and vague advancement in consequence
+for Tertius.  Especially as, probably at the Captain's suggestion, his
+married sister, Mrs. Mengan, had come with her maid, and stayed two
+nights on her way from town.  Hence it was clearly worth while for
+Rosamond to take pains with her music and the careful selection of her
+lace.
+
+As to Captain Lydgate himself, his low brow, his aquiline nose bent on
+one side, and his rather heavy utterance, might have been
+disadvantageous in any young gentleman who had not a military bearing
+and mustache to give him what is doted on by some flower-like blond
+heads as "style."  He had, moreover, that sort of high-breeding which
+consists in being free from the petty solicitudes of middle-class
+gentility, and he was a great critic of feminine charms.  Rosamond
+delighted in his admiration now even more than she had done at
+Quallingham, and he found it easy to spend several hours of the day in
+flirting with her.  The visit altogether was one of the pleasantest
+larks he had ever had, not the less so perhaps because he suspected
+that his queer cousin Tertius wished him away: though Lydgate, who
+would rather (hyperbolically speaking) have died than have failed in
+polite hospitality, suppressed his dislike, and only pretended
+generally not to hear what the gallant officer said, consigning the
+task of answering him to Rosamond.  For he was not at all a jealous
+husband, and preferred leaving a feather-headed young gentleman alone
+with his wife to bearing him company.
+
+"I wish you would talk more to the Captain at dinner, Tertius," said
+Rosamond, one evening when the important guest was gone to Loamford to
+see some brother officers stationed there.  "You really look so absent
+sometimes--you seem to be seeing through his head into something behind
+it, instead of looking at him."
+
+"My dear Rosy, you don't expect me to talk much to such a conceited ass
+as that, I hope," said Lydgate, brusquely.  "If he got his head broken,
+I might look at it with interest, not before."
+
+"I cannot conceive why you should speak of your cousin so
+contemptuously," said Rosamond, her fingers moving at her work while
+she spoke with a mild gravity which had a touch of disdain in it.
+
+"Ask Ladislaw if he doesn't think your Captain the greatest bore he
+ever met with.  Ladislaw has almost forsaken the house since he came."
+
+Rosamond thought she knew perfectly well why Mr. Ladislaw disliked the
+Captain: he was jealous, and she liked his being jealous.
+
+"It is impossible to say what will suit eccentric persons," she
+answered, "but in my opinion Captain Lydgate is a thorough gentleman,
+and I think you ought not, out of respect to Sir Godwin, to treat him
+with neglect."
+
+"No, dear; but we have had dinners for him.  And he comes in and goes
+out as he likes.  He doesn't want me."
+
+"Still, when he is in the room, you might show him more attention.  He
+may not be a phoenix of cleverness in your sense; his profession is
+different; but it would be all the better for you to talk a little on
+his subjects.  _I_ think his conversation is quite agreeable.  And he
+is anything but an unprincipled man."
+
+"The fact is, you would wish me to be a little more like him, Rosy,"
+said Lydgate, in a sort of resigned murmur, with a smile which was not
+exactly tender, and certainly not merry.  Rosamond was silent and did
+not smile again; but the lovely curves of her face looked good-tempered
+enough without smiling.
+
+Those words of Lydgate's were like a sad milestone marking how far he
+had travelled from his old dreamland, in which Rosamond Vincy appeared
+to be that perfect piece of womanhood who would reverence her husband's
+mind after the fashion of an accomplished mermaid, using her comb and
+looking-glass and singing her song for the relaxation of his adored
+wisdom alone.  He had begun to distinguish between that imagined
+adoration and the attraction towards a man's talent because it gives
+him prestige, and is like an order in his button-hole or an Honorable
+before his name.
+
+It might have been supposed that Rosamond had travelled too, since she
+had found the pointless conversation of Mr. Ned Plymdale perfectly
+wearisome; but to most mortals there is a stupidity which is
+unendurable and a stupidity which is altogether acceptable--else,
+indeed, what would become of social bonds?  Captain Lydgate's stupidity
+was delicately scented, carried itself with "style," talked with a good
+accent, and was closely related to Sir Godwin.  Rosamond found it quite
+agreeable and caught many of its phrases.
+
+Therefore since Rosamond, as we know, was fond of horseback, there were
+plenty of reasons why she should be tempted to resume her riding when
+Captain Lydgate, who had ordered his man with two horses to follow him
+and put up at the "Green Dragon," begged her to go out on the gray
+which he warranted to be gentle and trained to carry a lady--indeed, he
+had bought it for his sister, and was taking it to Quallingham.
+Rosamond went out the first time without telling her husband, and came
+back before his return; but the ride had been so thorough a success,
+and she declared herself so much the better in consequence, that he was
+informed of it with full reliance on his consent that she should go
+riding again.
+
+On the contrary Lydgate was more than hurt--he was utterly confounded
+that she had risked herself on a strange horse without referring the
+matter to his wish.  After the first almost thundering exclamations of
+astonishment, which sufficiently warned Rosamond of what was coming, he
+was silent for some moments.
+
+"However, you have come back safely," he said, at last, in a decisive
+tone.  "You will not go again, Rosy; that is understood.  If it were
+the quietest, most familiar horse in the world, there would always be
+the chance of accident.  And you know very well that I wished you to
+give up riding the roan on that account."
+
+"But there is the chance of accident indoors, Tertius."
+
+"My darling, don't talk nonsense," said Lydgate, in an imploring tone;
+"surely I am the person to judge for you.  I think it is enough that I
+say you are not to go again."
+
+Rosamond was arranging her hair before dinner, and the reflection of
+her head in the glass showed no change in its loveliness except a
+little turning aside of the long neck.  Lydgate had been moving about
+with his hands in his pockets, and now paused near her, as if he
+awaited some assurance.
+
+"I wish you would fasten up my plaits, dear," said Rosamond, letting
+her arms fall with a little sigh, so as to make a husband ashamed of
+standing there like a brute.  Lydgate had often fastened the plaits
+before, being among the deftest of men with his large finely formed
+fingers.  He swept up the soft festoons of plaits and fastened in the
+tall comb (to such uses do men come!); and what could he do then but
+kiss the exquisite nape which was shown in all its delicate curves?
+But when we do what we have done before, it is often with a difference.
+Lydgate was still angry, and had not forgotten his point.
+
+"I shall tell the Captain that he ought to have known better than offer
+you his horse," he said, as he moved away.
+
+"I beg you will not do anything of the kind, Tertius," said Rosamond,
+looking at him with something more marked than usual in her speech.
+"It will be treating me as if I were a child.  Promise that you will
+leave the subject to me."
+
+There did seem to be some truth in her objection.  Lydgate said, "Very
+well," with a surly obedience, and thus the discussion ended with his
+promising Rosamond, and not with her promising him.
+
+In fact, she had been determined not to promise.  Rosamond had that
+victorious obstinacy which never wastes its energy in impetuous
+resistance.  What she liked to do was to her the right thing, and all
+her cleverness was directed to getting the means of doing it.  She
+meant to go out riding again on the gray, and she did go on the next
+opportunity of her husband's absence, not intending that he should know
+until it was late enough not to signify to her.  The temptation was
+certainly great: she was very fond of the exercise, and the
+gratification of riding on a fine horse, with Captain Lydgate, Sir
+Godwin's son, on another fine horse by her side, and of being met in
+this position by any one but her husband, was something as good as her
+dreams before marriage: moreover she was riveting the connection with
+the family at Quallingham, which must be a wise thing to do.
+
+But the gentle gray, unprepared for the crash of a tree that was being
+felled on the edge of Halsell wood, took fright, and caused a worse
+fright to Rosamond, leading finally to the loss of her baby.  Lydgate
+could not show his anger towards her, but he was rather bearish to the
+Captain, whose visit naturally soon came to an end.
+
+In all future conversations on the subject, Rosamond was mildly certain
+that the ride had made no difference, and that if she had stayed at
+home the same symptoms would have come on and would have ended in the
+same way, because she had felt something like them before.
+
+Lydgate could only say, "Poor, poor darling!"--but he secretly wondered
+over the terrible tenacity of this mild creature.  There was gathering
+within him an amazed sense of his powerlessness over Rosamond.  His
+superior knowledge and mental force, instead of being, as he had
+imagined, a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set aside on
+every practical question.  He had regarded Rosamond's cleverness as
+precisely of the receptive kind which became a woman.  He was now
+beginning to find out what that cleverness was--what was the shape into
+which it had run as into a close network aloof and independent.  No one
+quicker than Rosamond to see causes and effects which lay within the
+track of her own tastes and interests: she had seen clearly Lydgate's
+preeminence in Middlemarch society, and could go on imaginatively
+tracing still more agreeable social effects when his talent should have
+advanced him; but for her, his professional and scientific ambition had
+no other relation to these desirable effects than if they had been the
+fortunate discovery of an ill-smelling oil.  And that oil apart, with
+which she had nothing to do, of course she believed in her own opinion
+more than she did in his.  Lydgate was astounded to find in numberless
+trifling matters, as well as in this last serious case of the riding,
+that affection did not make her compliant.  He had no doubt that the
+affection was there, and had no presentiment that he had done anything
+to repel it.  For his own part he said to himself that he loved her as
+tenderly as ever, and could make up his mind to her negations;
+but--well!  Lydgate was much worried, and conscious of new elements in
+his life as noxious to him as an inlet of mud to a creature that has
+been used to breathe and bathe and dart after its illuminated prey in
+the clearest of waters.
+
+Rosamond was soon looking lovelier than ever at her worktable, enjoying
+drives in her father's phaeton and thinking it likely that she might be
+invited to Quallingham.  She knew that she was a much more exquisite
+ornament to the drawing-room there than any daughter of the family, and
+in reflecting that the gentlemen were aware of that, did not perhaps
+sufficiently consider whether the ladies would be eager to see
+themselves surpassed.
+
+Lydgate, relieved from anxiety about her, relapsed into what she
+inwardly called his moodiness--a name which to her covered his
+thoughtful preoccupation with other subjects than herself, as well as
+that uneasy look of the brow and distaste for all ordinary things as if
+they were mixed with bitter herbs, which really made a sort of
+weather-glass to his vexation and foreboding.  These latter states of
+mind had one cause amongst others, which he had generously but
+mistakenly avoided mentioning to Rosamond, lest it should affect her
+health and spirits.  Between him and her indeed there was that total
+missing of each other's mental track, which is too evidently possible
+even between persons who are continually thinking of each other.  To
+Lydgate it seemed that he had been spending month after month in
+sacrificing more than half of his best intent and best power to his
+tenderness for Rosamond; bearing her little claims and interruptions
+without impatience, and, above all, bearing without betrayal of
+bitterness to look through less and less of interfering illusion at the
+blank unreflecting surface her mind presented to his ardor for the more
+impersonal ends of his profession and his scientific study, an ardor
+which he had fancied that the ideal wife must somehow worship as
+sublime, though not in the least knowing why.  But his endurance was
+mingled with a self-discontent which, if we know how to be candid, we
+shall confess to make more than half our bitterness under grievances,
+wife or husband included.  It always remains true that if we had been
+greater, circumstance would have been less strong against us.  Lydgate
+was aware that his concessions to Rosamond were often little more than
+the lapse of slackening resolution, the creeping paralysis apt to seize
+an enthusiasm which is out of adjustment to a constant portion of our
+lives.  And on Lydgate's enthusiasm there was constantly pressing not a
+simple weight of sorrow, but the biting presence of a petty degrading
+care, such as casts the blight of irony over all higher effort.
+
+This was the care which he had hitherto abstained from mentioning to
+Rosamond; and he believed, with some wonder, that it had never entered
+her mind, though certainly no difficulty could be less mysterious.  It
+was an inference with a conspicuous handle to it, and had been easily
+drawn by indifferent observers, that Lydgate was in debt; and he could
+not succeed in keeping out of his mind for long together that he was
+every day getting deeper into that swamp, which tempts men towards it
+with such a pretty covering of flowers and verdure.  It is wonderful
+how soon a man gets up to his chin there--in a condition in which,
+in spite of himself, he is forced to think chiefly of release, though he
+had a scheme of the universe in his soul.
+
+Eighteen months ago Lydgate was poor, but had never known the eager
+want of small sums, and felt rather a burning contempt for any one who
+descended a step in order to gain them.  He was now experiencing
+something worse than a simple deficit: he was assailed by the vulgar
+hateful trials of a man who has bought and used a great many things
+which might have been done without, and which he is unable to pay for,
+though the demand for payment has become pressing.
+
+How this came about may be easily seen without much arithmetic or
+knowledge of prices.  When a man in setting up a house and preparing
+for marriage finds that his furniture and other initial expenses come
+to between four and five hundred pounds more than he has capital to pay
+for; when at the end of a year it appears that his household expenses,
+horses and et caeteras, amount to nearly a thousand, while the proceeds
+of the practice reckoned from the old books to be worth eight hundred
+per annum have sunk like a summer pond and make hardly five hundred,
+chiefly in unpaid entries, the plain inference is that, whether he
+minds it or not, he is in debt.  Those were less expensive times than
+our own, and provincial life was comparatively modest; but the ease
+with which a medical man who had lately bought a practice, who thought
+that he was obliged to keep two horses, whose table was supplied
+without stint, and who paid an insurance on his life and a high rent
+for house and garden, might find his expenses doubling his receipts,
+can be conceived by any one who does not think these details beneath
+his consideration.  Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant
+household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering
+the best of everything--nothing else "answered;" and Lydgate supposed
+that "if things were done at all, they must be done properly"--he did
+not see how they were to live otherwise.  If each head of household
+expenditure had been mentioned to him beforehand, he would have
+probably observed that "it could hardly come to much," and if any one
+had suggested a saving on a particular article--for example, the
+substitution of cheap fish for dear--it would have appeared to him
+simply a penny-wise, mean notion.  Rosamond, even without such an
+occasion as Captain Lydgate's visit, was fond of giving invitations,
+and Lydgate, though he often thought the guests tiresome, did not
+interfere.  This sociability seemed a necessary part of professional
+prudence, and the entertainment must be suitable.  It is true Lydgate
+was constantly visiting the homes of the poor and adjusting his
+prescriptions of diet to their small means; but, dear me! has it not by
+this time ceased to be remarkable--is it not rather that we expect in
+men, that they should have numerous strands of experience lying side by
+side and never compare them with each other?  Expenditure--like
+ugliness and errors--becomes a totally new thing when we attach our own
+personality to it, and measure it by that wide difference which is
+manifest (in our own sensations) between ourselves and others.  Lydgate
+believed himself to be careless about his dress, and he despised a man
+who calculated the effects of his costume; it seemed to him only a
+matter of course that he had abundance of fresh garments--such things
+were naturally ordered in sheaves.  It must be remembered that he had
+never hitherto felt the check of importunate debt, and he walked by
+habit, not by self-criticism.  But the check had come.
+
+Its novelty made it the more irritating.  He was amazed, disgusted that
+conditions so foreign to all his purposes, so hatefully disconnected
+with the objects he cared to occupy himself with, should have lain in
+ambush and clutched him when he was unaware.  And there was not only
+the actual debt; there was the certainty that in his present position
+he must go on deepening it.  Two furnishing tradesmen at Brassing,
+whose bills had been incurred before his marriage, and whom
+uncalculated current expenses had ever since prevented him from paying,
+had repeatedly sent him unpleasant letters which had forced themselves
+on his attention.  This could hardly have been more galling to any
+disposition than to Lydgate's, with his intense pride--his dislike of
+asking a favor or being under an obligation to any one.  He had scorned
+even to form conjectures about Mr. Vincy's intentions on money matters,
+and nothing but extremity could have induced him to apply to his
+father-in-law, even if he had not been made aware in various indirect
+ways since his marriage that Mr. Vincy's own affairs were not
+flourishing, and that the expectation of help from him would be
+resented.  Some men easily trust in the readiness of friends; it had
+never in the former part of his life occurred to Lydgate that he should
+need to do so: he had never thought what borrowing would be to him; but
+now that the idea had entered his mind, he felt that he would rather
+incur any other hardship.  In the mean time he had no money or
+prospects of money; and his practice was not getting more lucrative.
+
+No wonder that Lydgate had been unable to suppress all signs of inward
+trouble during the last few months, and now that Rosamond was regaining
+brilliant health, he meditated taking her entirely into confidence on
+his difficulties.  New conversance with tradesmen's bills had forced
+his reasoning into a new channel of comparison: he had begun to
+consider from a new point of view what was necessary and unnecessary in
+goods ordered, and to see that there must be some change of habits.
+How could such a change be made without Rosamond's concurrence?  The
+immediate occasion of opening the disagreeable fact to her was forced
+upon him.
+
+Having no money, and having privately sought advice as to what security
+could possibly be given by a man in his position, Lydgate had offered
+the one good security in his power to the less peremptory creditor, who
+was a silversmith and jeweller, and who consented to take on himself
+the upholsterer's credit also, accepting interest for a given term.
+The security necessary was a bill of sale on the furniture of his
+house, which might make a creditor easy for a reasonable time about a
+debt amounting to less than four hundred pounds; and the silversmith,
+Mr. Dover, was willing to reduce it by taking back a portion of the
+plate and any other article which was as good as new.  "Any other
+article" was a phrase delicately implying jewellery, and more
+particularly some purple amethysts costing thirty pounds, which Lydgate
+had bought as a bridal present.
+
+Opinions may be divided as to his wisdom in making this present: some
+may think that it was a graceful attention to be expected from a man
+like Lydgate, and that the fault of any troublesome consequences lay in
+the pinched narrowness of provincial life at that time, which offered
+no conveniences for professional people whose fortune was not
+proportioned to their tastes; also, in Lydgate's ridiculous
+fastidiousness about asking his friends for money.
+
+However, it had seemed a question of no moment to him on that fine
+morning when he went to give a final order for plate: in the presence
+of other jewels enormously expensive, and as an addition to orders of
+which the amount had not been exactly calculated, thirty pounds for
+ornaments so exquisitely suited to Rosamond's neck and arms could
+hardly appear excessive when there was no ready cash for it to exceed.
+But at this crisis Lydgate's imagination could not help dwelling on the
+possibility of letting the amethysts take their place again among Mr.
+Dover's stock, though he shrank from the idea of proposing this to
+Rosamond.  Having been roused to discern consequences which he had
+never been in the habit of tracing, he was preparing to act on this
+discernment with some of the rigor (by no means all) that he would have
+applied in pursuing experiment.  He was nerving himself to this rigor
+as he rode from Brassing, and meditated on the representations he must
+make to Rosamond.
+
+It was evening when he got home.  He was intensely miserable, this
+strong man of nine-and-twenty and of many gifts.  He was not saying
+angrily within himself that he had made a profound mistake; but the
+mistake was at work in him like a recognized chronic disease, mingling
+its uneasy importunities with every prospect, and enfeebling every
+thought.  As he went along the passage to the drawing-room, he heard
+the piano and singing.  Of course, Ladislaw was there.  It was some
+weeks since Will had parted from Dorothea, yet he was still at the old
+post in Middlemarch.  Lydgate had no objection in general to Ladislaw's
+coming, but just now he was annoyed that he could not find his hearth
+free.  When he opened the door the two singers went on towards the
+key-note, raising their eyes and looking at him indeed, but not
+regarding his entrance as an interruption.  To a man galled with his
+harness as poor Lydgate was, it is not soothing to see two people
+warbling at him, as he comes in with the sense that the painful day has
+still pains in store.  His face, already paler than usual, took on a
+scowl as he walked across the room and flung himself into a chair.
+
+The singers feeling themselves excused by the fact that they had only
+three bars to sing, now turned round.
+
+"How are you, Lydgate?" said Will, coming forward to shake hands.
+
+Lydgate took his hand, but did not think it necessary to speak.
+
+"Have you dined, Tertius?  I expected you much earlier," said Rosamond,
+who had already seen that her husband was in a "horrible humor." She
+seated herself in her usual place as she spoke.
+
+"I have dined.  I should like some tea, please," said Lydgate, curtly,
+still scowling and looking markedly at his legs stretched out before
+him.
+
+Will was too quick to need more.  "I shall be off," he said, reaching
+his hat.
+
+"Tea is coming," said Rosamond; "pray don't go."
+
+"Yes, Lydgate is bored," said Will, who had more comprehension of
+Lydgate than Rosamond had, and was not offended by his manner, easily
+imagining outdoor causes of annoyance.
+
+"There is the more need for you to stay," said Rosamond, playfully, and
+in her lightest accent; "he will not speak to me all the evening."
+
+"Yes, Rosamond, I shall," said Lydgate, in his strong baritone.  "I
+have some serious business to speak to you about."
+
+No introduction of the business could have been less like that which
+Lydgate had intended; but her indifferent manner had been too provoking.
+
+"There! you see," said Will.  "I'm going to the meeting about the
+Mechanics' Institute.  Good-by;" and he went quickly out of the room.
+
+Rosamond did not look at her husband, but presently rose and took her
+place before the tea-tray. She was thinking that she had never seen him
+so disagreeable.  Lydgate turned his dark eyes on her and watched her
+as she delicately handled the tea-service with her taper fingers, and
+looked at the objects immediately before her with no curve in her face
+disturbed, and yet with an ineffable protest in her air against all
+people with unpleasant manners.  For the moment he lost the sense of
+his wound in a sudden speculation about this new form of feminine
+impassibility revealing itself in the sylph-like frame which he had
+once interpreted as the sign of a ready intelligent sensitiveness.  His
+mind glancing back to Laure while he looked at Rosamond, he said
+inwardly, "Would _she_ kill me because I wearied her?" and then, "It is
+the way with all women." But this power of generalizing which gives men
+so much the superiority in mistake over the dumb animals, was
+immediately thwarted by Lydgate's memory of wondering impressions from
+the behavior of another woman--from Dorothea's looks and tones of
+emotion about her husband when Lydgate began to attend him--from her
+passionate cry to be taught what would best comfort that man for whose
+sake it seemed as if she must quell every impulse in her except the
+yearnings of faithfulness and compassion.  These revived impressions
+succeeded each other quickly and dreamily in Lydgate's mind while the
+tea was being brewed.  He had shut his eyes in the last instant of
+reverie while he heard Dorothea saying, "Advise me--think what I can
+do--he has been all his life laboring and looking forward.  He minds
+about nothing else--and I mind about nothing else."
+
+That voice of deep-souled womanhood had remained within him as the
+enkindling conceptions of dead and sceptred genius had remained within
+him (is there not a genius for feeling nobly which also reigns over
+human spirits and their conclusions?); the tones were a music from
+which he was falling away--he had really fallen into a momentary doze,
+when Rosamond said in her silvery neutral way, "Here is your tea,
+Tertius," setting it on the small table by his side, and then moved
+back to her place without looking at him.  Lydgate was too hasty in
+attributing insensibility to her; after her own fashion, she was
+sensitive enough, and took lasting impressions.  Her impression now was
+one of offence and repulsion.  But then, Rosamond had no scowls and had
+never raised her voice: she was quite sure that no one could justly
+find fault with her.
+
+Perhaps Lydgate and she had never felt so far off each other before;
+but there were strong reasons for not deferring his revelation, even if
+he had not already begun it by that abrupt announcement; indeed some of
+the angry desire to rouse her into more sensibility on his account
+which had prompted him to speak prematurely, still mingled with his
+pain in the prospect of her pain.  But he waited till the tray was
+gone, the candles were lit, and the evening quiet might be counted on:
+the interval had left time for repelled tenderness to return into the
+old course.  He spoke kindly.
+
+"Dear Rosy, lay down your work and come to sit by me," he said, gently,
+pushing away the table, and stretching out his arm to draw a chair near
+his own.
+
+Rosamond obeyed.  As she came towards him in her drapery of transparent
+faintly tinted muslin, her slim yet round figure never looked more
+graceful; as she sat down by him and laid one hand on the elbow of his
+chair, at last looking at him and meeting his eyes, her delicate neck
+and cheek and purely cut lips never had more of that untarnished beauty
+which touches as in spring-time and infancy and all sweet freshness.
+It touched Lydgate now, and mingled the early moments of his love for
+her with all the other memories which were stirred in this crisis of
+deep trouble.  He laid his ample hand softly on hers, saying--
+
+"Dear!" with the lingering utterance which affection gives to the word.
+Rosamond too was still under the power of that same past, and her
+husband was still in part the Lydgate whose approval had stirred
+delight.  She put his hair lightly away from his forehead, then laid
+her other hand on his, and was conscious of forgiving him.
+
+"I am obliged to tell you what will hurt you, Rosy.  But there are
+things which husband and wife must think of together.  I dare say it
+has occurred to you already that I am short of money."
+
+Lydgate paused; but Rosamond turned her neck and looked at a vase on
+the mantel-piece.
+
+"I was not able to pay for all the things we had to get before we were
+married, and there have been expenses since which I have been obliged
+to meet.  The consequence is, there is a large debt at Brassing--three
+hundred and eighty pounds--which has been pressing on me a good while,
+and in fact we are getting deeper every day, for people don't pay me
+the faster because others want the money.  I took pains to keep it from
+you while you were not well; but now we must think together about it,
+and you must help me."
+
+"What can--I--do, Tertius?" said Rosamond, turning her eyes on him
+again.  That little speech of four words, like so many others in all
+languages, is capable by varied vocal inflections of expressing all
+states of mind from helpless dimness to exhaustive argumentative
+perception, from the completest self-devoting fellowship to the most
+neutral aloofness.  Rosamond's thin utterance threw into the words
+"What can--I--do!" as much neutrality as they could hold.  They fell
+like a mortal chill on Lydgate's roused tenderness.  He did not storm
+in indignation--he felt too sad a sinking of the heart.  And when he
+spoke again it was more in the tone of a man who forces himself to
+fulfil a task.
+
+"It is necessary for you to know, because I have to give security for a
+time, and a man must come to make an inventory of the furniture."
+
+Rosamond colored deeply.  "Have you not asked papa for money?" she
+said, as soon as she could speak.
+
+"No."
+
+"Then I must ask him!" she said, releasing her hands from Lydgate's,
+and rising to stand at two yards' distance from him.
+
+"No, Rosy," said Lydgate, decisively.  "It is too late to do that.  The
+inventory will be begun to-morrow. Remember it is a mere security: it
+will make no difference: it is a temporary affair.  I insist upon it
+that your father shall not know, unless I choose to tell him," added
+Lydgate, with a more peremptory emphasis.
+
+This certainly was unkind, but Rosamond had thrown him back on evil
+expectation as to what she would do in the way of quiet steady
+disobedience.  The unkindness seemed unpardonable to her: she was not
+given to weeping and disliked it, but now her chin and lips began to
+tremble and the tears welled up.  Perhaps it was not possible for
+Lydgate, under the double stress of outward material difficulty and of
+his own proud resistance to humiliating consequences, to imagine fully
+what this sudden trial was to a young creature who had known nothing
+but indulgence, and whose dreams had all been of new indulgence, more
+exactly to her taste.  But he did wish to spare her as much as he
+could, and her tears cut him to the heart.  He could not speak again
+immediately; but Rosamond did not go on sobbing: she tried to conquer
+her agitation and wiped away her tears, continuing to look before her
+at the mantel-piece.
+
+"Try not to grieve, darling," said Lydgate, turning his eyes up towards
+her.  That she had chosen to move away from him in this moment of her
+trouble made everything harder to say, but he must absolutely go on.
+"We must brace ourselves to do what is necessary.  It is I who have
+been in fault: I ought to have seen that I could not afford to live in
+this way. But many things have told against me in my practice, and it
+really just now has ebbed to a low point.  I may recover it, but in the
+mean time we must pull up--we must change our way of living.  We shall
+weather it.  When I have given this security I shall have time to look
+about me; and you are so clever that if you turn your mind to managing
+you will school me into carefulness.  I have been a thoughtless rascal
+about squaring prices--but come, dear, sit down and forgive me."
+
+Lydgate was bowing his neck under the yoke like a creature who had
+talons, but who had Reason too, which often reduces us to meekness.
+When he had spoken the last words in an imploring tone, Rosamond
+returned to the chair by his side.  His self-blame gave her some hope
+that he would attend to her opinion, and she said--
+
+"Why can you not put off having the inventory made?  You can send the
+men away to-morrow when they come."
+
+"I shall not send them away," said Lydgate, the peremptoriness rising
+again.  Was it of any use to explain?
+
+"If we left Middlemarch? there would of course be a sale, and that
+would do as well."
+
+"But we are not going to leave Middlemarch."
+
+"I am sure, Tertius, it would be much better to do so.  Why can we not
+go to London?  Or near Durham, where your family is known?"
+
+"We can go nowhere without money, Rosamond."
+
+"Your friends would not wish you to be without money.  And surely these
+odious tradesmen might be made to understand that, and to wait, if you
+would make proper representations to them."
+
+"This is idle Rosamond," said Lydgate, angrily.  "You must learn to
+take my judgment on questions you don't understand.  I have made
+necessary arrangements, and they must be carried out.  As to friends, I
+have no expectations whatever from them, and shall not ask them for
+anything."
+
+Rosamond sat perfectly still.  The thought in her mind was that if she
+had known how Lydgate would behave, she would never have married him.
+
+"We have no time to waste now on unnecessary words, dear," said
+Lydgate, trying to be gentle again.  "There are some details that I
+want to consider with you.  Dover says he will take a good deal of the
+plate back again, and any of the jewellery we like.  He really behaves
+very well."
+
+"Are we to go without spoons and forks then?" said Rosamond, whose very
+lips seemed to get thinner with the thinness of her utterance.  She was
+determined to make no further resistance or suggestions.
+
+"Oh no, dear!" said Lydgate.  "But look here," he continued, drawing a
+paper from his pocket and opening it; "here is Dover's account.  See, I
+have marked a number of articles, which if we returned them would
+reduce the amount by thirty pounds and more.  I have not marked any
+of the jewellery."  Lydgate had really felt this point of the jewellery
+very bitter to himself; but he had overcome the feeling by severe
+argument.  He could not propose to Rosamond that she should return any
+particular present of his, but he had told himself that he was bound to
+put Dover's offer before her, and her inward prompting might make the
+affair easy.
+
+"It is useless for me to look, Tertius," said Rosamond, calmly; "you
+will return what you please."  She would not turn her eyes on the
+paper, and Lydgate, flushing up to the roots of his hair, drew it back
+and let it fall on his knee.  Meanwhile Rosamond quietly went out of
+the room, leaving Lydgate helpless and wondering.  Was she not coming
+back?  It seemed that she had no more identified herself with him than
+if they had been creatures of different species and opposing interests.
+He tossed his head and thrust his hands deep into his pockets with a
+sort of vengeance.  There was still science--there were still good
+objects to work for.  He must give a tug still--all the stronger
+because other satisfactions were going.
+
+But the door opened and Rosamond re-entered. She carried the leather
+box containing the amethysts, and a tiny ornamental basket which
+contained other boxes, and laying them on the chair where she had been
+sitting, she said, with perfect propriety in her air--
+
+"This is all the jewellery you ever gave me.  You can return what you
+like of it, and of the plate also.  You will not, of course, expect me
+to stay at home to-morrow. I shall go to papa's."
+
+To many women the look Lydgate cast at her would have been more
+terrible than one of anger: it had in it a despairing acceptance of the
+distance she was placing between them.
+
+"And when shall you come back again?" he said, with a bitter edge on
+his accent.
+
+"Oh, in the evening.  Of course I shall not mention the subject to
+mamma."  Rosamond was convinced that no woman could behave more
+irreproachably than she was behaving; and she went to sit down at her
+work-table. Lydgate sat meditating a minute or two, and the result was
+that he said, with some of the old emotion in his tone--
+
+"Now we have been united, Rosy, you should not leave me to myself in
+the first trouble that has come."
+
+"Certainly not," said Rosamond; "I shall do everything it becomes me to
+do."
+
+"It is not right that the thing should be left to servants, or that I
+should have to speak to them about it.  And I shall be obliged to go
+out--I don't know how early.  I understand your shrinking from the
+humiliation of these money affairs.  But, my dear Rosamond, as a
+question of pride, which I feel just as much as you can, it is surely
+better to manage the thing ourselves, and let the servants see as
+little of it as possible; and since you are my wife, there is no
+hindering your share in my disgraces--if there were disgraces."
+
+Rosamond did not answer immediately, but at last she said, "Very well,
+I will stay at home."
+
+"I shall not touch these jewels, Rosy.  Take them away again.  But I
+will write out a list of plate that we may return, and that can be
+packed up and sent at once."
+
+"The servants will know _that_," said Rosamond, with the slightest
+touch of sarcasm.
+
+"Well, we must meet some disagreeables as necessities.  Where is the
+ink, I wonder?" said Lydgate, rising, and throwing the account on the
+larger table where he meant to write.
+
+Rosamond went to reach the inkstand, and after setting it on the table
+was going to turn away, when Lydgate, who was standing close by, put
+his arm round her and drew her towards him, saying--
+
+"Come, darling, let us make the best of things.  It will only be for a
+time, I hope, that we shall have to be stingy and particular.  Kiss me."
+
+His native warm-heartedness took a great deal of quenching, and it is a
+part of manliness for a husband to feel keenly the fact that an
+inexperienced girl has got into trouble by marrying him.  She received
+his kiss and returned it faintly, and in this way an appearance of
+accord was recovered for the time.  But Lydgate could not help looking
+forward with dread to the inevitable future discussions about
+expenditure and the necessity for a complete change in their way of
+living.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LIX.
+
+    They said of old the Soul had human shape,
+    But smaller, subtler than the fleshly self,
+    So wandered forth for airing when it pleased.
+    And see! beside her cherub-face there floats
+    A pale-lipped form aerial whispering
+    Its promptings in that little shell her ear."
+
+
+News is often dispersed as thoughtlessly and effectively as that pollen
+which the bees carry off (having no idea how powdery they are) when
+they are buzzing in search of their particular nectar.  This fine
+comparison has reference to Fred Vincy, who on that evening at Lowick
+Parsonage heard a lively discussion among the ladies on the news which
+their old servant had got from Tantripp concerning Mr. Casaubon's
+strange mention of Mr. Ladislaw in a codicil to his will made not long
+before his death.  Miss Winifred was astounded to find that her brother
+had known the fact before, and observed that Camden was the most
+wonderful man for knowing things and not telling them; whereupon Mary
+Garth said that the codicil had perhaps got mixed up with the habits of
+spiders, which Miss Winifred never would listen to.  Mrs. Farebrother
+considered that the news had something to do with their having only
+once seen Mr. Ladislaw at Lowick, and Miss Noble made many small
+compassionate mewings.
+
+Fred knew little and cared less about Ladislaw and the Casaubons, and
+his mind never recurred to that discussion till one day calling on
+Rosamond at his mother's request to deliver a message as he passed, he
+happened to see Ladislaw going away.  Fred and Rosamond had little to
+say to each other now that marriage had removed her from collision with
+the unpleasantness of brothers, and especially now that he had taken
+what she held the stupid and even reprehensible step of giving up the
+Church to take to such a business as Mr. Garth's. Hence Fred talked by
+preference of what he considered indifferent news, and "a propos of
+that young Ladislaw" mentioned what he had heard at Lowick Parsonage.
+
+Now Lydgate, like Mr. Farebrother, knew a great deal more than he told,
+and when he had once been set thinking about the relation between Will
+and Dorothea his conjectures had gone beyond the fact.  He imagined
+that there was a passionate attachment on both sides, and this struck
+him as much too serious to gossip about.  He remembered Will's
+irritability when he had mentioned Mrs. Casaubon, and was the more
+circumspect.  On the whole his surmises, in addition to what he knew of
+the fact, increased his friendliness and tolerance towards Ladislaw,
+and made him understand the vacillation which kept him at Middlemarch
+after he had said that he should go away.  It was significant of the
+separateness between Lydgate's mind and Rosamond's that he had no
+impulse to speak to her on the subject; indeed, he did not quite trust
+her reticence towards Will.  And he was right there; though he had no
+vision of the way in which her mind would act in urging her to speak.
+
+When she repeated Fred's news to Lydgate, he said, "Take care you don't
+drop the faintest hint to Ladislaw, Rosy.  He is likely to fly out as
+if you insulted him.  Of course it is a painful affair."
+
+Rosamond turned her neck and patted her hair, looking the image of
+placid indifference.  But the next time Will came when Lydgate was
+away, she spoke archly about his not going to London as he had
+threatened.
+
+"I know all about it.  I have a confidential little bird," said she,
+showing very pretty airs of her head over the bit of work held high
+between her active fingers.  "There is a powerful magnet in this
+neighborhood."
+
+"To be sure there is.  Nobody knows that better than you," said Will,
+with light gallantry, but inwardly prepared to be angry.
+
+"It is really the most charming romance: Mr. Casaubon jealous, and
+foreseeing that there was no one else whom Mrs. Casaubon would so much
+like to marry, and no one who would so much like to marry her as a
+certain gentleman; and then laying a plan to spoil all by making her
+forfeit her property if she did marry that gentleman--and then--and
+then--and then--oh, I have no doubt the end will be thoroughly
+romantic."
+
+"Great God! what do you mean?" said Will, flushing over face and ears,
+his features seeming to change as if he had had a violent shake.
+"Don't joke; tell me what you mean."
+
+"You don't really know?" said Rosamond, no longer playful, and desiring
+nothing better than to tell in order that she might evoke effects.
+
+"No!" he returned, impatiently.
+
+"Don't know that Mr. Casaubon has left it in his will that if Mrs.
+Casaubon marries you she is to forfeit all her property?"
+
+"How do you know that it is true?" said Will, eagerly.
+
+"My brother Fred heard it from the Farebrothers."  Will started up from
+his chair and reached his hat.
+
+"I dare say she likes you better than the property," said Rosamond,
+looking at him from a distance.
+
+"Pray don't say any more about it," said Will, in a hoarse undertone
+extremely unlike his usual light voice.  "It is a foul insult to her
+and to me."  Then he sat down absently, looking before him, but seeing
+nothing.
+
+"Now you are angry with _me_," said Rosamond.  "It is too bad to bear
+_me_ malice.  You ought to be obliged to me for telling you."
+
+"So I am," said Will, abruptly, speaking with that kind of double soul
+which belongs to dreamers who answer questions.
+
+"I expect to hear of the marriage," said Rosamond, playfully.
+
+"Never!  You will never hear of the marriage!"
+
+With those words uttered impetuously, Will rose, put out his hand to
+Rosamond, still with the air of a somnambulist, and went away.
+
+When he was gone, Rosamond left her chair and walked to the other end
+of the room, leaning when she got there against a chiffonniere, and
+looking out of the window wearily.  She was oppressed by ennui, and by
+that dissatisfaction which in women's minds is continually turning into
+a trivial jealousy, referring to no real claims, springing from no
+deeper passion than the vague exactingness of egoism, and yet capable
+of impelling action as well as speech.  "There really is nothing to
+care for much," said poor Rosamond inwardly, thinking of the family at
+Quallingham, who did not write to her; and that perhaps Tertius when he
+came home would tease her about expenses.  She had already secretly
+disobeyed him by asking her father to help them, and he had ended
+decisively by saying, "I am more likely to want help myself."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LX.
+
+    Good phrases are surely, and ever were, very commendable.
+                                          --Justice Shallow.
+
+
+A few days afterwards--it was already the end of August--there was an
+occasion which caused some excitement in Middlemarch: the public, if it
+chose, was to have the advantage of buying, under the distinguished
+auspices of Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, the furniture, books, and pictures
+which anybody might see by the handbills to be the best in every kind,
+belonging to Edwin Larcher, Esq. This was not one of the sales
+indicating the depression of trade; on the contrary, it was due to Mr.
+Larcher's great success in the carrying business, which warranted his
+purchase of a mansion near Riverston already furnished in high style by
+an illustrious Spa physician--furnished indeed with such large
+framefuls of expensive flesh-painting in the dining-room, that Mrs.
+Larcher was nervous until reassured by finding the subjects to be
+Scriptural.  Hence the fine opportunity to purchasers which was well
+pointed out in the handbills of Mr. Borthrop Trumbull, whose
+acquaintance with the history of art enabled him to state that the hall
+furniture, to be sold without reserve, comprised a piece of carving by
+a contemporary of Gibbons.
+
+At Middlemarch in those times a large sale was regarded as a kind of
+festival.  There was a table spread with the best cold eatables, as at
+a superior funeral; and facilities were offered for that
+generous-drinking of cheerful glasses which might lead to generous and
+cheerful bidding for undesirable articles.  Mr. Larcher's sale was the
+more attractive in the fine weather because the house stood just at the
+end of the town, with a garden and stables attached, in that pleasant
+issue from Middlemarch called the London Road, which was also the road
+to the New Hospital and to Mr. Bulstrode's retired residence, known as
+the Shrubs.  In short, the auction was as good as a fair, and drew all
+classes with leisure at command: to some, who risked making bids in
+order simply to raise prices, it was almost equal to betting at the
+races.  The second day, when the best furniture was to be sold,
+"everybody" was there; even Mr. Thesiger, the rector of St. Peter's,
+had looked in for a short time, wishing to buy the carved table, and
+had rubbed elbows with Mr. Bambridge and Mr. Horrock.  There was a
+wreath of Middlemarch ladies accommodated with seats round the large
+table in the dining-room, where Mr. Borthrop Trumbull was mounted with
+desk and hammer; but the rows chiefly of masculine faces behind were
+often varied by incomings and outgoings both from the door and the
+large bow-window opening on to the lawn.
+
+"Everybody" that day did not include Mr. Bulstrode, whose health could
+not well endure crowds and draughts.  But Mrs. Bulstrode had
+particularly wished to have a certain picture--a "Supper at Emmaus,"
+attributed in the catalogue to Guido; and at the last moment before the
+day of the sale Mr. Bulstrode had called at the office of the
+"Pioneer," of which he was now one of the proprietors, to beg of Mr.
+Ladislaw as a great favor that he would obligingly use his remarkable
+knowledge of pictures on behalf of Mrs. Bulstrode, and judge of the
+value of this particular painting--"if," added the scrupulously polite
+banker, "attendance at the sale would not interfere with the
+arrangements for your departure, which I know is imminent."
+
+This proviso might have sounded rather satirically in Will's ear if he
+had been in a mood to care about such satire.  It referred to an
+understanding entered into many weeks before with the proprietors of
+the paper, that he should be at liberty any day he pleased to hand over
+the management to the subeditor whom he had been training; since he
+wished finally to quit Middlemarch.  But indefinite visions of ambition
+are weak against the ease of doing what is habitual or beguilingly
+agreeable; and we all know the difficulty of carrying out a resolve
+when we secretly long that it may turn out to be unnecessary.  In such
+states of mind the most incredulous person has a private leaning
+towards miracle: impossible to conceive how our wish could be
+fulfilled, still--very wonderful things have happened!  Will did not
+confess this weakness to himself, but he lingered.  What was the use of
+going to London at that time of the year?  The Rugby men who would
+remember him were not there; and so far as political writing was
+concerned, he would rather for a few weeks go on with the "Pioneer."
+At the present moment, however, when Mr. Bulstrode was speaking to him,
+he had both a strengthened resolve to go and an equally strong resolve
+not to go till he had once more seen Dorothea.  Hence he replied that
+he had reasons for deferring his departure a little, and would be happy
+to go to the sale.
+
+Will was in a defiant mood, his consciousness being deeply stung with
+the thought that the people who looked at him probably knew a fact
+tantamount to an accusation against him as a fellow with low designs
+which were to be frustrated by a disposal of property.  Like most
+people who assert their freedom with regard to conventional
+distinction, he was prepared to be sudden and quick at quarrel with any
+one who might hint that he had personal reasons for that assertion--that
+there was anything in his blood, his bearing, or his character to
+which he gave the mask of an opinion.  When he was under an irritating
+impression of this kind he would go about for days with a defiant look,
+the color changing in his transparent skin as if he were on the qui
+vive, watching for something which he had to dart upon.
+
+This expression was peculiarly noticeable in him at the sale, and those
+who had only seen him in his moods of gentle oddity or of bright
+enjoyment would have been struck with a contrast.  He was not sorry to
+have this occasion for appearing in public before the Middlemarch
+tribes of Toller, Hackbutt, and the rest, who looked down on him as an
+adventurer, and were in a state of brutal ignorance about Dante--who
+sneered at his Polish blood, and were themselves of a breed very much
+in need of crossing.  He stood in a conspicuous place not far from the
+auctioneer, with a fore-finger in each side-pocket and his head thrown
+backward, not caring to speak to anybody, though he had been cordially
+welcomed as a connoiss_ure_ by Mr. Trumbull, who was enjoying the
+utmost activity of his great faculties.
+
+And surely among all men whose vocation requires them to exhibit their
+powers of speech, the happiest is a prosperous provincial auctioneer
+keenly alive to his own jokes and sensible of his encyclopedic
+knowledge.  Some saturnine, sour-blooded persons might object to be
+constantly insisting on the merits of all articles from boot-jacks to
+"Berghems;" but Mr. Borthrop Trumbull had a kindly liquid in his veins;
+he was an admirer by nature, and would have liked to have the universe
+under his hammer, feeling that it would go at a higher figure for his
+recommendation.
+
+Meanwhile Mrs. Larcher's drawing-room furniture was enough for him.
+When Will Ladislaw had come in, a second fender, said to have been
+forgotten in its right place, suddenly claimed the auctioneer's
+enthusiasm, which he distributed on the equitable principle of praising
+those things most which were most in need of praise.  The fender was of
+polished steel, with much lancet-shaped open-work and a sharp edge.
+
+"Now, ladies," said he, "I shall appeal to you.  Here is a fender which
+at any other sale would hardly be offered with out reserve, being, as I
+may say, for quality of steel and quaintness of design, a kind of
+thing"--here Mr. Trumbull dropped his voice and became slightly nasal,
+trimming his outlines with his left finger--"that might not fall in
+with ordinary tastes.  Allow me to tell you that by-and-by this style
+of workmanship will be the only one in vogue--half-a-crown, you said?
+thank you--going at half-a-crown, this characteristic fender; and I
+have particular information that the antique style is very much sought
+after in high quarters.  Three shillings--three-and-sixpence--hold it
+well up, Joseph!  Look, ladies, at the chastity of the design--I have
+no doubt myself that it was turned out in the last century!  Four
+shillings, Mr. Mawmsey?--four shillings."
+
+"It's not a thing I would put in _my_ drawing-room," said Mrs. Mawmsey,
+audibly, for the warning of the rash husband.  "I wonder _at_ Mrs.
+Larcher.  Every blessed child's head that fell against it would be cut
+in two.  The edge is like a knife."
+
+"Quite true," rejoined Mr. Trumbull, quickly, "and most uncommonly
+useful to have a fender at hand that will cut, if you have a leather
+shoe-tie or a bit of string that wants cutting and no knife at hand:
+many a man has been left hanging because there was no knife to cut him
+down.  Gentlemen, here's a fender that if you had the misfortune to
+hang yourselves would cut you down in no time--with astonishing
+celerity--four-and-sixpence--five--five-and-sixpence--an appropriate
+thing for a spare bedroom where there was a four-poster and a guest a
+little out of his mind--six shillings--thank you, Mr. Clintup--going
+at six shillings--going--gone!"  The auctioneer's glance, which had
+been searching round him with a preternatural susceptibility to all
+signs of bidding, here dropped on the paper before him, and his voice
+too dropped into a tone of indifferent despatch as he said, "Mr.
+Clintup.  Be handy, Joseph."
+
+"It was worth six shillings to have a fender you could always tell that
+joke on," said Mr. Clintup, laughing low and apologetically to his next
+neighbor.  He was a diffident though distinguished nurseryman, and
+feared that the audience might regard his bid as a foolish one.
+
+Meanwhile Joseph had brought a trayful of small articles.  "Now,
+ladies," said Mr. Trumbull, taking up one of the articles, "this tray
+contains a very recherchy lot--a collection of trifles for the
+drawing-room table--and trifles make the sum _of_ human things--nothing
+more important than trifles--(yes, Mr. Ladislaw, yes, by-and-by)--but
+pass the tray round, Joseph--these bijoux must be examined, ladies.
+This I have in my hand is an ingenious contrivance--a sort of
+practical rebus, I may call it: here, you see, it looks like an elegant
+heart-shaped box, portable--for the pocket; there, again, it becomes
+like a splendid double flower--an ornament for the table; and now"--Mr.
+Trumbull allowed the flower to fall alarmingly into strings of
+heart-shaped leaves--"a book of riddles!  No less than five hundred
+printed in a beautiful red.  Gentlemen, if I had less of a conscience,
+I should not wish you to bid high for this lot--I have a longing for
+it myself.  What can promote innocent mirth, and I may say virtue, more
+than a good riddle?--it hinders profane language, and attaches a man to
+the society of refined females.  This ingenious article itself, without
+the elegant domino-box, card-basket, &c., ought alone to give a high
+price to the lot.  Carried in the pocket it might make an individual
+welcome in any society.  Four shillings, sir?--four shillings for this
+remarkable collection of riddles with the et caeteras.  Here is a
+sample: 'How must you spell honey to make it catch lady-birds?
+Answer--money.'  You hear?--lady-birds--honey money.  This is an
+amusement to sharpen the intellect; it has a sting--it has what we call
+satire, and wit without indecency.  Four-and-sixpence--five shillings."
+
+The bidding ran on with warming rivalry.  Mr. Bowyer was a bidder, and
+this was too exasperating.  Bowyer couldn't afford it, and only wanted
+to hinder every other man from making a figure.  The current carried
+even Mr. Horrock with it, but this committal of himself to an opinion
+fell from him with so little sacrifice of his neutral expression, that
+the bid might not have been detected as his but for the friendly oaths
+of Mr. Bambridge, who wanted to know what Horrock would do with blasted
+stuff only fit for haberdashers given over to that state of perdition
+which the horse-dealer so cordially recognized in the majority of
+earthly existences.  The lot was finally knocked down at a guinea to
+Mr. Spilkins, a young Slender of the neighborhood, who was reckless
+with his pocket-money and felt his want of memory for riddles.
+
+"Come, Trumbull, this is too bad--you've been putting some old maid's
+rubbish into the sale," murmured Mr. Toller, getting close to the
+auctioneer.  "I want to see how the prints go, and I must be off soon."
+
+"_Im_mediately, Mr. Toller.  It was only an act of benevolence which
+your noble heart would approve.  Joseph! quick with the prints--Lot
+235.  Now, gentlemen, you who are connoiss_ures_, you are going to have
+a treat.  Here is an engraving of the Duke of Wellington surrounded by
+his staff on the Field of Waterloo; and notwithstanding recent events
+which have, as it were, enveloped our great Hero in a cloud, I will be
+bold to say--for a man in my line must not be blown about by political
+winds--that a finer subject--of the modern order, belonging to our own
+time and epoch--the understanding of man could hardly conceive: angels
+might, perhaps, but not men, sirs, not men."
+
+"Who painted it?" said Mr. Powderell, much impressed.
+
+"It is a proof before the letter, Mr. Powderell--the painter is not
+known," answered Trumbull, with a certain gaspingness in his last
+words, after which he pursed up his lips and stared round him.
+
+"I'll bid a pound!" said Mr. Powderell, in a tone of resolved emotion,
+as of a man ready to put himself in the breach.  Whether from awe or
+pity, nobody raised the price on him.
+
+Next came two Dutch prints which Mr. Toller had been eager for, and
+after he had secured them he went away.  Other prints, and afterwards
+some paintings, were sold to leading Middlemarchers who had come with a
+special desire for them, and there was a more active movement of the
+audience in and out; some, who had bought what they wanted, going away,
+others coming in either quite newly or from a temporary visit to the
+refreshments which were spread under the marquee on the lawn.  It was
+this marquee that Mr. Bambridge was bent on buying, and he appeared to
+like looking inside it frequently, as a foretaste of its possession.
+On the last occasion of his return from it he was observed to bring
+with him a new companion, a stranger to Mr. Trumbull and every one
+else, whose appearance, however, led to the supposition that he might
+be a relative of the horse-dealer's--also "given to indulgence."  His
+large whiskers, imposing swagger, and swing of the leg, made him a
+striking figure; but his suit of black, rather shabby at the edges,
+caused the prejudicial inference that he was not able to afford himself
+as much indulgence as he liked.
+
+"Who is it you've picked up, Bam?" said Mr. Horrock, aside.
+
+"Ask him yourself," returned Mr. Bambridge.  "He said he'd just turned
+in from the road."
+
+Mr. Horrock eyed the stranger, who was leaning back against his stick
+with one hand, using his toothpick with the other, and looking about
+him with a certain restlessness apparently under the silence imposed on
+him by circumstances.
+
+At length the "Supper at Emmaus" was brought forward, to Will's immense
+relief, for he was getting so tired of the proceedings that he had
+drawn back a little and leaned his shoulder against the wall just
+behind the auctioneer.  He now came forward again, and his eye caught
+the conspicuous stranger, who, rather to his surprise, was staring at
+him markedly.  But Will was immediately appealed to by Mr. Trumbull.
+
+"Yes, Mr. Ladislaw, yes; this interests you as a connoiss_ure_, I
+think.  It is some pleasure," the auctioneer went on with a rising
+fervor, "to have a picture like this to show to a company of ladies and
+gentlemen--a picture worth any sum to an individual whose means were on
+a level with his judgment.  It is a painting of the Italian school--by
+the celebrated Guydo, the greatest painter in the world, the chief of
+the Old Masters, as they are called--I take it, because they were up
+to a thing or two beyond most of us--in possession of secrets now lost
+to the bulk of mankind.  Let me tell you, gentlemen, I have seen a
+great many pictures by the Old Masters, and they are not all up to this
+mark--some of them are darker than you might like and not family
+subjects.  But here is a Guydo--the frame alone is worth pounds--which
+any lady might be proud to hang up--a suitable thing for what we call a
+refectory in a charitable institution, if any gentleman of the
+Corporation wished to show his munifi_cence_. Turn it a little, sir?
+yes.  Joseph, turn it a little towards Mr. Ladislaw--Mr. Ladislaw,
+having been abroad, understands the merit of these things, you observe."
+
+All eyes were for a moment turned towards Will, who said, coolly, "Five
+pounds."  The auctioneer burst out in deep remonstrance.
+
+"Ah!  Mr. Ladislaw! the frame alone is worth that.  Ladies and
+gentlemen, for the credit of the town!  Suppose it should be discovered
+hereafter that a gem of art has been amongst us in this town, and
+nobody in Middlemarch awake to it.  Five guineas--five seven-six--five
+ten.  Still, ladies, still!  It is a gem, and 'Full many a gem,' as the
+poet says, has been allowed to go at a nominal price because the public
+knew no better, because it was offered in circles where there was--I
+was going to say a low feeling, but no!--Six pounds--six guineas--a
+Guydo of the first order going at six guineas--it is an insult to
+religion, ladies; it touches us all as Christians, gentlemen, that a
+subject like this should go at such a low figure--six pounds
+ten--seven--"
+
+The bidding was brisk, and Will continued to share in it, remembering
+that Mrs. Bulstrode had a strong wish for the picture, and thinking
+that he might stretch the price to twelve pounds.  But it was knocked
+down to him at ten guineas, whereupon he pushed his way towards the
+bow-window and went out.  He chose to go under the marquee to get a
+glass of water, being hot and thirsty: it was empty of other visitors,
+and he asked the woman in attendance to fetch him some fresh water; but
+before she was well gone he was annoyed to see entering the florid
+stranger who had stared at him.  It struck Will at this moment that the
+man might be one of those political parasitic insects of the bloated
+kind who had once or twice claimed acquaintance with him as having
+heard him speak on the Reform question, and who might think of getting
+a shilling by news.  In this light his person, already rather heating
+to behold on a summer's day, appeared the more disagreeable; and Will,
+half-seated on the elbow of a garden-chair, turned his eyes carefully
+away from the comer.  But this signified little to our acquaintance Mr.
+Raffles, who never hesitated to thrust himself on unwilling
+observation, if it suited his purpose to do so.  He moved a step or two
+till he was in front of Will, and said with full-mouthed haste, "Excuse
+me, Mr. Ladislaw--was your mother's name Sarah Dunkirk?"
+
+Will, starting to his feet, moved backward a step, frowning, and saying
+with some fierceness, "Yes, sir, it was.  And what is that to you?"
+
+It was in Will's nature that the first spark it threw out was a direct
+answer of the question and a challenge of the consequences.  To have
+said, "What is that to you?" in the first instance, would have seemed
+like shuffling--as if he minded who knew anything about his origin!
+
+Raffles on his side had not the same eagerness for a collision which
+was implied in Ladislaw's threatening air.  The slim young fellow with
+his girl's complexion looked like a tiger-cat ready to spring on him.
+Under such circumstances Mr. Raffles's pleasure in annoying his company
+was kept in abeyance.
+
+"No offence, my good sir, no offence!  I only remember your mother--knew
+her when she was a girl.  But it is your father that you feature,
+sir.  I had the pleasure of seeing your father too.  Parents alive, Mr.
+Ladislaw?"
+
+"No!" thundered Will, in the same attitude as before.
+
+"Should be glad to do you a service, Mr. Ladislaw--by Jove, I should!
+Hope to meet again."
+
+Hereupon Raffles, who had lifted his hat with the last words, turned
+himself round with a swing of his leg and walked away.  Will looked
+after him a moment, and could see that he did not re-enter the
+auction-room, but appeared to be walking towards the road.  For an
+instant he thought that he had been foolish not to let the man go on
+talking;--but no! on the whole he preferred doing without knowledge
+from that source.
+
+Later in the evening, however, Raffles overtook him in the street, and
+appearing either to have forgotten the roughness of his former
+reception or to intend avenging it by a forgiving familiarity, greeted
+him jovially and walked by his side, remarking at first on the
+pleasantness of the town and neighborhood.  Will suspected that the man
+had been drinking and was considering how to shake him off when Raffles
+said--
+
+"I've been abroad myself, Mr. Ladislaw--I've seen the world--used to
+parley-vous a little.  It was at Boulogne I saw your father--a most
+uncommon likeness you are of him, by Jove! mouth--nose--eyes--hair
+turned off your brow just like his--a little in the foreign style.
+John Bull doesn't do much of that.  But your father was very ill when I
+saw him.  Lord, lord! hands you might see through.  You were a small
+youngster then.  Did he get well?"
+
+"No," said Will, curtly.
+
+"Ah!  Well!  I've often wondered what became of your mother.  She ran
+away from her friends when she was a young lass--a proud-spirited
+lass, and pretty, by Jove!  I knew the reason why she ran away," said
+Raffles, winking slowly as he looked sideways at Will.
+
+"You know nothing dishonorable of her, sir," said Will, turning on him
+rather savagely.  But Mr. Raffles just now was not sensitive to shades
+of manner.
+
+"Not a bit!" said he, tossing his head decisively "She was a little too
+honorable to like her friends--that was it!"  Here Raffles again winked
+slowly.  "Lord bless you, I knew all about 'em--a little in what you
+may call the respectable thieving line--the high style of
+receiving-house--none of your holes and corners--first-rate. Slap-up
+shop, high profits and no mistake.  But Lord!  Sarah would have known
+nothing about it--a dashing young lady she was--fine
+boarding-school--fit for a lord's wife--only Archie Duncan threw it at
+her out of spite, because she would have nothing to do with him.  And
+so she ran away from the whole concern.  I travelled for 'em, sir, in a
+gentlemanly way--at a high salary.  They didn't mind her running away
+at first--godly folks, sir, very godly--and she was for the stage.  The
+son was alive then, and the daughter was at a discount.  Hallo! here we
+are at the Blue Bull.  What do you say, Mr. Ladislaw?--shall we turn in
+and have a glass?"
+
+"No, I must say good evening," said Will, dashing up a passage which
+led into Lowick Gate, and almost running to get out of Raffles's reach.
+
+He walked a long while on the Lowick road away from the town, glad of
+the starlit darkness when it came.  He felt as if he had had dirt cast
+on him amidst shouts of scorn.  There was this to confirm the fellow's
+statement--that his mother never would tell him the reason why she had
+run away from her family.
+
+Well! what was he, Will Ladislaw, the worse, supposing the truth about
+that family to be the ugliest?  His mother had braved hardship in order
+to separate herself from it.  But if Dorothea's friends had known this
+story--if the Chettams had known it--they would have had a fine color
+to give their suspicions a welcome ground for thinking him unfit to
+come near her.  However, let them suspect what they pleased, they would
+find themselves in the wrong.  They would find out that the blood in
+his veins was as free from the taint of meanness as theirs.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXI.
+
+    "Inconsistencies," answered Imlac, "cannot both be right,
+    but imputed to man they may both be true."--Rasselas.
+
+
+The same night, when Mr. Bulstrode returned from a journey to Brassing
+on business, his good wife met him in the entrance-hall and drew him
+into his private sitting-room.
+
+"Nicholas," she said, fixing her honest eyes upon him anxiously, "there
+has been such a disagreeable man here asking for you--it has made me
+quite uncomfortable."
+
+"What kind of man, my dear," said Mr. Bulstrode, dreadfully certain of
+the answer.
+
+"A red-faced man with large whiskers, and most impudent in his manner.
+He declared he was an old friend of yours, and said you would be sorry
+not to see him.  He wanted to wait for you here, but I told him he
+could see you at the Bank to-morrow morning.  Most impudent he
+was!--stared at me, and said his friend Nick had luck in wives.  I
+don't believe he would have gone away, if Blucher had not happened to
+break his chain and come running round on the gravel--for I was in the
+garden; so I said, 'You'd better go away--the dog is very fierce, and I
+can't hold him.'  Do you really know anything of such a man?"
+
+"I believe I know who he is, my dear," said Mr. Bulstrode, in his usual
+subdued voice, "an unfortunate dissolute wretch, whom I helped too much
+in days gone by.  However, I presume you will not be troubled by him
+again.  He will probably come to the Bank--to beg, doubtless."
+
+No more was said on the subject until the next day, when Mr. Bulstrode
+had returned from the town and was dressing for dinner.  His wife, not
+sure that he was come home, looked into his dressing-room and saw him
+with his coat and cravat off, leaning one arm on a chest of drawers and
+staring absently at the ground.  He started nervously and looked up as
+she entered.
+
+"You look very ill, Nicholas.  Is there anything the matter?"
+
+"I have a good deal of pain in my head," said Mr. Bulstrode, who was so
+frequently ailing that his wife was always ready to believe in this
+cause of depression.
+
+"Sit down and let me sponge it with vinegar."
+
+Physically Mr. Bulstrode did not want the vinegar, but morally the
+affectionate attention soothed him.  Though always polite, it was his
+habit to receive such services with marital coolness, as his wife's
+duty.  But to-day, while she was bending over him, he said, "You are
+very good, Harriet," in a tone which had something new in it to her
+ear; she did not know exactly what the novelty was, but her woman's
+solicitude shaped itself into a darting thought that he might be going
+to have an illness.
+
+"Has anything worried you?" she said.  "Did that man come to you at the
+Bank?"
+
+"Yes; it was as I had supposed.  He is a man who at one time might have
+done better.  But he has sunk into a drunken debauched creature."
+
+"Is he quite gone away?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, anxiously but for certain
+reasons she refrained from adding, "It was very disagreeable to hear
+him calling himself a friend of yours."  At that moment she would not
+have liked to say anything which implied her habitual consciousness
+that her husband's earlier connections were not quite on a level with
+her own.  Not that she knew much about them.  That her husband had at
+first been employed in a bank, that he had afterwards entered into what
+he called city business and gained a fortune before he was
+three-and-thirty, that he had married a widow who was much older than
+himself--a Dissenter, and in other ways probably of that
+disadvantageous quality usually perceptible in a first wife if inquired
+into with the dispassionate judgment of a second--was almost as much as
+she had cared to learn beyond the glimpses which Mr. Bulstrode's
+narrative occasionally gave of his early bent towards religion, his
+inclination to be a preacher, and his association with missionary and
+philanthropic efforts.  She believed in him as an excellent man whose
+piety carried a peculiar eminence in belonging to a layman, whose
+influence had turned her own mind toward seriousness, and whose share
+of perishable good had been the means of raising her own position.  But
+she also liked to think that it was well in every sense for Mr.
+Bulstrode to have won the hand of Harriet Vincy; whose family was
+undeniable in a Middlemarch light--a better light surely than any
+thrown in London thoroughfares or dissenting chapel-yards. The
+unreformed provincial mind distrusted London; and while true religion
+was everywhere saving, honest Mrs. Bulstrode was convinced that to be
+saved in the Church was more respectable.  She so much wished to ignore
+towards others that her husband had ever been a London Dissenter, that
+she liked to keep it out of sight even in talking to him.  He was quite
+aware of this; indeed in some respects he was rather afraid of this
+ingenuous wife, whose imitative piety and native worldliness were
+equally sincere, who had nothing to be ashamed of, and whom he had
+married out of a thorough inclination still subsisting.  But his fears
+were such as belong to a man who cares to maintain his recognized
+supremacy: the loss of high consideration from his wife, as from every
+one else who did not clearly hate him out of enmity to the truth, would
+be as the beginning of death to him.  When she said--
+
+"Is he quite gone away?"
+
+"Oh, I trust so," he answered, with an effort to throw as much sober
+unconcern into his tone as possible!
+
+But in truth Mr. Bulstrode was very far from a state of quiet trust.
+In the interview at the Bank, Raffles had made it evident that his
+eagerness to torment was almost as strong in him as any other greed.
+He had frankly said that he had turned out of the way to come to
+Middlemarch, just to look about him and see whether the neighborhood
+would suit him to live in.  He had certainly had a few debts to pay
+more than he expected, but the two hundred pounds were not gone yet: a
+cool five-and-twenty would suffice him to go away with for the present.
+What he had wanted chiefly was to see his friend Nick and family, and
+know all about the prosperity of a man to whom he was so much attached.
+By-and-by he might come back for a longer stay.  This time Raffles
+declined to be "seen off the premises," as he expressed it--declined to
+quit Middlemarch under Bulstrode's eyes.  He meant to go by coach the
+next day--if he chose.
+
+Bulstrode felt himself helpless.  Neither threats nor coaxing could
+avail: he could not count on any persistent fear nor on any promise.
+On the contrary, he felt a cold certainty at his heart that
+Raffles--unless providence sent death to hinder him--would come back
+to Middlemarch before long.  And that certainty was a terror.
+
+It was not that he was in danger of legal punishment or of beggary: he
+was in danger only of seeing disclosed to the judgment of his neighbors
+and the mournful perception of his wife certain facts of his past life
+which would render him an object of scorn and an opprobrium of the
+religion with which he had diligently associated himself.  The terror
+of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over
+that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in
+general phrases.  Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a
+zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man
+to own his blameworthy past.  With memory set smarting like a reopened
+wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn
+preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose
+from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing
+shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.
+
+Into this second life Bulstrode's past had now risen, only the
+pleasures of it seeming to have lost their quality.  Night and day,
+without interruption save of brief sleep which only wove retrospect and
+fear into a fantastic present, he felt the scenes of his earlier life
+coming between him and everything else, as obstinately as when we look
+through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn our backs
+on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees. The
+successive events inward and outward were there in one view: though
+each might be dwelt on in turn, the rest still kept their hold in the
+consciousness.
+
+Once more he saw himself the young banker's clerk, with an agreeable
+person, as clever in figures as he was fluent in speech and fond of
+theological definition: an eminent though young member of a Calvinistic
+dissenting church at Highbury, having had striking experience in
+conviction of sin and sense of pardon.  Again he heard himself called
+for as Brother Bulstrode in prayer meetings, speaking on religious
+platforms, preaching in private houses.  Again he felt himself thinking
+of the ministry as possibly his vocation, and inclined towards
+missionary labor.  That was the happiest time of his life: that was the
+spot he would have chosen now to awake in and find the rest a dream.
+The people among whom Brother Bulstrode was distinguished were very
+few, but they were very near to him, and stirred his satisfaction the
+more; his power stretched through a narrow space, but he felt its
+effect the more intensely.  He believed without effort in the peculiar
+work of grace within him, and in the signs that God intended him for
+special instrumentality.
+
+Then came the moment of transition; it was with the sense of promotion
+he had when he, an orphan educated at a commercial charity-school, was
+invited to a fine villa belonging to Mr. Dunkirk, the richest man in
+the congregation.  Soon he became an intimate there, honored for his
+piety by the wife, marked out for his ability by the husband, whose
+wealth was due to a flourishing city and west-end trade.  That was the
+setting-in of a new current for his ambition, directing his prospects
+of "instrumentality" towards the uniting of distinguished religious
+gifts with successful business.
+
+By-and-by came a decided external leading: a confidential subordinate
+partner died, and nobody seemed to the principal so well fitted to fill
+the severely felt vacancy as his young friend Bulstrode, if he would
+become confidential accountant.  The offer was accepted.  The business
+was a pawnbroker's, of the most magnificent sort both in extent and
+profits; and on a short acquaintance with it Bulstrode became aware
+that one source of magnificent profit was the easy reception of any
+goods offered, without strict inquiry as to where they came from.  But
+there was a branch house at the west end, and no pettiness or dinginess
+to give suggestions of shame.
+
+He remembered his first moments of shrinking.  They were private, and
+were filled with arguments; some of these taking the form of prayer.
+The business was established and had old roots; is it not one thing to
+set up a new gin-palace and another to accept an investment in an old
+one?  The profits made out of lost souls--where can the line be drawn
+at which they begin in human transactions?  Was it not even God's way
+of saving His chosen?  "Thou knowest,"--the young Bulstrode had said
+then, as the older Bulstrode was saying now--"Thou knowest how loose
+my soul sits from these things--how I view them all as implements for
+tilling Thy garden rescued here and there from the wilderness."
+
+Metaphors and precedents were not wanting; peculiar spiritual
+experiences were not wanting which at last made the retention of his
+position seem a service demanded of him: the vista of a fortune had
+already opened itself, and Bulstrode's shrinking remained private.  Mr.
+Dunkirk had never expected that there would be any shrinking at all: he
+had never conceived that trade had anything to do with the scheme of
+salvation.  And it was true that Bulstrode found himself carrying on
+two distinct lives; his religious activity could not be incompatible
+with his business as soon as he had argued himself into not feeling it
+incompatible.
+
+Mentally surrounded with that past again, Bulstrode had the same
+pleas--indeed, the years had been perpetually spinning them into
+intricate thickness, like masses of spider-web, padding the moral
+sensibility; nay, as age made egoism more eager but less enjoying, his
+soul had become more saturated with the belief that he did everything
+for God's sake, being indifferent to it for his own.  And yet--if he
+could be back in that far-off spot with his youthful poverty--why, then
+he would choose to be a missionary.
+
+But the train of causes in which he had locked himself went on.  There
+was trouble in the fine villa at Highbury.  Years before, the only
+daughter had run away, defied her parents, and gone on the stage; and
+now the only boy died, and after a short time Mr. Dunkirk died also.
+The wife, a simple pious woman, left with all the wealth in and out of
+the magnificent trade, of which she never knew the precise nature, had
+come to believe in Bulstrode, and innocently adore him as women often
+adore their priest or "man-made" minister.  It was natural that after a
+time marriage should have been thought of between them.  But Mrs.
+Dunkirk had qualms and yearnings about her daughter, who had long been
+regarded as lost both to God and her parents.  It was known that the
+daughter had married, but she was utterly gone out of sight.  The
+mother, having lost her boy, imagined a grandson, and wished in a
+double sense to reclaim her daughter.  If she were found, there would
+be a channel for property--perhaps a wide one--in the provision for
+several grandchildren.  Efforts to find her must be made before Mrs.
+Dunkirk would marry again.  Bulstrode concurred; but after
+advertisement as well as other modes of inquiry had been tried, the
+mother believed that her daughter was not to be found, and consented to
+marry without reservation of property.
+
+The daughter had been found; but only one man besides Bulstrode knew
+it, and he was paid for keeping silence and carrying himself away.
+
+That was the bare fact which Bulstrode was now forced to see in the
+rigid outline with which acts present themselves onlookers.  But for
+himself at that distant time, and even now in burning memory, the fact
+was broken into little sequences, each justified as it came by
+reasonings which seemed to prove it righteous.  Bulstrode's course up
+to that time had, he thought, been sanctioned by remarkable
+providences, appearing to point the way for him to be the agent in
+making the best use of a large property and withdrawing it from
+perversion.  Death and other striking dispositions, such as feminine
+trustfulness, had come; and Bulstrode would have adopted Cromwell's
+words--"Do you call these bare events?  The Lord pity you!"  The
+events were comparatively small, but the essential condition was
+there--namely, that they were in favor of his own ends.  It was easy
+for him to settle what was due from him to others by inquiring what
+were God's intentions with regard to himself.  Could it be for God's
+service that this fortune should in any considerable proportion go to a
+young woman and her husband who were given up to the lightest pursuits,
+and might scatter it abroad in triviality--people who seemed to lie
+outside the path of remarkable providences?  Bulstrode had never said
+to himself beforehand, "The daughter shall not be found"--nevertheless
+when the moment came he kept her existence hidden; and when other
+moments followed, he soothed the mother with consolation in the
+probability that the unhappy young woman might be no more.
+
+There were hours in which Bulstrode felt that his action was
+unrighteous; but how could he go back?  He had mental exercises, called
+himself nought, laid hold on redemption, and went on in his course of
+instrumentality.  And after five years Death again came to widen his
+path, by taking away his wife.  He did gradually withdraw his capital,
+but he did not make the sacrifices requisite to put an end to the
+business, which was carried on for thirteen years afterwards before it
+finally collapsed.  Meanwhile Nicholas Bulstrode had used his hundred
+thousand discreetly, and was become provincially, solidly important--a
+banker, a Churchman, a public benefactor; also a sleeping partner in
+trading concerns, in which his ability was directed to economy in the
+raw material, as in the case of the dyes which rotted Mr. Vincy's silk.
+And now, when this respectability had lasted undisturbed for nearly
+thirty years--when all that preceded it had long lain benumbed in the
+consciousness--that past had risen and immersed his thought as if with
+the terrible irruption of a new sense overburthening the feeble being.
+
+Meanwhile, in his conversation with Raffles, he had learned something
+momentous, something which entered actively into the struggle of his
+longings and terrors.  There, he thought, lay an opening towards
+spiritual, perhaps towards material rescue.
+
+The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him.  There may be
+coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the
+sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them.  He was
+simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic
+beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his
+desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs.  If this be
+hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all,
+to whatever confession we belong, and whether we believe in the future
+perfection of our race or in the nearest date fixed for the end of the
+world; whether we regard the earth as a putrefying nidus for a saved
+remnant, including ourselves, or have a passionate belief in the
+solidarity of mankind.
+
+The service he could do to the cause of religion had been through life
+the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action: it had been
+the motive which he had poured out in his prayers.  Who would use money
+and position better than he meant to use them?  Who could surpass him
+in self-abhorrence and exaltation of God's cause?  And to Mr. Bulstrode
+God's cause was something distinct from his own rectitude of conduct:
+it enforced a discrimination of God's enemies, who were to be used
+merely as instruments, and whom it would be as well if possible to keep
+out of money and consequent influence.  Also, profitable investments in
+trades where the power of the prince of this world showed its most
+active devices, became sanctified by a right application of the profits
+in the hands of God's servant.
+
+This implicit reasoning is essentially no more peculiar to evangelical
+belief than the use of wide phrases for narrow motives is peculiar to
+Englishmen.  There is no general doctrine which is not capable of
+eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct
+fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.
+
+But a man who believes in something else than his own greed, has
+necessarily a conscience or standard to which he more or less adapts
+himself.  Bulstrode's standard had been his serviceableness to God's
+cause: "I am sinful and nought--a vessel to be consecrated by use--but
+use me!"--had been the mould into which he had constrained his immense
+need of being something important and predominating.  And now had come
+a moment in which that mould seemed in danger of being broken and
+utterly cast away.
+
+What if the acts he had reconciled himself to because they made him a
+stronger instrument of the divine glory, were to become the pretext of
+the scoffer, and a darkening of that glory?  If this were to be the
+ruling of Providence, he was cast out from the temple as one who had
+brought unclean offerings.
+
+He had long poured out utterances of repentance.  But today a
+repentance had come which was of a bitterer flavor, and a threatening
+Providence urged him to a kind of propitiation which was not simply a
+doctrinal transaction.  The divine tribunal had changed its aspect for
+him; self-prostration was no longer enough, and he must bring
+restitution in his hand.  It was really before his God that Bulstrode
+was about to attempt such restitution as seemed possible: a great dread
+had seized his susceptible frame, and the scorching approach of shame
+wrought in him a new spiritual need.  Night and day, while the
+resurgent threatening past was making a conscience within him, he was
+thinking by what means he could recover peace and trust--by what
+sacrifice he could stay the rod.  His belief in these moments of dread
+was, that if he spontaneously did something right, God would save him
+from the consequences of wrong-doing. For religion can only change when
+the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal
+fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.
+
+He had seen Raffles actually going away on the Brassing coach, and this
+was a temporary relief; it removed the pressure of an immediate dread,
+but did not put an end to the spiritual conflict and the need to win
+protection.  At last he came to a difficult resolve, and wrote a letter
+to Will Ladislaw, begging him to be at the Shrubs that evening for a
+private interview at nine o'clock. Will had felt no particular surprise
+at the request, and connected it with some new notions about the
+"Pioneer;" but when he was shown into Mr. Bulstrode's private room, he
+was struck with the painfully worn look on the banker's face, and was
+going to say, "Are you ill?" when, checking himself in that abruptness,
+he only inquired after Mrs. Bulstrode, and her satisfaction with the
+picture bought for her.
+
+"Thank you, she is quite satisfied; she has gone out with her daughters
+this evening.  I begged you to come, Mr. Ladislaw, because I have a
+communication of a very private--indeed, I will say, of a sacredly
+confidential nature, which I desire to make to you.  Nothing, I dare
+say, has been farther from your thoughts than that there had been
+important ties in the past which could connect your history with mine."
+
+Will felt something like an electric shock.  He was already in a state
+of keen sensitiveness and hardly allayed agitation on the subject of
+ties in the past, and his presentiments were not agreeable.  It seemed
+like the fluctuations of a dream--as if the action begun by that loud
+bloated stranger were being carried on by this pale-eyed sickly looking
+piece of respectability, whose subdued tone and glib formality of
+speech were at this moment almost as repulsive to him as their
+remembered contrast.  He answered, with a marked change of color--
+
+"No, indeed, nothing."
+
+"You see before you, Mr. Ladislaw, a man who is deeply stricken.  But
+for the urgency of conscience and the knowledge that I am before the
+bar of One who seeth not as man seeth, I should be under no compulsion
+to make the disclosure which has been my object in asking you to come
+here to-night. So far as human laws go, you have no claim on me
+whatever."
+
+Will was even more uncomfortable than wondering.  Mr. Bulstrode had
+paused, leaning his head on his hand, and looking at the floor.  But he
+now fixed his examining glance on Will and said--
+
+"I am told that your mother's name was Sarah Dunkirk, and that she ran
+away from her friends to go on the stage.  Also, that your father was
+at one time much emaciated by illness.  May I ask if you can confirm
+these statements?"
+
+"Yes, they are all true," said Will, struck with the order in which an
+inquiry had come, that might have been expected to be preliminary to
+the banker's previous hints.  But Mr. Bulstrode had to-night followed
+the order of his emotions; he entertained no doubt that the opportunity
+for restitution had come, and he had an overpowering impulse towards
+the penitential expression by which he was deprecating chastisement.
+
+"Do you know any particulars of your mother's family?" he continued.
+
+"No; she never liked to speak of them.  She was a very generous,
+honorable woman," said Will, almost angrily.
+
+"I do not wish to allege anything against her.  Did she never mention
+her mother to you at all?"
+
+"I have heard her say that she thought her mother did not know the
+reason of her running away.  She said 'poor mother' in a pitying tone."
+
+"That mother became my wife," said Bulstrode, and then paused a moment
+before he added, "you have a claim on me, Mr. Ladislaw: as I said
+before, not a legal claim, but one which my conscience recognizes.  I
+was enriched by that marriage--a result which would probably not have
+taken place--certainly not to the same extent--if your grandmother
+could have discovered her daughter.  That daughter, I gather, is no
+longer living!"
+
+"No," said Will, feeling suspicion and repugnance rising so strongly
+within him, that without quite knowing what he did, he took his hat
+from the floor and stood up.  The impulse within him was to reject the
+disclosed connection.
+
+"Pray be seated, Mr. Ladislaw," said Bulstrode, anxiously.  "Doubtless
+you are startled by the suddenness of this discovery.  But I entreat
+your patience with one who is already bowed down by inward trial."
+
+Will reseated himself, feeling some pity which was half contempt for
+this voluntary self-abasement of an elderly man.
+
+"It is my wish, Mr. Ladislaw, to make amends for the deprivation which
+befell your mother.  I know that you are without fortune, and I wish to
+supply you adequately from a store which would have probably already
+been yours had your grandmother been certain of your mother's existence
+and been able to find her."
+
+Mr. Bulstrode paused.  He felt that he was performing a striking piece
+of scrupulosity in the judgment of his auditor, and a penitential act
+in the eyes of God.  He had no clew to the state of Will Ladislaw's
+mind, smarting as it was from the clear hints of Raffles, and with its
+natural quickness in construction stimulated by the expectation of
+discoveries which he would have been glad to conjure back into
+darkness.  Will made no answer for several moments, till Mr. Bulstrode,
+who at the end of his speech had cast his eyes on the floor, now raised
+them with an examining glance, which Will met fully, saying--
+
+"I suppose you did know of my mother's existence, and knew where she
+might have been found."
+
+Bulstrode shrank--there was a visible quivering in his face and hands.
+He was totally unprepared to have his advances met in this way, or to
+find himself urged into more revelation than he had beforehand set down
+as needful.  But at that moment he dared not tell a lie, and he felt
+suddenly uncertain of his ground which he had trodden with some
+confidence before.
+
+"I will not deny that you conjecture rightly," he answered, with a
+faltering in his tone.  "And I wish to make atonement to you as the one
+still remaining who has suffered a loss through me.  You enter, I
+trust, into my purpose, Mr. Ladislaw, which has a reference to higher
+than merely human claims, and as I have already said, is entirely
+independent of any legal compulsion.  I am ready to narrow my own
+resources and the prospects of my family by binding myself to allow you
+five hundred pounds yearly during my life, and to leave you a
+proportional capital at my death--nay, to do still more, if more should
+be definitely necessary to any laudable project on your part."  Mr.
+Bulstrode had gone on to particulars in the expectation that these
+would work strongly on Ladislaw, and merge other feelings in grateful
+acceptance.
+
+But Will was looking as stubborn as possible, with his lip pouting and
+his fingers in his side-pockets. He was not in the least touched, and
+said firmly,--
+
+"Before I make any reply to your proposition, Mr. Bulstrode, I must beg
+you to answer a question or two.  Were you connected with the business
+by which that fortune you speak of was originally made?"
+
+Mr. Bulstrode's thought was, "Raffles has told him."  How could he
+refuse to answer when he had volunteered what drew forth the question?
+He answered, "Yes."
+
+"And was that business--or was it not--a thoroughly dishonorable
+one--nay, one that, if its nature had been made public, might have
+ranked those concerned in it with thieves and convicts?"
+
+Will's tone had a cutting bitterness: he was moved to put his question
+as nakedly as he could.
+
+Bulstrode reddened with irrepressible anger.  He had been prepared for
+a scene of self-abasement, but his intense pride and his habit of
+supremacy overpowered penitence, and even dread, when this young man,
+whom he had meant to benefit, turned on him with the air of a judge.
+
+"The business was established before I became connected with it, sir;
+nor is it for you to institute an inquiry of that kind," he answered,
+not raising his voice, but speaking with quick defiantness.
+
+"Yes, it is," said Will, starting up again with his hat in his hand.
+"It is eminently mine to ask such questions, when I have to decide
+whether I will have transactions with you and accept your money.  My
+unblemished honor is important to me.  It is important to me to have no
+stain on my birth and connections.  And now I find there is a stain
+which I can't help.  My mother felt it, and tried to keep as clear of
+it as she could, and so will I.  You shall keep your ill-gotten money.
+If I had any fortune of my own, I would willingly pay it to any one who
+could disprove what you have told me.  What I have to thank you for is
+that you kept the money till now, when I can refuse it.  It ought to
+lie with a man's self that he is a gentleman.  Good-night, sir."
+
+Bulstrode was going to speak, but Will, with determined quickness, was
+out of the room in an instant, and in another the hall-door had closed
+behind him.  He was too strongly possessed with passionate rebellion
+against this inherited blot which had been thrust on his knowledge to
+reflect at present whether he had not been too hard on Bulstrode--too
+arrogantly merciless towards a man of sixty, who was making efforts at
+retrieval when time had rendered them vain.
+
+No third person listening could have thoroughly understood the
+impetuosity of Will's repulse or the bitterness of his words.  No one
+but himself then knew how everything connected with the sentiment of
+his own dignity had an immediate bearing for him on his relation to
+Dorothea and to Mr. Casaubon's treatment of him.  And in the rush of
+impulses by which he flung back that offer of Bulstrode's there was
+mingled the sense that it would have been impossible for him ever to
+tell Dorothea that he had accepted it.
+
+As for Bulstrode--when Will was gone he suffered a violent reaction,
+and wept like a woman.  It was the first time he had encountered an
+open expression of scorn from any man higher than Raffles; and with
+that scorn hurrying like venom through his system, there was no
+sensibility left to consolations.  But the relief of weeping had to be
+checked.  His wife and daughters soon came home from hearing the
+address of an Oriental missionary, and were full of regret that papa
+had not heard, in the first instance, the interesting things which they
+tried to repeat to him.
+
+Perhaps, through all other hidden thoughts, the one that breathed most
+comfort was, that Will Ladislaw at least was not likely to publish what
+had taken place that evening.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXII.
+
+    "He was a squyer of lowe degre,
+     That loved the king's daughter of Hungrie.
+                                    --Old Romance.
+
+
+Will Ladislaw's mind was now wholly bent on seeing Dorothea again, and
+forthwith quitting Middlemarch.  The morning after his agitating scene
+with Bulstrode he wrote a brief letter to her, saying that various
+causes had detained him in the neighborhood longer than he had
+expected, and asking her permission to call again at Lowick at some
+hour which she would mention on the earliest possible day, he being
+anxious to depart, but unwilling to do so until she had granted him an
+interview.  He left the letter at the office, ordering the messenger to
+carry it to Lowick Manor, and wait for an answer.
+
+Ladislaw felt the awkwardness of asking for more last words.  His
+former farewell had been made in the hearing of Sir James Chettam, and
+had been announced as final even to the butler.  It is certainly trying
+to a man's dignity to reappear when he is not expected to do so: a
+first farewell has pathos in it, but to come back for a second lends an
+opening to comedy, and it was possible even that there might be bitter
+sneers afloat about Will's motives for lingering.  Still it was on the
+whole more satisfactory to his feeling to take the directest means of
+seeing Dorothea, than to use any device which might give an air of
+chance to a meeting of which he wished her to understand that it was
+what he earnestly sought.  When he had parted from her before, he had
+been in ignorance of facts which gave a new aspect to the relation
+between them, and made a more absolute severance than he had then
+believed in.  He knew nothing of Dorothea's private fortune, and being
+little used to reflect on such matters, took it for granted that
+according to Mr. Casaubon's arrangement marriage to him, Will Ladislaw,
+would mean that she consented to be penniless.  That was not what he
+could wish for even in his secret heart, or even if she had been ready
+to meet such hard contrast for his sake.  And then, too, there was the
+fresh smart of that disclosure about his mother's family, which if
+known would be an added reason why Dorothea's friends should look down
+upon him as utterly below her.  The secret hope that after some years
+he might come back with the sense that he had at least a personal value
+equal to her wealth, seemed now the dreamy continuation of a dream.
+This change would surely justify him in asking Dorothea to receive him
+once more.
+
+But Dorothea on that morning was not at home to receive Will's note.
+In consequence of a letter from her uncle announcing his intention to
+be at home in a week, she had driven first to Freshitt to carry the
+news, meaning to go on to the Grange to deliver some orders with which
+her uncle had intrusted her--thinking, as he said, "a little mental
+occupation of this sort good for a widow."
+
+If Will Ladislaw could have overheard some of the talk at Freshitt that
+morning, he would have felt all his suppositions confirmed as to the
+readiness of certain people to sneer at his lingering in the
+neighborhood.  Sir James, indeed, though much relieved concerning
+Dorothea, had been on the watch to learn Ladislaw's movements, and had
+an instructed informant in Mr. Standish, who was necessarily in his
+confidence on this matter.  That Ladislaw had stayed in Middlemarch
+nearly two months after he had declared that he was going immediately,
+was a fact to embitter Sir James's suspicions, or at least to justify
+his aversion to a "young fellow" whom he represented to himself as
+slight, volatile, and likely enough to show such recklessness as
+naturally went along with a position unriveted by family ties or a
+strict profession.  But he had just heard something from Standish
+which, while it justified these surmises about Will, offered a means of
+nullifying all danger with regard to Dorothea.
+
+Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there
+are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to
+sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same
+incongruous manner.  Good Sir James was this morning so far unlike
+himself that he was irritably anxious to say something to Dorothea on a
+subject which he usually avoided as if it had been a matter of shame to
+them both.  He could not use Celia as a medium, because he did not
+choose that she should know the kind of gossip he had in his mind; and
+before Dorothea happened to arrive he had been trying to imagine how,
+with his shyness and unready tongue, he could ever manage to introduce
+his communication.  Her unexpected presence brought him to utter
+hopelessness in his own power of saying anything unpleasant; but
+desperation suggested a resource; he sent the groom on an unsaddled
+horse across the park with a pencilled note to Mrs. Cadwallader, who
+already knew the gossip, and would think it no compromise of herself to
+repeat it as often as required.
+
+Dorothea was detained on the good pretext that Mr. Garth, whom she
+wanted to see, was expected at the hall within the hour, and she was
+still talking to Caleb on the gravel when Sir James, on the watch for
+the rector's wife, saw her coming and met her with the needful hints.
+
+"Enough!  I understand,"--said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "You shall be
+innocent.  I am such a blackamoor that I cannot smirch myself."
+
+"I don't mean that it's of any consequence," said Sir James, disliking
+that Mrs. Cadwallader should understand too much.  "Only it is
+desirable that Dorothea should know there are reasons why she should
+not receive him again; and I really can't say so to her.  It will come
+lightly from you."
+
+It came very lightly indeed.  When Dorothea quitted Caleb and turned to
+meet them, it appeared that Mrs. Cadwallader had stepped across the
+park by the merest chance in the world, just to chat with Celia in a
+matronly way about the baby.  And so Mr. Brooke was coming back?
+Delightful!--coming back, it was to be hoped, quite cured of
+Parliamentary fever and pioneering.  Apropos of the "Pioneer"--somebody
+had prophesied that it would soon be like a dying dolphin, and turn all
+colors for want of knowing how to help itself, because Mr. Brooke's
+protege, the brilliant young Ladislaw, was gone or going.  Had Sir
+James heard that?
+
+The three were walking along the gravel slowly, and Sir James, turning
+aside to whip a shrub, said he had heard something of that sort.
+
+"All false!" said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "He is not gone, or going,
+apparently; the 'Pioneer' keeps its color, and Mr. Orlando Ladislaw is
+making a sad dark-blue scandal by warbling continually with your Mr.
+Lydgate's wife, who they tell me is as pretty as pretty can be.  It
+seems nobody ever goes into the house without finding this young
+gentleman lying on the rug or warbling at the piano.  But the people in
+manufacturing towns are always disreputable."
+
+"You began by saying that one report was false, Mrs. Cadwallader, and I
+believe this is false too," said Dorothea, with indignant energy; "at
+least, I feel sure it is a misrepresentation.  I will not hear any evil
+spoken of Mr. Ladislaw; he has already suffered too much injustice."
+
+Dorothea when thoroughly moved cared little what any one thought of her
+feelings; and even if she had been able to reflect, she would have held
+it petty to keep silence at injurious words about Will from fear of
+being herself misunderstood.  Her face was flushed and her lip trembled.
+
+Sir James, glancing at her, repented of his stratagem; but Mrs.
+Cadwallader, equal to all occasions, spread the palms of her hands
+outward and said--"Heaven grant it, my dear!--I mean that all bad tales
+about anybody may be false.  But it is a pity that young Lydgate should
+have married one of these Middlemarch girls.  Considering he's a son of
+somebody, he might have got a woman with good blood in her veins, and
+not too young, who would have put up with his profession.  There's
+Clara Harfager, for instance, whose friends don't know what to do with
+her; and she has a portion.  Then we might have had her among us.
+However!--it's no use being wise for other people.  Where is Celia?
+Pray let us go in."
+
+"I am going on immediately to Tipton," said Dorothea, rather haughtily.
+"Good-by."
+
+Sir James could say nothing as he accompanied her to the carriage.  He
+was altogether discontented with the result of a contrivance which had
+cost him some secret humiliation beforehand.
+
+Dorothea drove along between the berried hedgerows and the shorn
+corn-fields, not seeing or hearing anything around.  The tears came and
+rolled down her cheeks, but she did not know it.  The world, it seemed,
+was turning ugly and hateful, and there was no place for her
+trustfulness.  "It is not true--it is not true!" was the voice within
+her that she listened to; but all the while a remembrance to which
+there had always clung a vague uneasiness would thrust itself on her
+attention--the remembrance of that day when she had found Will Ladislaw
+with Mrs. Lydgate, and had heard his voice accompanied by the piano.
+
+"He said he would never do anything that I disapproved--I wish I could
+have told him that I disapproved of that," said poor Dorothea,
+inwardly, feeling a strange alternation between anger with Will and the
+passionate defence of him.  "They all try to blacken him before me; but
+I will care for no pain, if he is not to blame.  I always believed he
+was good."--These were her last thoughts before she felt that the
+carriage was passing under the archway of the lodge-gate at the Grange,
+when she hurriedly pressed her handkerchief to her face and began to
+think of her errands.  The coachman begged leave to take out the horses
+for half an hour as there was something wrong with a shoe; and
+Dorothea, having the sense that she was going to rest, took off her
+gloves and bonnet, while she was leaning against a statue in the
+entrance-hall, and talking to the housekeeper.  At last she said--
+
+"I must stay here a little, Mrs. Kell.  I will go into the library and
+write you some memoranda from my uncle's letter, if you will open the
+shutters for me."
+
+"The shutters are open, madam," said Mrs. Kell, following Dorothea, who
+had walked along as she spoke.  "Mr. Ladislaw is there, looking for
+something."
+
+(Will had come to fetch a portfolio of his own sketches which he had
+missed in the act of packing his movables, and did not choose to leave
+behind.)
+
+Dorothea's heart seemed to turn over as if it had had a blow, but she
+was not perceptibly checked: in truth, the sense that Will was there
+was for the moment all-satisfying to her, like the sight of something
+precious that one has lost.  When she reached the door she said to Mrs.
+Kell--
+
+"Go in first, and tell him that I am here."
+
+Will had found his portfolio, and had laid it on the table at the far
+end of the room, to turn over the sketches and please himself by
+looking at the memorable piece of art which had a relation to nature
+too mysterious for Dorothea.  He was smiling at it still, and shaking
+the sketches into order with the thought that he might find a letter
+from her awaiting him at Middlemarch, when Mrs. Kell close to his elbow
+said--
+
+"Mrs. Casaubon is coming in, sir."
+
+Will turned round quickly, and the next moment Dorothea was entering.
+As Mrs. Kell closed the door behind her they met: each was looking at
+the other, and consciousness was overflowed by something that
+suppressed utterance.  It was not confusion that kept them silent, for
+they both felt that parting was near, and there is no shamefacedness in
+a sad parting.
+
+She moved automatically towards her uncle's chair against the
+writing-table, and Will, after drawing it out a little for her, went a
+few paces off and stood opposite to her.
+
+"Pray sit down," said Dorothea, crossing her hands on her lap; "I am
+very glad you were here."  Will thought that her face looked just as it
+did when she first shook hands with him in Rome; for her widow's cap,
+fixed in her bonnet, had gone off with it, and he could see that she
+had lately been shedding tears.  But the mixture of anger in her
+agitation had vanished at the sight of him; she had been used, when
+they were face to face, always to feel confidence and the happy freedom
+which comes with mutual understanding, and how could other people's
+words hinder that effect on a sudden?  Let the music which can take
+possession of our frame and fill the air with joy for us, sound once
+more--what does it signify that we heard it found fault with in its
+absence?
+
+"I have sent a letter to Lowick Manor to-day, asking leave to see you,"
+said Will, seating himself opposite to her.  "I am going away
+immediately, and I could not go without speaking to you again."
+
+"I thought we had parted when you came to Lowick many weeks ago--you
+thought you were going then," said Dorothea, her voice trembling a
+little.
+
+"Yes; but I was in ignorance then of things which I know now--things
+which have altered my feelings about the future.  When I saw you
+before, I was dreaming that I might come back some day.  I don't think
+I ever shall--now."  Will paused here.
+
+"You wished me to know the reasons?" said Dorothea, timidly.
+
+"Yes," said Will, impetuously, shaking his head backward, and looking
+away from her with irritation in his face.  "Of course I must wish it.
+I have been grossly insulted in your eyes and in the eyes of others.
+There has been a mean implication against my character.  I wish you to
+know that under no circumstances would I have lowered myself by--under
+no circumstances would I have given men the chance of saying that I
+sought money under the pretext of seeking--something else.  There was
+no need of other safeguard against me--the safeguard of wealth was
+enough."
+
+Will rose from his chair with the last word and went--he hardly knew
+where; but it was to the projecting window nearest him, which had been
+open as now about the same season a year ago, when he and Dorothea had
+stood within it and talked together.  Her whole heart was going out at
+this moment in sympathy with Will's indignation: she only wanted to
+convince him that she had never done him injustice, and he seemed to
+have turned away from her as if she too had been part of the unfriendly
+world.
+
+"It would be very unkind of you to suppose that I ever attributed any
+meanness to you," she began.  Then in her ardent way, wanting to plead
+with him, she moved from her chair and went in front of him to her old
+place in the window, saying, "Do you suppose that I ever disbelieved in
+you?"
+
+When Will saw her there, he gave a start and moved backward out of the
+window, without meeting her glance.  Dorothea was hurt by this movement
+following up the previous anger of his tone.  She was ready to say that
+it was as hard on her as on him, and that she was helpless; but those
+strange particulars of their relation which neither of them could
+explicitly mention kept her always in dread of saying too much.  At
+this moment she had no belief that Will would in any case have wanted
+to marry her, and she feared using words which might imply such a
+belief.  She only said earnestly, recurring to his last word--
+
+"I am sure no safeguard was ever needed against you."
+
+Will did not answer.  In the stormy fluctuation of his feelings these
+words of hers seemed to him cruelly neutral, and he looked pale and
+miserable after his angry outburst.  He went to the table and fastened
+up his portfolio, while Dorothea looked at him from the distance.  They
+were wasting these last moments together in wretched silence.  What
+could he say, since what had got obstinately uppermost in his mind was
+the passionate love for her which he forbade himself to utter?  What
+could she say, since she might offer him no help--since she was forced
+to keep the money that ought to have been his?--since to-day he seemed
+not to respond as he used to do to her thorough trust and liking?
+
+But Will at last turned away from his portfolio and approached the
+window again.
+
+"I must go," he said, with that peculiar look of the eyes which
+sometimes accompanies bitter feeling, as if they had been tired and
+burned with gazing too close at a light.
+
+"What shall you do in life?" said Dorothea, timidly.  "Have your
+intentions remained just the same as when we said good-by before?"
+
+"Yes," said Will, in a tone that seemed to waive the subject as
+uninteresting.  "I shall work away at the first thing that offers.  I
+suppose one gets a habit of doing without happiness or hope."
+
+"Oh, what sad words!" said Dorothea, with a dangerous tendency to sob.
+Then trying to smile, she added, "We used to agree that we were alike
+in speaking too strongly."
+
+"I have not spoken too strongly now," said Will, leaning back against
+the angle of the wall.  "There are certain things which a man can only
+go through once in his life; and he must know some time or other that
+the best is over with him.  This experience has happened to me while I
+am very young--that is all.  What I care more for than I can ever care
+for anything else is absolutely forbidden to me--I don't mean merely
+by being out of my reach, but forbidden me, even if it were within my
+reach, by my own pride and honor--by everything I respect myself for.
+Of course I shall go on living as a man might do who had seen heaven in
+a trance."
+
+Will paused, imagining that it would be impossible for Dorothea to
+misunderstand this; indeed he felt that he was contradicting himself
+and offending against his self-approval in speaking to her so plainly;
+but still--it could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her
+that he would never woo her.  It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind
+of wooing.
+
+But Dorothea's mind was rapidly going over the past with quite another
+vision than his.  The thought that she herself might be what Will most
+cared for did throb through her an instant, but then came doubt: the
+memory of the little they had lived through together turned pale and
+shrank before the memory which suggested how much fuller might have
+been the intercourse between Will and some one else with whom he had
+had constant companionship.  Everything he had said might refer to that
+other relation, and whatever had passed between him and herself was
+thoroughly explained by what she had always regarded as their simple
+friendship and the cruel obstruction thrust upon it by her husband's
+injurious act.  Dorothea stood silent, with her eyes cast down
+dreamily, while images crowded upon her which left the sickening
+certainty that Will was referring to Mrs. Lydgate.  But why sickening?
+He wanted her to know that here too his conduct should be above
+suspicion.
+
+Will was not surprised at her silence.  His mind also was tumultuously
+busy while he watched her, and he was feeling rather wildly that
+something must happen to hinder their parting--some miracle, clearly
+nothing in their own deliberate speech.  Yet, after all, had she any
+love for him?--he could not pretend to himself that he would rather
+believe her to be without that pain.  He could not deny that a secret
+longing for the assurance that she loved him was at the root of all his
+words.
+
+Neither of them knew how long they stood in that way.  Dorothea was
+raising her eyes, and was about to speak, when the door opened and her
+footman came to say--
+
+"The horses are ready, madam, whenever you like to start."
+
+"Presently," said Dorothea.  Then turning to Will, she said, "I have
+some memoranda to write for the housekeeper."
+
+"I must go," said Will, when the door had closed again--advancing
+towards her.  "The day after to-morrow I shall leave Middlemarch."
+
+"You have acted in every way rightly," said Dorothea, in a low tone,
+feeling a pressure at her heart which made it difficult to speak.
+
+She put out her hand, and Will took it for an instant without speaking,
+for her words had seemed to him cruelly cold and unlike herself.  Their
+eyes met, but there was discontent in his, and in hers there was only
+sadness.  He turned away and took his portfolio under his arm.
+
+"I have never done you injustice.  Please remember me," said Dorothea,
+repressing a rising sob.
+
+"Why should you say that?" said Will, with irritation.  "As if I were
+not in danger of forgetting everything else."
+
+He had really a movement of anger against her at that moment, and it
+impelled him to go away without pause.  It was all one flash to
+Dorothea--his last words--his distant bow to her as he reached the
+door--the sense that he was no longer there.  She sank into the chair,
+and for a few moments sat like a statue, while images and emotions were
+hurrying upon her.  Joy came first, in spite of the threatening train
+behind it--joy in the impression that it was really herself whom Will
+loved and was renouncing, that there was really no other love less
+permissible, more blameworthy, which honor was hurrying him away from.
+They were parted all the same, but--Dorothea drew a deep breath and
+felt her strength return--she could think of him unrestrainedly.  At
+that moment the parting was easy to bear: the first sense of loving and
+being loved excluded sorrow.  It was as if some hard icy pressure had
+melted, and her consciousness had room to expand: her past was come
+back to her with larger interpretation.  The joy was not the
+less--perhaps it was the more complete just then--because of the
+irrevocable parting; for there was no reproach, no contemptuous wonder
+to imagine in any eye or from any lips.  He had acted so as to defy
+reproach, and make wonder respectful.
+
+Any one watching her might have seen that there was a fortifying
+thought within her.  Just as when inventive power is working with glad
+ease some small claim on the attention is fully met as if it were only
+a cranny opened to the sunlight, it was easy now for Dorothea to write
+her memoranda.  She spoke her last words to the housekeeper in cheerful
+tones, and when she seated herself in the carriage her eyes were bright
+and her cheeks blooming under the dismal bonnet.  She threw back the
+heavy "weepers," and looked before her, wondering which road Will had
+taken.  It was in her nature to be proud that he was blameless, and
+through all her feelings there ran this vein--"I was right to defend
+him."
+
+The coachman was used to drive his grays at a good pace, Mr. Casaubon
+being unenjoying and impatient in everything away from his desk, and
+wanting to get to the end of all journeys; and Dorothea was now bowled
+along quickly.  Driving was pleasant, for rain in the night had laid
+the dust, and the blue sky looked far off, away from the region of the
+great clouds that sailed in masses.  The earth looked like a happy
+place under the vast heavens, and Dorothea was wishing that she might
+overtake Will and see him once more.
+
+After a turn of the road, there he was with the portfolio under his
+arm; but the next moment she was passing him while he raised his hat,
+and she felt a pang at being seated there in a sort of exaltation,
+leaving him behind.  She could not look back at him.  It was as if a
+crowd of indifferent objects had thrust them asunder, and forced them
+along different paths, taking them farther and farther away from each
+other, and making it useless to look back.  She could no more make any
+sign that would seem to say, "Need we part?" than she could stop the
+carriage to wait for him.  Nay, what a world of reasons crowded upon
+her against any movement of her thought towards a future that might
+reverse the decision of this day!
+
+"I only wish I had known before--I wish he knew--then we could be quite
+happy in thinking of each other, though we are forever parted.  And if
+I could but have given him the money, and made things easier for
+him!"--were the longings that came back the most persistently.  And
+yet, so heavily did the world weigh on her in spite of her independent
+energy, that with this idea of Will as in need of such help and at a
+disadvantage with the world, there came always the vision of that
+unfittingness of any closer relation between them which lay in the
+opinion of every one connected with her.  She felt to the full all the
+imperativeness of the motives which urged Will's conduct.  How could he
+dream of her defying the barrier that her husband had placed between
+them?--how could she ever say to herself that she would defy it?
+
+Will's certainty as the carriage grew smaller in the distance, had much
+more bitterness in it.  Very slight matters were enough to gall him in
+his sensitive mood, and the sight of Dorothea driving past him while he
+felt himself plodding along as a poor devil seeking a position in a
+world which in his present temper offered him little that he coveted,
+made his conduct seem a mere matter of necessity, and took away the
+sustainment of resolve.  After all, he had no assurance that she loved
+him: could any man pretend that he was simply glad in such a case to
+have the suffering all on his own side?
+
+That evening Will spent with the Lydgates; the next evening he was gone.
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VII.
+
+
+
+
+
+TWO TEMPTATIONS.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIII.
+
+    These little things are great to little man.--GOLDSMITH.
+
+
+"Have you seen much of your scientific phoenix, Lydgate, lately?" said
+Mr. Toller at one of his Christmas dinner-parties, speaking to Mr.
+Farebrother on his right hand.
+
+"Not much, I am sorry to say," answered the Vicar, accustomed to parry
+Mr. Toller's banter about his belief in the new medical light.  "I am
+out of the way and he is too busy."
+
+"Is he?  I am glad to hear it," said Dr. Minchin, with mingled suavity
+and surprise.
+
+"He gives a great deal of time to the New Hospital," said Mr.
+Farebrother, who had his reasons for continuing the subject: "I hear of
+that from my neighbor, Mrs. Casaubon, who goes there often.  She says
+Lydgate is indefatigable, and is making a fine thing of Bulstrode's
+institution.  He is preparing a new ward in case of the cholera coming
+to us."
+
+"And preparing theories of treatment to try on the patients, I
+suppose," said Mr. Toller.
+
+"Come, Toller, be candid," said Mr. Farebrother.  "You are too clever
+not to see the good of a bold fresh mind in medicine, as well as in
+everything else; and as to cholera, I fancy, none of you are very sure
+what you ought to do.  If a man goes a little too far along a new road,
+it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else."
+
+"I am sure you and Wrench ought to be obliged to him," said Dr.
+Minchin, looking towards Toller, "for he has sent you the cream of
+Peacock's patients."
+
+"Lydgate has been living at a great rate for a young beginner," said
+Mr. Harry Toller, the brewer.  "I suppose his relations in the North
+back him up."
+
+"I hope so," said Mr. Chichely, "else he ought not to have married that
+nice girl we were all so fond of.  Hang it, one has a grudge against a
+man who carries off the prettiest girl in the town."
+
+"Ay, by God! and the best too," said Mr. Standish.
+
+"My friend Vincy didn't half like the marriage, I know that," said Mr.
+Chichely.  "_He_ wouldn't do much.  How the relations on the other side
+may have come down I can't say."  There was an emphatic kind of
+reticence in Mr. Chichely's manner of speaking.
+
+"Oh, I shouldn't think Lydgate ever looked to practice for a living,"
+said Mr. Toller, with a slight touch of sarcasm, and there the subject
+was dropped.
+
+This was not the first time that Mr. Farebrother had heard hints of
+Lydgate's expenses being obviously too great to be met by his practice,
+but he thought it not unlikely that there were resources or
+expectations which excused the large outlay at the time of Lydgate's
+marriage, and which might hinder any bad consequences from the
+disappointment in his practice.  One evening, when he took the pains to
+go to Middlemarch on purpose to have a chat with Lydgate as of old, he
+noticed in him an air of excited effort quite unlike his usual easy way
+of keeping silence or breaking it with abrupt energy whenever he had
+anything to say.  Lydgate talked persistently when they were in his
+work-room, putting arguments for and against the probability of certain
+biological views; but he had none of those definite things to say or to
+show which give the waymarks of a patient uninterrupted pursuit, such
+as he used himself to insist on, saying that "there must be a systole
+and diastole in all inquiry," and that "a man's mind must be
+continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and
+the horizon of an object-glass." That evening he seemed to be talking
+widely for the sake of resisting any personal bearing; and before long
+they went into the drawing room, where Lydgate, having asked Rosamond
+to give them music, sank back in his chair in silence, but with a
+strange light in his eyes.  "He may have been taking an opiate," was a
+thought that crossed Mr. Farebrother's mind--"tic-douloureux
+perhaps--or medical worries."
+
+It did not occur to him that Lydgate's marriage was not delightful: he
+believed, as the rest did, that Rosamond was an amiable, docile
+creature, though he had always thought her rather uninteresting--a
+little too much the pattern-card of the finishing-school; and his
+mother could not forgive Rosamond because she never seemed to see that
+Henrietta Noble was in the room.  "However, Lydgate fell in love with
+her," said the Vicar to himself, "and she must be to his taste."
+
+Mr. Farebrother was aware that Lydgate was a proud man, but having very
+little corresponding fibre in himself, and perhaps too little care
+about personal dignity, except the dignity of not being mean or
+foolish, he could hardly allow enough for the way in which Lydgate
+shrank, as from a burn, from the utterance of any word about his
+private affairs.  And soon after that conversation at Mr. Toller's, the
+Vicar learned something which made him watch the more eagerly for an
+opportunity of indirectly letting Lydgate know that if he wanted to
+open himself about any difficulty there was a friendly ear ready.
+
+The opportunity came at Mr. Vincy's, where, on New Year's Day, there
+was a party, to which Mr. Farebrother was irresistibly invited, on the
+plea that he must not forsake his old friends on the first new year of
+his being a greater man, and Rector as well as Vicar.  And this party
+was thoroughly friendly: all the ladies of the Farebrother family were
+present; the Vincy children all dined at the table, and Fred had
+persuaded his mother that if she did not invite Mary Garth, the
+Farebrothers would regard it as a slight to themselves, Mary being
+their particular friend.  Mary came, and Fred was in high spirits,
+though his enjoyment was of a checkered kind--triumph that his mother
+should see Mary's importance with the chief personages in the party
+being much streaked with jealousy when Mr. Farebrother sat down by her.
+Fred used to be much more easy about his own accomplishments in the
+days when he had not begun to dread being "bowled out by Farebrother,"
+and this terror was still before him.  Mrs. Vincy, in her fullest
+matronly bloom, looked at Mary's little figure, rough wavy hair, and
+visage quite without lilies and roses, and wondered; trying
+unsuccessfully to fancy herself caring about Mary's appearance in
+wedding clothes, or feeling complacency in grandchildren who would
+"feature" the Garths.  However, the party was a merry one, and Mary was
+particularly bright; being glad, for Fred's sake, that his friends were
+getting kinder to her, and being also quite willing that they should
+see how much she was valued by others whom they must admit to be judges.
+
+Mr. Farebrother noticed that Lydgate seemed bored, and that Mr. Vincy
+spoke as little as possible to his son-in-law. Rosamond was perfectly
+graceful and calm, and only a subtle observation such as the Vicar had
+not been roused to bestow on her would have perceived the total absence
+of that interest in her husband's presence which a loving wife is sure
+to betray, even if etiquette keeps her aloof from him.  When Lydgate
+was taking part in the conversation, she never looked towards him any
+more than if she had been a sculptured Psyche modelled to look another
+way: and when, after being called out for an hour or two, he re-entered
+the room, she seemed unconscious of the fact, which eighteen months
+before would have had the effect of a numeral before ciphers.  In
+reality, however, she was intensely aware of Lydgate's voice and
+movements; and her pretty good-tempered air of unconsciousness was a
+studied negation by which she satisfied her inward opposition to him
+without compromise of propriety.  When the ladies were in the
+drawing-room after Lydgate had been called away from the dessert, Mrs.
+Farebrother, when Rosamond happened to be near her, said--"You have to
+give up a great deal of your husband's society, Mrs. Lydgate."
+
+"Yes, the life of a medical man is very arduous: especially when he is
+so devoted to his profession as Mr. Lydgate is," said Rosamond, who was
+standing, and moved easily away at the end of this correct little
+speech.
+
+"It is dreadfully dull for her when there is no company," said Mrs.
+Vincy, who was seated at the old lady's side.  "I am sure I thought so
+when Rosamond was ill, and I was staying with her.  You know, Mrs.
+Farebrother, ours is a cheerful house.  I am of a cheerful disposition
+myself, and Mr. Vincy always likes something to be going on.  That is
+what Rosamond has been used to.  Very different from a husband out at
+odd hours, and never knowing when he will come home, and of a close,
+proud disposition, _I_ think"--indiscreet Mrs. Vincy did lower her tone
+slightly with this parenthesis.  "But Rosamond always had an angel of a
+temper; her brothers used very often not to please her, but she was
+never the girl to show temper; from a baby she was always as good as
+good, and with a complexion beyond anything.  But my children are all
+good-tempered, thank God."
+
+This was easily credible to any one looking at Mrs. Vincy as she threw
+back her broad cap-strings, and smiled towards her three little girls,
+aged from seven to eleven.  But in that smiling glance she was obliged
+to include Mary Garth, whom the three girls had got into a corner to
+make her tell them stories.  Mary was just finishing the delicious tale
+of Rumpelstiltskin, which she had well by heart, because Letty was
+never tired of communicating it to her ignorant elders from a favorite
+red volume.  Louisa, Mrs. Vincy's darling, now ran to her with
+wide-eyed serious excitement, crying, "Oh mamma, mamma, the little man
+stamped so hard on the floor he couldn't get his leg out again!"
+
+"Bless you, my cherub!" said mamma; "you shall tell me all about it
+to-morrow. Go and listen!" and then, as her eyes followed Louisa back
+towards the attractive corner, she thought that if Fred wished her to
+invite Mary again she would make no objection, the children being so
+pleased with her.
+
+But presently the corner became still more animated, for Mr.
+Farebrother came in, and seating himself behind Louisa, took her on his
+lap; whereupon the girls all insisted that he must hear
+Rumpelstiltskin, and Mary must tell it over again.  He insisted too,
+and Mary, without fuss, began again in her neat fashion, with precisely
+the same words as before.  Fred, who had also seated himself near,
+would have felt unmixed triumph in Mary's effectiveness if Mr.
+Farebrother had not been looking at her with evident admiration, while
+he dramatized an intense interest in the tale to please the children.
+
+"You will never care any more about my one-eyed giant, Loo," said Fred
+at the end.
+
+"Yes, I shall.  Tell about him now," said Louisa.
+
+"Oh, I dare say; I am quite cut out.  Ask Mr. Farebrother."
+
+"Yes," added Mary; "ask Mr. Farebrother to tell you about the ants
+whose beautiful house was knocked down by a giant named Tom, and he
+thought they didn't mind because he couldn't hear them cry, or see them
+use their pocket-handkerchiefs."
+
+"Please," said Louisa, looking up at the Vicar.
+
+"No, no, I am a grave old parson.  If I try to draw a story out of my
+bag a sermon comes instead.  Shall I preach you a sermon?" said he,
+putting on his short-sighted glasses, and pursing up his lips.
+
+"Yes," said Louisa, falteringly.
+
+"Let me see, then.  Against cakes: how cakes are bad things, especially
+if they are sweet and have plums in them."
+
+Louisa took the affair rather seriously, and got down from the Vicar's
+knee to go to Fred.
+
+"Ah, I see it will not do to preach on New Year's Day," said Mr.
+Farebrother, rising and walking away.  He had discovered of late that
+Fred had become jealous of him, and also that he himself was not losing
+his preference for Mary above all other women.
+
+"A delightful young person is Miss Garth," said Mrs. Farebrother, who
+had been watching her son's movements.
+
+"Yes," said Mrs. Vincy, obliged to reply, as the old lady turned to her
+expectantly.  "It is a pity she is not better-looking."
+
+"I cannot say that," said Mrs. Farebrother, decisively.  "I like her
+countenance.  We must not always ask for beauty, when a good God has
+seen fit to make an excellent young woman without it.  I put good
+manners first, and Miss Garth will know how to conduct herself in any
+station."
+
+The old lady was a little sharp in her tone, having a prospective
+reference to Mary's becoming her daughter-in-law; for there was this
+inconvenience in Mary's position with regard to Fred, that it was not
+suitable to be made public, and hence the three ladies at Lowick
+Parsonage were still hoping that Camden would choose Miss Garth.
+
+New visitors entered, and the drawing-room was given up to music and
+games, while whist-tables were prepared in the quiet room on the other
+side of the hall.  Mr. Farebrother played a rubber to satisfy his
+mother, who regarded her occasional whist as a protest against scandal
+and novelty of opinion, in which light even a revoke had its dignity.
+But at the end he got Mr. Chichely to take his place, and left the
+room.  As he crossed the hall, Lydgate had just come in and was taking
+off his great-coat.
+
+"You are the man I was going to look for," said the Vicar; and instead
+of entering the drawing-room, they walked along the hall and stood
+against the fireplace, where the frosty air helped to make a glowing
+bank.  "You see, I can leave the whist-table easily enough," he went
+on, smiling at Lydgate, "now I don't play for money.  I owe that to
+you, Mrs. Casaubon says."
+
+"How?" said Lydgate, coldly.
+
+"Ah, you didn't mean me to know it; I call that ungenerous reticence.
+You should let a man have the pleasure of feeling that you have done
+him a good turn.  I don't enter into some people's dislike of being
+under an obligation: upon my word, I prefer being under an obligation
+to everybody for behaving well to me."
+
+"I can't tell what you mean," said Lydgate, "unless it is that I once
+spoke of you to Mrs. Casaubon.  But I did not think that she would
+break her promise not to mention that I had done so," said Lydgate,
+leaning his back against the corner of the mantel-piece, and showing no
+radiance in his face.
+
+"It was Brooke who let it out, only the other day.  He paid me the
+compliment of saying that he was very glad I had the living though you
+had come across his tactics, and had praised me up as a lien and a
+Tillotson, and that sort of thing, till Mrs. Casaubon would hear of no
+one else."
+
+"Oh, Brooke is such a leaky-minded fool," said Lydgate, contemptuously.
+
+"Well, I was glad of the leakiness then.  I don't see why you shouldn't
+like me to know that you wished to do me a service, my dear fellow.
+And you certainly have done me one.  It's rather a strong check to
+one's self-complacency to find how much of one's right doing depends on
+not being in want of money.  A man will not be tempted to say the
+Lord's Prayer backward to please the devil, if he doesn't want the
+devil's services.  I have no need to hang on the smiles of chance now."
+
+"I don't see that there's any money-getting without chance," said
+Lydgate; "if a man gets it in a profession, it's pretty sure to come by
+chance."
+
+Mr. Farebrother thought he could account for this speech, in striking
+contrast with Lydgate's former way of talking, as the perversity which
+will often spring from the moodiness of a man ill at ease in his
+affairs.  He answered in a tone of good-humored admission--
+
+"Ah, there's enormous patience wanted with the way of the world.  But
+it is the easier for a man to wait patiently when he has friends who
+love him, and ask for nothing better than to help him through, so far
+as it lies in their power."
+
+"Oh yes," said Lydgate, in a careless tone, changing his attitude and
+looking at his watch.  "People make much more of their difficulties
+than they need to do."
+
+He knew as distinctly as possible that this was an offer of help to
+himself from Mr. Farebrother, and he could not bear it.  So strangely
+determined are we mortals, that, after having been long gratified with
+the sense that he had privately done the Vicar a service, the
+suggestion that the Vicar discerned his need of a service in return
+made him shrink into unconquerable reticence.  Besides, behind all
+making of such offers what else must come?--that he should "mention his
+case," imply that he wanted specific things.  At that moment, suicide
+seemed easier.
+
+Mr. Farebrother was too keen a man not to know the meaning of that
+reply, and there was a certain massiveness in Lydgate's manner and
+tone, corresponding with his physique, which if he repelled your
+advances in the first instance seemed to put persuasive devices out of
+question.
+
+"What time are you?" said the Vicar, devouring his wounded feeling.
+
+"After eleven," said Lydgate.  And they went into the drawing-room.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIV.
+
+    1st Gent. Where lies the power, there let the blame lie too.
+    2d Gent.  Nay, power is relative; you cannot fright
+                  The coming pest with border fortresses,
+                  Or catch your carp with subtle argument.
+                  All force is twain in one: cause is not cause
+                  Unless effect be there; and action's self
+                  Must needs contain a passive.  So command
+                  Exists but with obedience."
+
+
+Even if Lydgate had been inclined to be quite open about his affairs,
+he knew that it would have hardly been in Mr. Farebrother's power to
+give him the help he immediately wanted.  With the year's bills coming
+in from his tradesmen, with Dover's threatening hold on his furniture,
+and with nothing to depend on but slow dribbling payments from patients
+who must not be offended--for the handsome fees he had had from
+Freshitt Hall and Lowick Manor had been easily absorbed--nothing less
+than a thousand pounds would have freed him from actual embarrassment,
+and left a residue which, according to the favorite phrase of
+hopefulness in such circumstances, would have given him "time to look
+about him."
+
+Naturally, the merry Christmas bringing the happy New Year, when
+fellow-citizens expect to be paid for the trouble and goods they have
+smilingly bestowed on their neighbors, had so tightened the pressure of
+sordid cares on Lydgate's mind that it was hardly possible for him to
+think unbrokenly of any other subject, even the most habitual and
+soliciting.  He was not an ill-tempered man; his intellectual activity,
+the ardent kindness of his heart, as well as his strong frame, would
+always, under tolerably easy conditions, have kept him above the petty
+uncontrolled susceptibilities which make bad temper.  But he was now a
+prey to that worst irritation which arises not simply from annoyances,
+but from the second consciousness underlying those annoyances, of
+wasted energy and a degrading preoccupation, which was the reverse of
+all his former purposes.  "_This_ is what I am thinking of; and _that_
+is what I might have been thinking of," was the bitter incessant murmur
+within him, making every difficulty a double goad to impatience.
+
+Some gentlemen have made an amazing figure in literature by general
+discontent with the universe as a trap of dulness into which their
+great souls have fallen by mistake; but the sense of a stupendous self
+and an insignificant world may have its consolations.  Lydgate's
+discontent was much harder to bear: it was the sense that there was a
+grand existence in thought and effective action lying around him, while
+his self was being narrowed into the miserable isolation of egoistic
+fears, and vulgar anxieties for events that might allay such fears.
+His troubles will perhaps appear miserably sordid, and beneath the
+attention of lofty persons who can know nothing of debt except on a
+magnificent scale.  Doubtless they were sordid; and for the majority,
+who are not lofty, there is no escape from sordidness but by being free
+from money-craving, with all its base hopes and temptations, its
+watching for death, its hinted requests, its horse-dealer's desire to
+make bad work pass for good, its seeking for function which ought to be
+another's, its compulsion often to long for Luck in the shape of a wide
+calamity.
+
+It was because Lydgate writhed under the idea of getting his neck
+beneath this vile yoke that he had fallen into a bitter moody state
+which was continually widening Rosamond's alienation from him.  After
+the first disclosure about the bill of sale, he had made many efforts
+to draw her into sympathy with him about possible measures for
+narrowing their expenses, and with the threatening approach of
+Christmas his propositions grew more and more definite.  "We two can do
+with only one servant, and live on very little," he said, "and I shall
+manage with one horse."  For Lydgate, as we have seen, had begun to
+reason, with a more distinct vision, about the expenses of living, and
+any share of pride he had given to appearances of that sort was meagre
+compared with the pride which made him revolt from exposure as a
+debtor, or from asking men to help him with their money.
+
+"Of course you can dismiss the other two servants, if you like," said
+Rosamond; "but I should have thought it would be very injurious to your
+position for us to live in a poor way.  You must expect your practice
+to be lowered."
+
+"My dear Rosamond, it is not a question of choice.  We have begun too
+expensively.  Peacock, you know, lived in a much smaller house than
+this.  It is my fault: I ought to have known better, and I deserve a
+thrashing--if there were anybody who had a right to give it me--for
+bringing you into the necessity of living in a poorer way than you have
+been used to.  But we married because we loved each other, I suppose.
+And that may help us to pull along till things get better.  Come, dear,
+put down that work and come to me."
+
+He was really in chill gloom about her at that moment, but he dreaded a
+future without affection, and was determined to resist the oncoming of
+division between them.  Rosamond obeyed him, and he took her on his
+knee, but in her secret soul she was utterly aloof from him.  The poor
+thing saw only that the world was not ordered to her liking, and
+Lydgate was part of that world.  But he held her waist with one hand
+and laid the other gently on both of hers; for this rather abrupt man
+had much tenderness in his manners towards women, seeming to have
+always present in his imagination the weakness of their frames and the
+delicate poise of their health both in body and mind.  And he began
+again to speak persuasively.
+
+"I find, now I look into things a little, Rosy, that it is wonderful
+what an amount of money slips away in our housekeeping.  I suppose the
+servants are careless, and we have had a great many people coming.  But
+there must be many in our rank who manage with much less: they must do
+with commoner things, I suppose, and look after the scraps.  It seems,
+money goes but a little way in these matters, for Wrench has everything
+as plain as possible, and he has a very large practice."
+
+"Oh, if you think of living as the Wrenches do!" said Rosamond, with a
+little turn of her neck.  "But I have heard you express your disgust at
+that way of living."
+
+"Yes, they have bad taste in everything--they make economy look ugly.
+We needn't do that.  I only meant that they avoid expenses, although
+Wrench has a capital practice."
+
+"Why should not you have a good practice, Tertius?  Mr. Peacock had.
+You should be more careful not to offend people, and you should send
+out medicines as the others do.  I am sure you began well, and you got
+several good houses.  It cannot answer to be eccentric; you should
+think what will be generally liked," said Rosamond, in a decided little
+tone of admonition.
+
+Lydgate's anger rose: he was prepared to be indulgent towards feminine
+weakness, but not towards feminine dictation.  The shallowness of a
+waternixie's soul may have a charm until she becomes didactic.  But he
+controlled himself, and only said, with a touch of despotic firmness--
+
+"What I am to do in my practice, Rosy, it is for me to judge.  That is
+not the question between us.  It is enough for you to know that our
+income is likely to be a very narrow one--hardly four hundred, perhaps
+less, for a long time to come, and we must try to re-arrange our lives
+in accordance with that fact."
+
+Rosamond was silent for a moment or two, looking before her, and then
+said, "My uncle Bulstrode ought to allow you a salary for the time you
+give to the Hospital: it is not right that you should work for nothing."
+
+"It was understood from the beginning that my services would be
+gratuitous.  That, again, need not enter into our discussion.  I have
+pointed out what is the only probability," said Lydgate, impatiently.
+Then checking himself, he went on more quietly--
+
+"I think I see one resource which would free us from a good deal of the
+present difficulty.  I hear that young Ned Plymdale is going to be
+married to Miss Sophy Toller.  They are rich, and it is not often that
+a good house is vacant in Middlemarch.  I feel sure that they would be
+glad to take this house from us with most of our furniture, and they
+would be willing to pay handsomely for the lease.  I can employ
+Trumbull to speak to Plymdale about it."
+
+Rosamond left her husband's knee and walked slowly to the other end of
+the room; when she turned round and walked towards him it was evident
+that the tears had come, and that she was biting her under-lip and
+clasping her hands to keep herself from crying.  Lydgate was
+wretched--shaken with anger and yet feeling that it would be unmanly to
+vent the anger just now.
+
+"I am very sorry, Rosamond; I know this is painful."
+
+"I thought, at least, when I had borne to send the plate back and have
+that man taking an inventory of the furniture--I should have thought
+_that_ would suffice."
+
+"I explained it to you at the time, dear.  That was only a security and
+behind that security there is a debt.  And that debt must be paid
+within the next few months, else we shall have our furniture sold.  If
+young Plymdale will take our house and most of our furniture, we shall
+be able to pay that debt, and some others too, and we shall be quit of
+a place too expensive for us.  We might take a smaller house: Trumbull,
+I know, has a very decent one to let at thirty pounds a-year, and this
+is ninety."  Lydgate uttered this speech in the curt hammering way with
+which we usually try to nail down a vague mind to imperative facts.
+Tears rolled silently down Rosamond's cheeks; she just pressed her
+handkerchief against them, and stood looking at the large vase on the
+mantel-piece. It was a moment of more intense bitterness than she had
+ever felt before.  At last she said, without hurry and with careful
+emphasis--
+
+"I never could have believed that you would like to act in that way."
+
+"Like it?" burst out Lydgate, rising from his chair, thrusting his
+hands in his pockets and stalking away from the hearth; "it's not a
+question of liking.  Of course, I don't like it; it's the only thing I
+can do."  He wheeled round there, and turned towards her.
+
+"I should have thought there were many other means than that," said
+Rosamond.  "Let us have a sale and leave Middlemarch altogether."
+
+"To do what?  What is the use of my leaving my work in Middlemarch to
+go where I have none?  We should be just as penniless elsewhere as we
+are here," said Lydgate still more angrily.
+
+"If we are to be in that position it will be entirely your own doing,
+Tertius," said Rosamond, turning round to speak with the fullest
+conviction.  "You will not behave as you ought to do to your own
+family.  You offended Captain Lydgate.  Sir Godwin was very kind to me
+when we were at Quallingham, and I am sure if you showed proper regard
+to him and told him your affairs, he would do anything for you.  But
+rather than that, you like giving up our house and furniture to Mr. Ned
+Plymdale."
+
+There was something like fierceness in Lydgate's eyes, as he answered
+with new violence, "Well, then, if you will have it so, I do like it.
+I admit that I like it better than making a fool of myself by going to
+beg where it's of no use.  Understand then, that it is what I _like to
+do._"
+
+There was a tone in the last sentence which was equivalent to the
+clutch of his strong hand on Rosamond's delicate arm.  But for all
+that, his will was not a whit stronger than hers.  She immediately
+walked out of the room in silence, but with an intense determination to
+hinder what Lydgate liked to do.
+
+He went out of the house, but as his blood cooled he felt that the
+chief result of the discussion was a deposit of dread within him at the
+idea of opening with his wife in future subjects which might again urge
+him to violent speech.  It was as if a fracture in delicate crystal had
+begun, and he was afraid of any movement that might make it fatal.  His
+marriage would be a mere piece of bitter irony if they could not go on
+loving each other.  He had long ago made up his mind to what he thought
+was her negative character--her want of sensibility, which showed
+itself in disregard both of his specific wishes and of his general
+aims.  The first great disappointment had been borne: the tender
+devotedness and docile adoration of the ideal wife must be renounced,
+and life must be taken up on a lower stage of expectation, as it is by
+men who have lost their limbs.  But the real wife had not only her
+claims, she had still a hold on his heart, and it was his intense
+desire that the hold should remain strong.  In marriage, the certainty,
+"She will never love me much," is easier to bear than the fear, "I
+shall love her no more."  Hence, after that outburst, his inward effort
+was entirely to excuse her, and to blame the hard circumstances which
+were partly his fault.  He tried that evening, by petting her, to heal
+the wound he had made in the morning, and it was not in Rosamond's
+nature to be repellent or sulky; indeed, she welcomed the signs that
+her husband loved her and was under control.  But this was something
+quite distinct from loving _him_. Lydgate would not have chosen soon to
+recur to the plan of parting with the house; he was resolved to carry
+it out, and say as little more about it as possible.  But Rosamond
+herself touched on it at breakfast by saying, mildly--
+
+"Have you spoken to Trumbull yet?"
+
+"No," said Lydgate, "but I shall call on him as I go by this morning.
+No time must be lost."  He took Rosamond's question as a sign that she
+withdrew her inward opposition, and kissed her head caressingly when he
+got up to go away.
+
+As soon as it was late enough to make a call, Rosamond went to Mrs.
+Plymdale, Mr. Ned's mother, and entered with pretty congratulations
+into the subject of the coming marriage.  Mrs. Plymdale's maternal view
+was, that Rosamond might possibly now have retrospective glimpses of
+her own folly; and feeling the advantages to be at present all on the
+side of her son, was too kind a woman not to behave graciously.
+
+"Yes, Ned is most happy, I must say.  And Sophy Toller is all I could
+desire in a daughter-in-law. Of course her father is able to do
+something handsome for her--that is only what would be expected with a
+brewery like his.  And the connection is everything we should desire.
+But that is not what I look at.  She is such a very nice girl--no airs,
+no pretensions, though on a level with the first.  I don't mean with
+the titled aristocracy.  I see very little good in people aiming out of
+their own sphere.  I mean that Sophy is equal to the best in the town,
+and she is contented with that."
+
+"I have always thought her very agreeable," said Rosamond.
+
+"I look upon it as a reward for Ned, who never held his head too high,
+that he should have got into the very best connection," continued Mrs.
+Plymdale, her native sharpness softened by a fervid sense that she was
+taking a correct view.  "And such particular people as the Tollers are,
+they might have objected because some of our friends are not theirs.
+It is well known that your aunt Bulstrode and I have been intimate from
+our youth, and Mr. Plymdale has been always on Mr. Bulstrode's side.
+And I myself prefer serious opinions.  But the Tollers have welcomed
+Ned all the same."
+
+"I am sure he is a very deserving, well-principled young man," said
+Rosamond, with a neat air of patronage in return for Mrs. Plymdale's
+wholesome corrections.
+
+"Oh, he has not the style of a captain in the army, or that sort of
+carriage as if everybody was beneath him, or that showy kind of
+talking, and singing, and intellectual talent.  But I am thankful he
+has not.  It is a poor preparation both for here and Hereafter."
+
+"Oh dear, yes; appearances have very little to do with happiness," said
+Rosamond.  "I think there is every prospect of their being a happy
+couple.  What house will they take?"
+
+"Oh, as for that, they must put up with what they can get.  They have
+been looking at the house in St. Peter's Place, next to Mr. Hackbutt's;
+it belongs to him, and he is putting it nicely in repair.  I suppose
+they are not likely to hear of a better.  Indeed, I think Ned will
+decide the matter to-day."
+
+"I should think it is a nice house; I like St. Peter's Place."
+
+"Well, it is near the Church, and a genteel situation.  But the windows
+are narrow, and it is all ups and downs.  You don't happen to know of
+any other that would be at liberty?" said Mrs. Plymdale, fixing her
+round black eyes on Rosamond with the animation of a sudden thought in
+them.
+
+"Oh no; I hear so little of those things."
+
+Rosamond had not foreseen that question and answer in setting out to
+pay her visit; she had simply meant to gather any information which
+would help her to avert the parting with her own house under
+circumstances thoroughly disagreeable to her.  As to the untruth in her
+reply, she no more reflected on it than she did on the untruth there
+was in her saying that appearances had very little to do with
+happiness.  Her object, she was convinced, was thoroughly justifiable:
+it was Lydgate whose intention was inexcusable; and there was a plan in
+her mind which, when she had carried it out fully, would prove how very
+false a step it would have been for him to have descended from his
+position.
+
+She returned home by Mr. Borthrop Trumbull's office, meaning to call
+there.  It was the first time in her life that Rosamond had thought of
+doing anything in the form of business, but she felt equal to the
+occasion.  That she should be obliged to do what she intensely
+disliked, was an idea which turned her quiet tenacity into active
+invention.  Here was a case in which it could not be enough simply to
+disobey and be serenely, placidly obstinate: she must act according to
+her judgment, and she said to herself that her judgment was
+right--"indeed, if it had not been, she would not have wished to act on
+it."
+
+Mr. Trumbull was in the back-room of his office, and received Rosamond
+with his finest manners, not only because he had much sensibility to
+her charms, but because the good-natured fibre in him was stirred by
+his certainty that Lydgate was in difficulties, and that this
+uncommonly pretty woman--this young lady with the highest personal
+attractions--was likely to feel the pinch of trouble--to find herself
+involved in circumstances beyond her control.  He begged her to do him
+the honor to take a seat, and stood before her trimming and comporting
+himself with an eager solicitude, which was chiefly benevolent.
+Rosamond's first question was, whether her husband had called on Mr.
+Trumbull that morning, to speak about disposing of their house.
+
+"Yes, ma'am, yes, he did; he did so," said the good auctioneer, trying
+to throw something soothing into his iteration.  "I was about to fulfil
+his order, if possible, this afternoon.  He wished me not to
+procrastinate."
+
+"I called to tell you not to go any further, Mr. Trumbull; and I beg of
+you not to mention what has been said on the subject.  Will you oblige
+me?"
+
+"Certainly I will, Mrs. Lydgate, certainly.  Confidence is sacred with
+me on business or any other topic.  I am then to consider the
+commission withdrawn?" said Mr. Trumbull, adjusting the long ends of
+his blue cravat with both hands, and looking at Rosamond deferentially.
+
+"Yes, if you please.  I find that Mr. Ned Plymdale has taken a house--the
+one in St. Peter's Place next to Mr. Hackbutt's. Mr. Lydgate would be
+annoyed that his orders should be fulfilled uselessly.  And besides
+that, there are other circumstances which render the proposal
+unnecessary."
+
+"Very good, Mrs. Lydgate, very good.  I am at your commands, whenever
+you require any service of me," said Mr. Trumbull, who felt pleasure in
+conjecturing that some new resources had been opened.  "Rely on me, I
+beg.  The affair shall go no further."
+
+That evening Lydgate was a little comforted by observing that Rosamond
+was more lively than she had usually been of late, and even seemed
+interested in doing what would please him without being asked.  He
+thought, "If she will be happy and I can rub through, what does it all
+signify?  It is only a narrow swamp that we have to pass in a long
+journey.  If I can get my mind clear again, I shall do."
+
+He was so much cheered that he began to search for an account of
+experiments which he had long ago meant to look up, and had neglected
+out of that creeping self-despair which comes in the train of petty
+anxieties.  He felt again some of the old delightful absorption in a
+far-reaching inquiry, while Rosamond played the quiet music which was
+as helpful to his meditation as the plash of an oar on the evening
+lake.  It was rather late; he had pushed away all the books, and was
+looking at the fire with his hands clasped behind his head in
+forgetfulness of everything except the construction of a new
+controlling experiment, when Rosamond, who had left the piano and was
+leaning back in her chair watching him, said--
+
+"Mr. Ned Plymdale has taken a house already."
+
+Lydgate, startled and jarred, looked up in silence for a moment, like a
+man who has been disturbed in his sleep.  Then flushing with an
+unpleasant consciousness, he asked--
+
+"How do you know?"
+
+"I called at Mrs. Plymdale's this morning, and she told me that he had
+taken the house in St. Peter's Place, next to Mr. Hackbutt's."
+
+Lydgate was silent.  He drew his hands from behind his head and pressed
+them against the hair which was hanging, as it was apt to do, in a mass
+on his forehead, while he rested his elbows on his knees.  He was
+feeling bitter disappointment, as if he had opened a door out of a
+suffocating place and had found it walled up; but he also felt sure
+that Rosamond was pleased with the cause of his disappointment.  He
+preferred not looking at her and not speaking, until he had got over
+the first spasm of vexation.  After all, he said in his bitterness,
+what can a woman care about so much as house and furniture? a husband
+without them is an absurdity.  When he looked up and pushed his hair
+aside, his dark eyes had a miserable blank non-expectance of sympathy
+in them, but he only said, coolly--
+
+"Perhaps some one else may turn up.  I told Trumbull to be on the
+look-out if he failed with Plymdale."
+
+Rosamond made no remark.  She trusted to the chance that nothing more
+would pass between her husband and the auctioneer until some issue
+should have justified her interference; at any rate, she had hindered
+the event which she immediately dreaded.  After a pause, she said--
+
+"How much money is it that those disagreeable people want?"
+
+"What disagreeable people?"
+
+"Those who took the list--and the others.  I mean, how much money would
+satisfy them so that you need not be troubled any more?"
+
+Lydgate surveyed her for a moment, as if he were looking for symptoms,
+and then said, "Oh, if I could have got six hundred from Plymdale for
+furniture and as premium, I might have managed.  I could have paid off
+Dover, and given enough on account to the others to make them wait
+patiently, if we contracted our expenses."
+
+"But I mean how much should you want if we stayed in this house?"
+
+"More than I am likely to get anywhere," said Lydgate, with rather a
+grating sarcasm in his tone.  It angered him to perceive that
+Rosamond's mind was wandering over impracticable wishes instead of
+facing possible efforts.
+
+"Why should you not mention the sum?" said Rosamond, with a mild
+indication that she did not like his manners.
+
+"Well," said Lydgate in a guessing tone, "it would take at least a
+thousand to set me at ease.  But," he added, incisively, "I have to
+consider what I shall do without it, not with it."
+
+Rosamond said no more.
+
+But the next day she carried out her plan of writing to Sir Godwin
+Lydgate.  Since the Captain's visit, she had received a letter from
+him, and also one from Mrs. Mengan, his married sister, condoling with
+her on the loss of her baby, and expressing vaguely the hope that they
+should see her again at Quallingham.  Lydgate had told her that this
+politeness meant nothing; but she was secretly convinced that any
+backwardness in Lydgate's family towards him was due to his cold and
+contemptuous behavior, and she had answered the letters in her most
+charming manner, feeling some confidence that a specific invitation
+would follow.  But there had been total silence.  The Captain evidently
+was not a great penman, and Rosamond reflected that the sisters might
+have been abroad.  However, the season was come for thinking of friends
+at home, and at any rate Sir Godwin, who had chucked her under the
+chin, and pronounced her to be like the celebrated beauty, Mrs. Croly,
+who had made a conquest of him in 1790, would be touched by any appeal
+from her, and would find it pleasant for her sake to behave as he ought
+to do towards his nephew.  Rosamond was naively convinced of what an
+old gentleman ought to do to prevent her from suffering annoyance.  And
+she wrote what she considered the most judicious letter possible--one
+which would strike Sir Godwin as a proof of her excellent sense--pointing
+out how desirable it was that Tertius should quit such a place
+as Middlemarch for one more fitted to his talents, how the unpleasant
+character of the inhabitants had hindered his professional success, and
+how in consequence he was in money difficulties, from which it would
+require a thousand pounds thoroughly to extricate him.  She did not say
+that Tertius was unaware of her intention to write; for she had the
+idea that his supposed sanction of her letter would be in accordance
+with what she did say of his great regard for his uncle Godwin as the
+relative who had always been his best friend.  Such was the force of
+Poor Rosamond's tactics now she applied them to affairs.
+
+This had happened before the party on New Year's Day, and no answer had
+yet come from Sir Godwin.  But on the morning of that day Lydgate had
+to learn that Rosamond had revoked his order to Borthrop Trumbull.
+Feeling it necessary that she should be gradually accustomed to the
+idea of their quitting the house in Lowick Gate, he overcame his
+reluctance to speak to her again on the subject, and when they were
+breakfasting said--
+
+"I shall try to see Trumbull this morning, and tell him to advertise
+the house in the 'Pioneer' and the 'Trumpet.' If the thing were
+advertised, some one might be inclined to take it who would not
+otherwise have thought of a change.  In these country places many
+people go on in their old houses when their families are too large for
+them, for want of knowing where they can find another.  And Trumbull
+seems to have got no bite at all."
+
+Rosamond knew that the inevitable moment was come.  "I ordered Trumbull
+not to inquire further," she said, with a careful calmness which was
+evidently defensive.
+
+Lydgate stared at her in mute amazement.  Only half an hour before he
+had been fastening up her plaits for her, and talking the "little
+language" of affection, which Rosamond, though not returning it,
+accepted as if she had been a serene and lovely image, now and then
+miraculously dimpling towards her votary.  With such fibres still astir
+in him, the shock he received could not at once be distinctly anger; it
+was confused pain.  He laid down the knife and fork with which he was
+carving, and throwing himself back in his chair, said at last, with a
+cool irony in his tone--
+
+"May I ask when and why you did so?"
+
+"When I knew that the Plymdales had taken a house, I called to tell him
+not to mention ours to them; and at the same time I told him not to let
+the affair go on any further.  I knew that it would be very injurious
+to you if it were known that you wished to part with your house and
+furniture, and I had a very strong objection to it.  I think that was
+reason enough."
+
+"It was of no consequence then that I had told you imperative reasons
+of another kind; of no consequence that I had come to a different
+conclusion, and given an order accordingly?" said Lydgate, bitingly,
+the thunder and lightning gathering about his brow and eyes.
+
+The effect of any one's anger on Rosamond had always been to make her
+shrink in cold dislike, and to become all the more calmly correct, in
+the conviction that she was not the person to misbehave whatever others
+might do.  She replied--
+
+"I think I had a perfect right to speak on a subject which concerns me
+at least as much as you."
+
+"Clearly--you had a right to speak, but only to me.  You had no right
+to contradict my orders secretly, and treat me as if I were a fool,"
+said Lydgate, in the same tone as before.  Then with some added scorn,
+"Is it possible to make you understand what the consequences will be?
+Is it of any use for me to tell you again why we must try to part with
+the house?"
+
+"It is not necessary for you to tell me again," said Rosamond, in a
+voice that fell and trickled like cold water-drops. "I remembered what
+you said.  You spoke just as violently as you do now.  But that does
+not alter my opinion that you ought to try every other means rather
+than take a step which is so painful to me.  And as to advertising the
+house, I think it would be perfectly degrading to you."
+
+"And suppose I disregard your opinion as you disregard mine?"
+
+"You can do so, of course.  But I think you ought to have told me
+before we were married that you would place me in the worst position,
+rather than give up your own will."
+
+Lydgate did not speak, but tossed his head on one side, and twitched
+the corners of his mouth in despair.  Rosamond, seeing that he was not
+looking at her, rose and set his cup of coffee before him; but he took
+no notice of it, and went on with an inward drama and argument,
+occasionally moving in his seat, resting one arm on the table, and
+rubbing his hand against his hair.  There was a conflux of emotions and
+thoughts in him that would not let him either give thorough way to his
+anger or persevere with simple rigidity of resolve.  Rosamond took
+advantage of his silence.
+
+"When we were married everyone felt that your position was very high.
+I could not have imagined then that you would want to sell our
+furniture, and take a house in Bride Street, where the rooms are like
+cages.  If we are to live in that way let us at least leave
+Middlemarch."
+
+"These would be very strong considerations," said Lydgate, half
+ironically--still there was a withered paleness about his lips as he
+looked at his coffee, and did not drink--"these would be very strong
+considerations if I did not happen to be in debt."
+
+"Many persons must have been in debt in the same way, but if they are
+respectable, people trust them.  I am sure I have heard papa say that
+the Torbits were in debt, and they went on very well.  It cannot be
+good to act rashly," said Rosamond, with serene wisdom.
+
+Lydgate sat paralyzed by opposing impulses: since no reasoning he could
+apply to Rosamond seemed likely to conquer her assent, he wanted to
+smash and grind some object on which he could at least produce an
+impression, or else to tell her brutally that he was master, and she
+must obey.  But he not only dreaded the effect of such extremities on
+their mutual life--he had a growing dread of Rosamond's quiet elusive
+obstinacy, which would not allow any assertion of power to be final;
+and again, she had touched him in a spot of keenest feeling by implying
+that she had been deluded with a false vision of happiness in marrying
+him.  As to saying that he was master, it was not the fact.  The very
+resolution to which he had wrought himself by dint of logic and
+honorable pride was beginning to relax under her torpedo contact.  He
+swallowed half his cup of coffee, and then rose to go.
+
+"I may at least request that you will not go to Trumbull at
+present--until it has been seen that there are no other means," said
+Rosamond.  Although she was not subject to much fear, she felt it safer
+not to betray that she had written to Sir Godwin.  "Promise me that you
+will not go to him for a few weeks, or without telling me."
+
+Lydgate gave a short laugh.  "I think it is I who should exact a
+promise that you will do nothing without telling me," he said, turning
+his eyes sharply upon her, and then moving to the door.
+
+"You remember that we are going to dine at papa's," said Rosamond,
+wishing that he should turn and make a more thorough concession to her.
+But he only said "Oh yes," impatiently, and went away.  She held it to
+be very odious in him that he did not think the painful propositions he
+had had to make to her were enough, without showing so unpleasant a
+temper.  And when she put the moderate request that he would defer
+going to Trumbull again, it was cruel in him not to assure her of what
+he meant to do.  She was convinced of her having acted in every way for
+the best; and each grating or angry speech of Lydgate's served only as
+an addition to the register of offences in her mind.  Poor Rosamond for
+months had begun to associate her husband with feelings of
+disappointment, and the terribly inflexible relation of marriage had
+lost its charm of encouraging delightful dreams.  It had freed her from
+the disagreeables of her father's house, but it had not given her
+everything that she had wished and hoped.  The Lydgate with whom she
+had been in love had been a group of airy conditions for her, most of
+which had disappeared, while their place had been taken by every-day
+details which must be lived through slowly from hour to hour, not
+floated through with a rapid selection of favorable aspects.  The
+habits of Lydgate's profession, his home preoccupation with scientific
+subjects, which seemed to her almost like a morbid vampire's taste, his
+peculiar views of things which had never entered into the dialogue of
+courtship--all these continually alienating influences, even without
+the fact of his having placed himself at a disadvantage in the town,
+and without that first shock of revelation about Dover's debt, would
+have made his presence dull to her.  There was another presence which
+ever since the early days of her marriage, until four months ago, had
+been an agreeable excitement, but that was gone: Rosamond would not
+confess to herself how much the consequent blank had to do with her
+utter ennui; and it seemed to her (perhaps she was right) that an
+invitation to Quallingham, and an opening for Lydgate to settle
+elsewhere than in Middlemarch--in London, or somewhere likely to be
+free from unpleasantness--would satisfy her quite well, and make her
+indifferent to the absence of Will Ladislaw, towards whom she felt some
+resentment for his exaltation of Mrs. Casaubon.
+
+That was the state of things with Lydgate and Rosamond on the New
+Year's Day when they dined at her father's, she looking mildly neutral
+towards him in remembrance of his ill-tempered behavior at breakfast,
+and he carrying a much deeper effect from the inward conflict in which
+that morning scene was only one of many epochs.  His flushed effort
+while talking to Mr. Farebrother--his effort after the cynical pretence
+that all ways of getting money are essentially the same, and that
+chance has an empire which reduces choice to a fool's illusion--was but
+the symptom of a wavering resolve, a benumbed response to the old
+stimuli of enthusiasm.
+
+What was he to do?  He saw even more keenly than Rosamond did the
+dreariness of taking her into the small house in Bride Street, where
+she would have scanty furniture around her and discontent within: a
+life of privation and life with Rosamond were two images which had
+become more and more irreconcilable ever since the threat of privation
+had disclosed itself.  But even if his resolves had forced the two
+images into combination, the useful preliminaries to that hard change
+were not visibly within reach.  And though he had not given the promise
+which his wife had asked for, he did not go again to Trumbull.  He even
+began to think of taking a rapid journey to the North and seeing Sir
+Godwin.  He had once believed that nothing would urge him into making
+an application for money to his uncle, but he had not then known the
+full pressure of alternatives yet more disagreeable.  He could not
+depend on the effect of a letter; it was only in an interview, however
+disagreeable this might be to himself, that he could give a thorough
+explanation and could test the effectiveness of kinship.  No sooner had
+Lydgate begun to represent this step to himself as the easiest than
+there was a reaction of anger that he--he who had long ago determined
+to live aloof from such abject calculations, such self-interested
+anxiety about the inclinations and the pockets of men with whom he had
+been proud to have no aims in common--should have fallen not simply to
+their level, but to the level of soliciting them.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXV.
+
+    "One of us two must bowen douteless,
+     And, sith a man is more reasonable
+     Than woman is, ye [men] moste be suffrable.
+                             --CHAUCER: Canterbury Tales.
+
+
+The bias of human nature to be slow in correspondence triumphs even
+over the present quickening in the general pace of things: what wonder
+then that in 1832 old Sir Godwin Lydgate was slow to write a letter
+which was of consequence to others rather than to himself?  Nearly
+three weeks of the new year were gone, and Rosamond, awaiting an answer
+to her winning appeal, was every day disappointed.  Lydgate, in total
+ignorance of her expectations, was seeing the bills come in, and
+feeling that Dover's use of his advantage over other creditors was
+imminent.  He had never mentioned to Rosamond his brooding purpose of
+going to Quallingham: he did not want to admit what would appear to her
+a concession to her wishes after indignant refusal, until the last
+moment; but he was really expecting to set off soon.  A slice of the
+railway would enable him to manage the whole journey and back in four
+days.
+
+But one morning after Lydgate had gone out, a letter came addressed to
+him, which Rosamond saw clearly to be from Sir Godwin.  She was full of
+hope.  Perhaps there might be a particular note to her enclosed; but
+Lydgate was naturally addressed on the question of money or other aid,
+and the fact that he was written to, nay, the very delay in writing at
+all, seemed to certify that the answer was thoroughly compliant.  She
+was too much excited by these thoughts to do anything but light
+stitching in a warm corner of the dining-room, with the outside of this
+momentous letter lying on the table before her.  About twelve she heard
+her husband's step in the passage, and tripping to open the door, she
+said in her lightest tones, "Tertius, come in here--here is a letter
+for you."
+
+"Ah?" he said, not taking off his hat, but just turning her round
+within his arm to walk towards the spot where the letter lay.  "My
+uncle Godwin!" he exclaimed, while Rosamond reseated herself, and
+watched him as he opened the letter.  She had expected him to be
+surprised.
+
+While Lydgate's eyes glanced rapidly over the brief letter, she saw his
+face, usually of a pale brown, taking on a dry whiteness; with nostrils
+and lips quivering he tossed down the letter before her, and said
+violently--
+
+"It will be impossible to endure life with you, if you will always be
+acting secretly--acting in opposition to me and hiding your actions."
+
+He checked his speech and turned his back on her--then wheeled round
+and walked about, sat down, and got up again restlessly, grasping hard
+the objects deep down in his pockets.  He was afraid of saying
+something irremediably cruel.
+
+Rosamond too had changed color as she read.  The letter ran in this
+way:--
+
+"DEAR TERTIUS,--Don't set your wife to write to me when you have
+anything to ask.  It is a roundabout wheedling sort of thing which I
+should not have credited you with.  I never choose to write to a woman
+on matters of business.  As to my supplying you with a thousand pounds,
+or only half that sum, I can do nothing of the sort.  My own family
+drains me to the last penny.  With two younger sons and three
+daughters, I am not likely to have cash to spare.  You seem to have got
+through your own money pretty quickly, and to have made a mess where
+you are; the sooner you go somewhere else the better.  But I have
+nothing to do with men of your profession, and can't help you there.  I
+did the best I could for you as guardian, and let you have your own way
+in taking to medicine.  You might have gone into the army or the
+Church.  Your money would have held out for that, and there would have
+been a surer ladder before you.  Your uncle Charles has had a grudge
+against you for not going into his profession, but not I. I have always
+wished you well, but you must consider yourself on your own legs
+entirely now.
+
+                Your affectionate uncle,
+                        GODWIN LYDGATE."
+
+When Rosamond had finished reading the letter she sat quite still, with
+her hands folded before her, restraining any show of her keen
+disappointment, and intrenching herself in quiet passivity under her
+husband's wrath.  Lydgate paused in his movements, looked at her again,
+and said, with biting severity--
+
+"Will this be enough to convince you of the harm you may do by secret
+meddling?  Have you sense enough to recognize now your incompetence to
+judge and act for me--to interfere with your ignorance in affairs which
+it belongs to me to decide on?"
+
+The words were hard; but this was not the first time that Lydgate had
+been frustrated by her.  She did not look at him, and made no reply.
+
+"I had nearly resolved on going to Quallingham.  It would have cost me
+pain enough to do it, yet it might have been of some use.  But it has
+been of no use for me to think of anything.  You have always been
+counteracting me secretly.  You delude me with a false assent, and then
+I am at the mercy of your devices.  If you mean to resist every wish I
+express, say so and defy me.  I shall at least know what I am doing
+then."
+
+It is a terrible moment in young lives when the closeness of love's
+bond has turned to this power of galling.  In spite of Rosamond's
+self-control a tear fell silently and rolled over her lips.  She still
+said nothing; but under that quietude was hidden an intense effect: she
+was in such entire disgust with her husband that she wished she had
+never seen him.  Sir Godwin's rudeness towards her and utter want of
+feeling ranged him with Dover and all other creditors--disagreeable
+people who only thought of themselves, and did not mind how annoying
+they were to her.  Even her father was unkind, and might have done more
+for them.  In fact there was but one person in Rosamond's world whom
+she did not regard as blameworthy, and that was the graceful creature
+with blond plaits and with little hands crossed before her, who had
+never expressed herself unbecomingly, and had always acted for the
+best--the best naturally being what she best liked.
+
+Lydgate pausing and looking at her began to feel that half-maddening
+sense of helplessness which comes over passionate people when their
+passion is met by an innocent-looking silence whose meek victimized air
+seems to put them in the wrong, and at last infects even the justest
+indignation with a doubt of its justice.  He needed to recover the full
+sense that he was in the right by moderating his words.
+
+"Can you not see, Rosamond," he began again, trying to be simply grave
+and not bitter, "that nothing can be so fatal as a want of openness and
+confidence between us?  It has happened again and again that I have
+expressed a decided wish, and you have seemed to assent, yet after that
+you have secretly disobeyed my wish.  In that way I can never know what
+I have to trust to.  There would be some hope for us if you would admit
+this.  Am I such an unreasonable, furious brute?  Why should you not be
+open with me?"  Still silence.
+
+"Will you only say that you have been mistaken, and that I may depend
+on your not acting secretly in future?" said Lydgate, urgently, but
+with something of request in his tone which Rosamond was quick to
+perceive.  She spoke with coolness.
+
+"I cannot possibly make admissions or promises in answer to such words
+as you have used towards me.  I have not been accustomed to language of
+that kind.  You have spoken of my 'secret meddling,' and my
+'interfering ignorance,' and my 'false assent.'  I have never expressed
+myself in that way to you, and I think that you ought to apologize.
+You spoke of its being impossible to live with me.  Certainly you have
+not made my life pleasant to me of late.  I think it was to be expected
+that I should try to avert some of the hardships which our marriage has
+brought on me."  Another tear fell as Rosamond ceased speaking, and she
+pressed it away as quietly as the first.
+
+Lydgate flung himself into a chair, feeling checkmated.  What place was
+there in her mind for a remonstrance to lodge in?  He laid down his
+hat, flung an arm over the back of his chair, and looked down for some
+moments without speaking.  Rosamond had the double purchase over him of
+insensibility to the point of justice in his reproach, and of
+sensibility to the undeniable hardships now present in her married
+life.  Although her duplicity in the affair of the house had exceeded
+what he knew, and had really hindered the Plymdales from knowing of it,
+she had no consciousness that her action could rightly be called false.
+We are not obliged to identify our own acts according to a strict
+classification, any more than the materials of our grocery and clothes.
+Rosamond felt that she was aggrieved, and that this was what Lydgate
+had to recognize.
+
+As for him, the need of accommodating himself to her nature, which was
+inflexible in proportion to its negations, held him as with pincers.
+He had begun to have an alarmed foresight of her irrevocable loss of
+love for him, and the consequent dreariness of their life.  The ready
+fulness of his emotions made this dread alternate quickly with the
+first violent movements of his anger.  It would assuredly have been a
+vain boast in him to say that he was her master.
+
+"You have not made my life pleasant to me of late"--"the hardships
+which our marriage has brought on me"--these words were stinging his
+imagination as a pain makes an exaggerated dream.  If he were not only
+to sink from his highest resolve, but to sink into the hideous
+fettering of domestic hate?
+
+"Rosamond," he said, turning his eyes on her with a melancholy look,
+"you should allow for a man's words when he is disappointed and
+provoked.  You and I cannot have opposite interests.  I cannot part my
+happiness from yours.  If I am angry with you, it is that you seem not
+to see how any concealment divides us.  How could I wish to make
+anything hard to you either by my words or conduct?  When I hurt you, I
+hurt part of my own life.  I should never be angry with you if you
+would be quite open with me."
+
+"I have only wished to prevent you from hurrying us into wretchedness
+without any necessity," said Rosamond, the tears coming again from a
+softened feeling now that her husband had softened.  "It is so very
+hard to be disgraced here among all the people we know, and to live in
+such a miserable way.  I wish I had died with the baby."
+
+She spoke and wept with that gentleness which makes such words and
+tears omnipotent over a loving-hearted man.  Lydgate drew his chair
+near to hers and pressed her delicate head against his cheek with his
+powerful tender hand.  He only caressed her; he did not say anything;
+for what was there to say?  He could not promise to shield her from the
+dreaded wretchedness, for he could see no sure means of doing so.  When
+he left her to go out again, he told himself that it was ten times
+harder for her than for him: he had a life away from home, and constant
+appeals to his activity on behalf of others.  He wished to excuse
+everything in her if he could--but it was inevitable that in that
+excusing mood he should think of her as if she were an animal of
+another and feebler species.  Nevertheless she had mastered him.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVI.
+
+    "'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
+      Another thing to fall."
+                          --Measure for Measure.
+
+
+Lydgate certainly had good reason to reflect on the service his
+practice did him in counteracting his personal cares.  He had no longer
+free energy enough for spontaneous research and speculative thinking,
+but by the bedside of patients, the direct external calls on his
+judgment and sympathies brought the added impulse needed to draw him
+out of himself.  It was not simply that beneficent harness of routine
+which enables silly men to live respectably and unhappy men to live
+calmly--it was a perpetual claim on the immediate fresh application of
+thought, and on the consideration of another's need and trial.  Many of
+us looking back through life would say that the kindest man we have
+ever known has been a medical man, or perhaps that surgeon whose fine
+tact, directed by deeply informed perception, has come to us in our
+need with a more sublime beneficence than that of miracle-workers. Some
+of that twice-blessed mercy was always with Lydgate in his work at the
+Hospital or in private houses, serving better than any opiate to quiet
+and sustain him under his anxieties and his sense of mental degeneracy.
+
+Mr. Farebrother's suspicion as to the opiate was true, however.  Under
+the first galling pressure of foreseen difficulties, and the first
+perception that his marriage, if it were not to be a yoked loneliness,
+must be a state of effort to go on loving without too much care about
+being loved, he had once or twice tried a dose of opium.  But he had no
+hereditary constitutional craving after such transient escapes from the
+hauntings of misery.  He was strong, could drink a great deal of wine,
+but did not care about it; and when the men round him were drinking
+spirits, he took sugar and water, having a contemptuous pity even for
+the earliest stages of excitement from drink.  It was the same with
+gambling.  He had looked on at a great deal of gambling in Paris,
+watching it as if it had been a disease.  He was no more tempted by
+such winning than he was by drink.  He had said to himself that the
+only winning he cared for must be attained by a conscious process of
+high, difficult combination tending towards a beneficent result.  The
+power he longed for could not be represented by agitated fingers
+clutching a heap of coin, or by the half-barbarous, half-idiotic
+triumph in the eyes of a man who sweeps within his arms the ventures of
+twenty chapfallen companions.
+
+But just as he had tried opium, so his thought now began to turn upon
+gambling--not with appetite for its excitement, but with a sort of
+wistful inward gaze after that easy way of getting money, which implied
+no asking and brought no responsibility.  If he had been in London or
+Paris at that time, it is probable that such thoughts, seconded by
+opportunity, would have taken him into a gambling-house, no longer to
+watch the gamblers, but to watch with them in kindred eagerness.
+Repugnance would have been surmounted by the immense need to win, if
+chance would be kind enough to let him.  An incident which happened not
+very long after that airy notion of getting aid from his uncle had been
+excluded, was a strong sign of the effect that might have followed any
+extant opportunity of gambling.
+
+The billiard-room at the Green Dragon was the constant resort of a
+certain set, most of whom, like our acquaintance Mr. Bambridge, were
+regarded as men of pleasure.  It was here that poor Fred Vincy had made
+part of his memorable debt, having lost money in betting, and been
+obliged to borrow of that gay companion.  It was generally known in
+Middlemarch that a good deal of money was lost and won in this way; and
+the consequent repute of the Green Dragon as a place of dissipation
+naturally heightened in some quarters the temptation to go there.
+Probably its regular visitants, like the initiates of freemasonry,
+wished that there were something a little more tremendous to keep to
+themselves concerning it; but they were not a closed community, and
+many decent seniors as well as juniors occasionally turned into the
+billiard-room to see what was going on.  Lydgate, who had the muscular
+aptitude for billiards, and was fond of the game, had once or twice in
+the early days after his arrival in Middlemarch taken his turn with the
+cue at the Green Dragon; but afterwards he had no leisure for the game,
+and no inclination for the socialities there.  One evening, however, he
+had occasion to seek Mr. Bambridge at that resort.  The horsedealer had
+engaged to get him a customer for his remaining good horse, for which
+Lydgate had determined to substitute a cheap hack, hoping by this
+reduction of style to get perhaps twenty pounds; and he cared now for
+every small sum, as a help towards feeding the patience of his
+tradesmen.  To run up to the billiard-room, as he was passing, would
+save time.
+
+Mr. Bambridge was not yet come, but would be sure to arrive by-and-by,
+said his friend Mr. Horrock; and Lydgate stayed, playing a game for the
+sake of passing the time.  That evening he had the peculiar light in
+the eyes and the unusual vivacity which had been once noticed in him by
+Mr. Farebrother.  The exceptional fact of his presence was much noticed
+in the room, where there was a good deal of Middlemarch company; and
+several lookers-on, as well as some of the players, were betting with
+animation.  Lydgate was playing well, and felt confident; the bets were
+dropping round him, and with a swift glancing thought of the probable
+gain which might double the sum he was saving from his horse, he began
+to bet on his own play, and won again and again.  Mr. Bambridge had
+come in, but Lydgate did not notice him.  He was not only excited with
+his play, but visions were gleaming on him of going the next day to
+Brassing, where there was gambling on a grander scale to be had, and
+where, by one powerful snatch at the devil's bait, he might carry it
+off without the hook, and buy his rescue from his daily solicitings.
+
+He was still winning when two new visitors entered.  One of them was a
+young Hawley, just come from his law studies in town, and the other was
+Fred Vincy, who had spent several evenings of late at this old haunt of
+his.  Young Hawley, an accomplished billiard-player, brought a cool
+fresh hand to the cue.  But Fred Vincy, startled at seeing Lydgate, and
+astonished to see him betting with an excited air, stood aside, and
+kept out of the circle round the table.
+
+Fred had been rewarding resolution by a little laxity of late.  He had
+been working heartily for six months at all outdoor occupations under
+Mr. Garth, and by dint of severe practice had nearly mastered the
+defects of his handwriting, this practice being, perhaps, a little the
+less severe that it was often carried on in the evening at Mr. Garth's
+under the eyes of Mary.  But the last fortnight Mary had been staying
+at Lowick Parsonage with the ladies there, during Mr. Farebrother's
+residence in Middlemarch, where he was carrying out some parochial
+plans; and Fred, not seeing anything more agreeable to do, had turned
+into the Green Dragon, partly to play at billiards, partly to taste the
+old flavor of discourse about horses, sport, and things in general,
+considered from a point of view which was not strenuously correct.  He
+had not been out hunting once this season, had had no horse of his own
+to ride, and had gone from place to place chiefly with Mr. Garth in his
+gig, or on the sober cob which Mr. Garth could lend him.  It was a
+little too bad, Fred began to think, that he should be kept in the
+traces with more severity than if he had been a clergyman.  "I will
+tell you what, Mistress Mary--it will be rather harder work to learn
+surveying and drawing plans than it would have been to write sermons,"
+he had said, wishing her to appreciate what he went through for her
+sake; "and as to Hercules and Theseus, they were nothing to me.  They
+had sport, and never learned to write a bookkeeping hand." And now,
+Mary being out of the way for a little while, Fred, like any other
+strong dog who cannot slip his collar, had pulled up the staple of his
+chain and made a small escape, not of course meaning to go fast or far.
+There could be no reason why he should not play at billiards, but he
+was determined not to bet.  As to money just now, Fred had in his mind
+the heroic project of saving almost all of the eighty pounds that Mr.
+Garth offered him, and returning it, which he could easily do by giving
+up all futile money-spending, since he had a superfluous stock of
+clothes, and no expense in his board.  In that way he could, in one
+year, go a good way towards repaying the ninety pounds of which he had
+deprived Mrs. Garth, unhappily at a time when she needed that sum more
+than she did now.  Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that on this
+evening, which was the fifth of his recent visits to the billiard-room,
+Fred had, not in his pocket, but in his mind, the ten pounds which he
+meant to reserve for himself from his half-year's salary (having before
+him the pleasure of carrying thirty to Mrs. Garth when Mary was likely
+to be come home again)--he had those ten pounds in his mind as a fund
+from which he might risk something, if there were a chance of a good
+bet.  Why?  Well, when sovereigns were flying about, why shouldn't he
+catch a few?  He would never go far along that road again; but a man
+likes to assure himself, and men of pleasure generally, what he could
+do in the way of mischief if he chose, and that if he abstains from
+making himself ill, or beggaring himself, or talking with the utmost
+looseness which the narrow limits of human capacity will allow, it is
+not because he is a spooney.  Fred did not enter into formal reasons,
+which are a very artificial, inexact way of representing the tingling
+returns of old habit, and the caprices of young blood: but there was
+lurking in him a prophetic sense that evening, that when he began to
+play he should also begin to bet--that he should enjoy some
+punch-drinking, and in general prepare himself for feeling "rather
+seedy" in the morning.  It is in such indefinable movements that action
+often begins.
+
+But the last thing likely to have entered Fred's expectation was that
+he should see his brother-in-law Lydgate--of whom he had never quite
+dropped the old opinion that he was a prig, and tremendously conscious
+of his superiority--looking excited and betting, just as he himself
+might have done.  Fred felt a shock greater than he could quite account
+for by the vague knowledge that Lydgate was in debt, and that his
+father had refused to help him; and his own inclination to enter into
+the play was suddenly checked.  It was a strange reversal of attitudes:
+Fred's blond face and blue eyes, usually bright and careless, ready to
+give attention to anything that held out a promise of amusement,
+looking involuntarily grave and almost embarrassed as if by the sight
+of something unfitting; while Lydgate, who had habitually an air of
+self-possessed strength, and a certain meditativeness that seemed to
+lie behind his most observant attention, was acting, watching, speaking
+with that excited narrow consciousness which reminds one of an animal
+with fierce eyes and retractile claws.
+
+Lydgate, by betting on his own strokes, had won sixteen pounds; but
+young Hawley's arrival had changed the poise of things.  He made
+first-rate strokes himself, and began to bet against Lydgate's strokes,
+the strain of whose nerves was thus changed from simple confidence in
+his own movements to defying another person's doubt in them.  The
+defiance was more exciting than the confidence, but it was less sure.
+He continued to bet on his own play, but began often to fail.  Still he
+went on, for his mind was as utterly narrowed into that precipitous
+crevice of play as if he had been the most ignorant lounger there.
+Fred observed that Lydgate was losing fast, and found himself in the
+new situation of puzzling his brains to think of some device by which,
+without being offensive, he could withdraw Lydgate's attention, and
+perhaps suggest to him a reason for quitting the room.  He saw that
+others were observing Lydgate's strange unlikeness to himself, and it
+occurred to him that merely to touch his elbow and call him aside for a
+moment might rouse him from his absorption.  He could think of nothing
+cleverer than the daring improbability of saying that he wanted to see
+Rosy, and wished to know if she were at home this evening; and he was
+going desperately to carry out this weak device, when a waiter came up
+to him with a message, saying that Mr. Farebrother was below, and
+begged to speak with him.
+
+Fred was surprised, not quite comfortably, but sending word that he
+would be down immediately, he went with a new impulse up to Lydgate,
+said, "Can I speak to you a moment?" and drew him aside.
+
+"Farebrother has just sent up a message to say that he wants to speak
+to me.  He is below.  I thought you might like to know he was there, if
+you had anything to say to him."
+
+Fred had simply snatched up this pretext for speaking, because he could
+not say, "You are losing confoundedly, and are making everybody stare
+at you; you had better come away."  But inspiration could hardly have
+served him better.  Lydgate had not before seen that Fred was present,
+and his sudden appearance with an announcement of Mr. Farebrother had
+the effect of a sharp concussion.
+
+"No, no," said Lydgate; "I have nothing particular to say to him.
+But--the game is up--I must be going--I came in just to see Bambridge."
+
+"Bambridge is over there, but he is making a row--I don't think he's
+ready for business.  Come down with me to Farebrother.  I expect he is
+going to blow me up, and you will shield me," said Fred, with some
+adroitness.
+
+Lydgate felt shame, but could not bear to act as if he felt it, by
+refusing to see Mr. Farebrother; and he went down.  They merely shook
+hands, however, and spoke of the frost; and when all three had turned
+into the street, the Vicar seemed quite willing to say good-by to
+Lydgate.  His present purpose was clearly to talk with Fred alone, and
+he said, kindly, "I disturbed you, young gentleman, because I have some
+pressing business with you.  Walk with me to St. Botolph's, will you?"
+
+It was a fine night, the sky thick with stars, and Mr. Farebrother
+proposed that they should make a circuit to the old church by the
+London road.  The next thing he said was--
+
+"I thought Lydgate never went to the Green Dragon?"
+
+"So did I," said Fred.  "But he said that he went to see Bambridge."
+
+"He was not playing, then?"
+
+Fred had not meant to tell this, but he was obliged now to say, "Yes,
+he was.  But I suppose it was an accidental thing.  I have never seen
+him there before."
+
+"You have been going often yourself, then, lately?"
+
+"Oh, about five or six times."
+
+"I think you had some good reason for giving up the habit of going
+there?"
+
+"Yes.  You know all about it," said Fred, not liking to be catechised
+in this way.  "I made a clean breast to you."
+
+"I suppose that gives me a warrant to speak about the matter now.  It
+is understood between us, is it not?--that we are on a footing of open
+friendship: I have listened to you, and you will be willing to listen
+to me.  I may take my turn in talking a little about myself?"
+
+"I am under the deepest obligation to you, Mr. Farebrother," said Fred,
+in a state of uncomfortable surmise.
+
+"I will not affect to deny that you are under some obligation to me.
+But I am going to confess to you, Fred, that I have been tempted to
+reverse all that by keeping silence with you just now.  When somebody
+said to me, 'Young Vincy has taken to being at the billiard-table every
+night again--he won't bear the curb long;' I was tempted to do the
+opposite of what I am doing--to hold my tongue and wait while you went
+down the ladder again, betting first and then--"
+
+"I have not made any bets," said Fred, hastily.
+
+"Glad to hear it.  But I say, my prompting was to look on and see you
+take the wrong turning, wear out Garth's patience, and lose the best
+opportunity of your life--the opportunity which you made some rather
+difficult effort to secure.  You can guess the feeling which raised
+that temptation in me--I am sure you know it.  I am sure you know that
+the satisfaction of your affections stands in the way of mine."
+
+There was a pause.  Mr. Farebrother seemed to wait for a recognition of
+the fact; and the emotion perceptible in the tones of his fine voice
+gave solemnity to his words.  But no feeling could quell Fred's alarm.
+
+"I could not be expected to give her up," he said, after a moment's
+hesitation: it was not a case for any pretence of generosity.
+
+"Clearly not, when her affection met yours.  But relations of this
+sort, even when they are of long standing, are always liable to change.
+I can easily conceive that you might act in a way to loosen the tie she
+feels towards you--it must be remembered that she is only conditionally
+bound to you--and that in that case, another man, who may flatter
+himself that he has a hold on her regard, might succeed in winning that
+firm place in her love as well as respect which you had let slip.  I
+can easily conceive such a result," repeated Mr. Farebrother,
+emphatically.  "There is a companionship of ready sympathy, which might
+get the advantage even over the longest associations."  It seemed to
+Fred that if Mr. Farebrother had had a beak and talons instead of his
+very capable tongue, his mode of attack could hardly be more cruel.  He
+had a horrible conviction that behind all this hypothetic statement
+there was a knowledge of some actual change in Mary's feeling.
+
+"Of course I know it might easily be all up with me," he said, in a
+troubled voice.  "If she is beginning to compare--"  He broke off, not
+liking to betray all he felt, and then said, by the help of a little
+bitterness, "But I thought you were friendly to me."
+
+"So I am; that is why we are here.  But I have had a strong disposition
+to be otherwise.  I have said to myself, 'If there is a likelihood of
+that youngster doing himself harm, why should you interfere?  Aren't
+you worth as much as he is, and don't your sixteen years over and above
+his, in which you have gone rather hungry, give you more right to
+satisfaction than he has?  If there's a chance of his going to the
+dogs, let him--perhaps you could nohow hinder it--and do you take the
+benefit.'"
+
+There was a pause, in which Fred was seized by a most uncomfortable
+chill.  What was coming next?  He dreaded to hear that something had
+been said to Mary--he felt as if he were listening to a threat rather
+than a warning.  When the Vicar began again there was a change in his
+tone like the encouraging transition to a major key.
+
+"But I had once meant better than that, and I am come back to my old
+intention.  I thought that I could hardly _secure myself_ in it better,
+Fred, than by telling you just what had gone on in me.  And now, do you
+understand me?  I want you to make the happiness of her life and your
+own, and if there is any chance that a word of warning from me may turn
+aside any risk to the contrary--well, I have uttered it."
+
+There was a drop in the Vicar's voice when he spoke the last words. He
+paused--they were standing on a patch of green where the road diverged
+towards St. Botolph's, and he put out his hand, as if to imply that the
+conversation was closed.  Fred was moved quite newly.  Some one highly
+susceptible to the contemplation of a fine act has said, that it
+produces a sort of regenerating shudder through the frame, and makes
+one feel ready to begin a new life.  A good degree of that effect was
+just then present in Fred Vincy.
+
+"I will try to be worthy," he said, breaking off before he could say
+"of you as well as of her."  And meanwhile Mr. Farebrother had gathered
+the impulse to say something more.
+
+"You must not imagine that I believe there is at present any decline in
+her preference of you, Fred.  Set your heart at rest, that if you keep
+right, other things will keep right."
+
+"I shall never forget what you have done," Fred answered.  "I can't say
+anything that seems worth saying--only I will try that your goodness
+shall not be thrown away."
+
+"That's enough.  Good-by, and God bless you."
+
+In that way they parted.  But both of them walked about a long while
+before they went out of the starlight.  Much of Fred's rumination might
+be summed up in the words, "It certainly would have been a fine thing
+for her to marry Farebrother--but if she loves me best and I am a good
+husband?"
+
+Perhaps Mr. Farebrother's might be concentrated into a single shrug and
+one little speech.  "To think of the part one little woman can play in
+the life of a man, so that to renounce her may be a very good imitation
+of heroism, and to win her may be a discipline!"
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVII.
+
+    Now is there civil war within the soul:
+    Resolve is thrust from off the sacred throne
+    By clamorous Needs, and Pride the grand-vizier
+    Makes humble compact, plays the supple part
+    Of envoy and deft-tongued apologist
+    For hungry rebels.
+
+
+Happily Lydgate had ended by losing in the billiard-room, and brought
+away no encouragement to make a raid on luck.  On the contrary, he felt
+unmixed disgust with himself the next day when he had to pay four or
+five pounds over and above his gains, and he carried about with him a
+most unpleasant vision of the figure he had made, not only rubbing
+elbows with the men at the Green Dragon but behaving just as they did.
+A philosopher fallen to betting is hardly distinguishable from a
+Philistine under the same circumstances: the difference will chiefly be
+found in his subsequent reflections, and Lydgate chewed a very
+disagreeable cud in that way.  His reason told him how the affair might
+have been magnified into ruin by a slight change of scenery--if it had
+been a gambling-house that he had turned into, where chance could be
+clutched with both hands instead of being picked up with thumb and
+fore-finger. Nevertheless, though reason strangled the desire to
+gamble, there remained the feeling that, with an assurance of luck to
+the needful amount, he would have liked to gamble, rather than take the
+alternative which was beginning to urge itself as inevitable.
+
+That alternative was to apply to Mr. Bulstrode.  Lydgate had so many
+times boasted both to himself and others that he was totally
+independent of Bulstrode, to whose plans he had lent himself solely
+because they enabled him to carry out his own ideas of professional
+work and public benefit--he had so constantly in their personal
+intercourse had his pride sustained by the sense that he was making a
+good social use of this predominating banker, whose opinions he thought
+contemptible and whose motives often seemed to him an absurd mixture of
+contradictory impressions--that he had been creating for himself
+strong ideal obstacles to the proffering of any considerable request to
+him on his own account.
+
+Still, early in March his affairs were at that pass in which men begin
+to say that their oaths were delivered in ignorance, and to perceive
+that the act which they had called impossible to them is becoming
+manifestly possible.  With Dover's ugly security soon to be put in
+force, with the proceeds of his practice immediately absorbed in paying
+back debts, and with the chance, if the worst were known, of daily
+supplies being refused on credit, above all with the vision of
+Rosamond's hopeless discontent continually haunting him, Lydgate had
+begun to see that he should inevitably bend himself to ask help from
+somebody or other.  At first he had considered whether he should write
+to Mr. Vincy; but on questioning Rosamond he found that, as he had
+suspected, she had already applied twice to her father, the last time
+being since the disappointment from Sir Godwin; and papa had said that
+Lydgate must look out for himself.  "Papa said he had come, with one
+bad year after another, to trade more and more on borrowed capital, and
+had had to give up many indulgences; he could not spare a single
+hundred from the charges of his family.  He said, let Lydgate ask
+Bulstrode: they have always been hand and glove."
+
+Indeed, Lydgate himself had come to the conclusion that if he must end
+by asking for a free loan, his relations with Bulstrode, more at least
+than with any other man, might take the shape of a claim which was not
+purely personal.  Bulstrode had indirectly helped to cause the failure
+of his practice, and had also been highly gratified by getting a
+medical partner in his plans:--but who among us ever reduced himself
+to the sort of dependence in which Lydgate now stood, without trying to
+believe that he had claims which diminished the humiliation of asking?
+It was true that of late there had seemed to be a new languor of
+interest in Bulstrode about the Hospital; but his health had got worse,
+and showed signs of a deep-seated nervous affection.  In other respects
+he did not appear to be changed: he had always been highly polite, but
+Lydgate had observed in him from the first a marked coldness about his
+marriage and other private circumstances, a coldness which he had
+hitherto preferred to any warmth of familiarity between them.  He
+deferred the intention from day to day, his habit of acting on his
+conclusions being made infirm by his repugnance to every possible
+conclusion and its consequent act.  He saw Mr. Bulstrode often, but he
+did not try to use any occasion for his private purpose.  At one moment
+he thought, "I will write a letter: I prefer that to any circuitous
+talk;" at another he thought, "No; if I were talking to him, I could
+make a retreat before any signs of disinclination."
+
+Still the days passed and no letter was written, no special interview
+sought.  In his shrinking from the humiliation of a dependent attitude
+towards Bulstrode, he began to familiarize his imagination with another
+step even more unlike his remembered self.  He began spontaneously to
+consider whether it would be possible to carry out that puerile notion
+of Rosamond's which had often made him angry, namely, that they should
+quit Middlemarch without seeing anything beyond that preface.  The
+question came--"Would any man buy the practice of me even now, for as
+little as it is worth?  Then the sale might happen as a necessary
+preparation for going away."
+
+But against his taking this step, which he still felt to be a
+contemptible relinquishment of present work, a guilty turning aside
+from what was a real and might be a widening channel for worthy
+activity, to start again without any justified destination, there was
+this obstacle, that the purchaser, if procurable at all, might not be
+quickly forthcoming.  And afterwards?  Rosamond in a poor lodging,
+though in the largest city or most distant town, would not find the
+life that could save her from gloom, and save him from the reproach of
+having plunged her into it.  For when a man is at the foot of the hill
+in his fortunes, he may stay a long while there in spite of
+professional accomplishment.  In the British climate there is no
+incompatibility between scientific insight and furnished lodgings: the
+incompatibility is chiefly between scientific ambition and a wife who
+objects to that kind of residence.
+
+But in the midst of his hesitation, opportunity came to decide him.  A
+note from Mr. Bulstrode requested Lydgate to call on him at the Bank.
+A hypochondriacal tendency had shown itself in the banker's
+constitution of late; and a lack of sleep, which was really only a
+slight exaggeration of an habitual dyspeptic symptom, had been dwelt on
+by him as a sign of threatening insanity.  He wanted to consult Lydgate
+without delay on that particular morning, although he had nothing to
+tell beyond what he had told before.  He listened eagerly to what
+Lydgate had to say in dissipation of his fears, though this too was
+only repetition; and this moment in which Bulstrode was receiving a
+medical opinion with a sense of comfort, seemed to make the
+communication of a personal need to him easier than it had been in
+Lydgate's contemplation beforehand.  He had been insisting that it
+would be well for Mr. Bulstrode to relax his attention to business.
+
+"One sees how any mental strain, however slight, may affect a delicate
+frame," said Lydgate at that stage of the consultation when the remarks
+tend to pass from the personal to the general, "by the deep stamp which
+anxiety will make for a time even on the young and vigorous.  I am
+naturally very strong; yet I have been thoroughly shaken lately by an
+accumulation of trouble."
+
+"I presume that a constitution in the susceptible state in which mine
+at present is, would be especially liable to fall a victim to cholera,
+if it visited our district.  And since its appearance near London, we
+may well besiege the Mercy-seat for our protection," said Mr.
+Bulstrode, not intending to evade Lydgate's allusion, but really
+preoccupied with alarms about himself.
+
+"You have at all events taken your share in using good practical
+precautions for the town, and that is the best mode of asking for
+protection," said Lydgate, with a strong distaste for the broken
+metaphor and bad logic of the banker's religion, somewhat increased by
+the apparent deafness of his sympathy.  But his mind had taken up its
+long-prepared movement towards getting help, and was not yet arrested.
+He added, "The town has done well in the way of cleansing, and finding
+appliances; and I think that if the cholera should come, even our
+enemies will admit that the arrangements in the Hospital are a public
+good."
+
+"Truly," said Mr. Bulstrode, with some coldness.  "With regard to what
+you say, Mr. Lydgate, about the relaxation of my mental labor, I have
+for some time been entertaining a purpose to that effect--a purpose of
+a very decided character.  I contemplate at least a temporary
+withdrawal from the management of much business, whether benevolent or
+commercial.  Also I think of changing my residence for a time: probably
+I shall close or let 'The Shrubs,' and take some place near the
+coast--under advice of course as to salubrity.  That would be a measure
+which you would recommend?"
+
+"Oh yes," said Lydgate, falling backward in his chair, with
+ill-repressed impatience under the banker's pale earnest eyes and
+intense preoccupation with himself.
+
+"I have for some time felt that I should open this subject with you in
+relation to our Hospital," continued Bulstrode.  "Under the
+circumstances I have indicated, of course I must cease to have any
+personal share in the management, and it is contrary to my views of
+responsibility to continue a large application of means to an
+institution which I cannot watch over and to some extent regulate.  I
+shall therefore, in case of my ultimate decision to leave Middlemarch,
+consider that I withdraw other support to the New Hospital than that
+which will subsist in the fact that I chiefly supplied the expenses of
+building it, and have contributed further large sums to its successful
+working."
+
+Lydgate's thought, when Bulstrode paused according to his wont, was,
+"He has perhaps been losing a good deal of money." This was the most
+plausible explanation of a speech which had caused rather a startling
+change in his expectations.  He said in reply--
+
+"The loss to the Hospital can hardly be made up, I fear."
+
+"Hardly," returned Bulstrode, in the same deliberate, silvery tone;
+"except by some changes of plan.  The only person who may be certainly
+counted on as willing to increase her contributions is Mrs. Casaubon.
+I have had an interview with her on the subject, and I have pointed out
+to her, as I am about to do to you, that it will be desirable to win a
+more general support to the New Hospital by a change of system."
+Another pause, but Lydgate did not speak.
+
+"The change I mean is an amalgamation with the Infirmary, so that the
+New Hospital shall be regarded as a special addition to the elder
+institution, having the same directing board.  It will be necessary,
+also, that the medical management of the two shall be combined.  In
+this way any difficulty as to the adequate maintenance of our new
+establishment will be removed; the benevolent interests of the town
+will cease to be divided."
+
+Mr. Bulstrode had lowered his eyes from Lydgate's face to the buttons
+of his coat as he again paused.
+
+"No doubt that is a good device as to ways and means," said Lydgate,
+with an edge of irony in his tone.  "But I can't be expected to rejoice
+in it at once, since one of the first results will be that the other
+medical men will upset or interrupt my methods, if it were only because
+they are mine."
+
+"I myself, as you know, Mr. Lydgate, highly valued the opportunity of
+new and independent procedure which you have diligently employed: the
+original plan, I confess, was one which I had much at heart, under
+submission to the Divine Will.  But since providential indications
+demand a renunciation from me, I renounce."
+
+Bulstrode showed a rather exasperating ability in this conversation.
+The broken metaphor and bad logic of motive which had stirred his
+hearer's contempt were quite consistent with a mode of putting the
+facts which made it difficult for Lydgate to vent his own indignation
+and disappointment.  After some rapid reflection, he only asked--
+
+"What did Mrs. Casaubon say?"
+
+"That was the further statement which I wished to make to you," said
+Bulstrode, who had thoroughly prepared his ministerial explanation.
+"She is, you are aware, a woman of most munificent disposition, and
+happily in possession--not I presume of great wealth, but of funds
+which she can well spare.  She has informed me that though she has
+destined the chief part of those funds to another purpose, she is
+willing to consider whether she cannot fully take my place in relation
+to the Hospital.  But she wishes for ample time to mature her thoughts
+on the subject, and I have told her that there is no need for
+haste--that, in fact, my own plans are not yet absolute."
+
+Lydgate was ready to say, "If Mrs. Casaubon would take your place,
+there would be gain, instead of loss."  But there was still a weight on
+his mind which arrested this cheerful candor.  He replied, "I suppose,
+then, that I may enter into the subject with Mrs. Casaubon."
+
+"Precisely; that is what she expressly desires.  Her decision, she
+says, will much depend on what you can tell her.  But not at present:
+she is, I believe, just setting out on a journey.  I have her letter
+here," said Mr. Bulstrode, drawing it out, and reading from it.  "'I am
+immediately otherwise engaged,' she says.  'I am going into Yorkshire
+with Sir James and Lady Chettam; and the conclusions I come to about
+some land which I am to see there may affect my power of contributing
+to the Hospital.'  Thus, Mr. Lydgate, there is no haste necessary in
+this matter; but I wished to apprise you beforehand of what may
+possibly occur."
+
+Mr. Bulstrode returned the letter to his side-pocket, and changed his
+attitude as if his business were closed.  Lydgate, whose renewed hope
+about the Hospital only made him more conscious of the facts which
+poisoned his hope, felt that his effort after help, if made at all,
+must be made now and vigorously.
+
+"I am much obliged to you for giving me full notice," he said, with a
+firm intention in his tone, yet with an interruptedness in his delivery
+which showed that he spoke unwillingly.  "The highest object to me is
+my profession, and I had identified the Hospital with the best use I
+can at present make of my profession.  But the best use is not always
+the same with monetary success.  Everything which has made the Hospital
+unpopular has helped with other causes--I think they are all connected
+with my professional zeal--to make me unpopular as a practitioner.  I
+get chiefly patients who can't pay me.  I should like them best, if I
+had nobody to pay on my own side." Lydgate waited a little, but
+Bulstrode only bowed, looking at him fixedly, and he went on with the
+same interrupted enunciation--as if he were biting an objectional leek.
+
+"I have slipped into money difficulties which I can see no way out of,
+unless some one who trusts me and my future will advance me a sum
+without other security.  I had very little fortune left when I came
+here.  I have no prospects of money from my own family.  My expenses,
+in consequence of my marriage, have been very much greater than I had
+expected.  The result at this moment is that it would take a thousand
+pounds to clear me.  I mean, to free me from the risk of having all my
+goods sold in security of my largest debt--as well as to pay my other
+debts--and leave anything to keep us a little beforehand with our small
+income.  I find that it is out of the question that my wife's father
+should make such an advance.  That is why I mention my position to--to
+the only other man who may be held to have some personal connection
+with my prosperity or ruin."
+
+Lydgate hated to hear himself.  But he had spoken now, and had spoken
+with unmistakable directness.  Mr. Bulstrode replied without haste, but
+also without hesitation.
+
+"I am grieved, though, I confess, not surprised by this information,
+Mr. Lydgate.  For my own part, I regretted your alliance with my
+brother-in-law's family, which has always been of prodigal habits, and
+which has already been much indebted to me for sustainment in its
+present position.  My advice to you, Mr. Lydgate, would be, that
+instead of involving yourself in further obligations, and continuing a
+doubtful struggle, you should simply become a bankrupt."
+
+"That would not improve my prospect," said Lydgate, rising and speaking
+bitterly, "even if it were a more agreeable thing in itself."
+
+"It is always a trial," said Mr. Bulstrode; "but trial, my dear sir, is
+our portion here, and is a needed corrective.  I recommend you to weigh
+the advice I have given."
+
+"Thank you," said Lydgate, not quite knowing what he said.  "I have
+occupied you too long.  Good-day."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXVIII.
+
+    "What suit of grace hath Virtue to put on
+     If Vice shall wear as good, and do as well?
+     If Wrong, if Craft, if Indiscretion
+     Act as fair parts with ends as laudable?
+     Which all this mighty volume of events
+     The world, the universal map of deeds,
+     Strongly controls, and proves from all descents,
+     That the directest course still best succeeds.
+     For should not grave and learn'd Experience
+     That looks with the eyes of all the world beside,
+     And with all ages holds intelligence,
+     Go safer than Deceit without a guide!
+                                --DANIEL: Musophilus.
+
+
+That change of plan and shifting of interest which Bulstrode stated or
+betrayed in his conversation with Lydgate, had been determined in him
+by some severe experience which he had gone through since the epoch of
+Mr. Larcher's sale, when Raffles had recognized Will Ladislaw, and when
+the banker had in vain attempted an act of restitution which might move
+Divine Providence to arrest painful consequences.
+
+His certainty that Raffles, unless he were dead, would return to
+Middlemarch before long, had been justified.  On Christmas Eve he had
+reappeared at The Shrubs.  Bulstrode was at home to receive him, and
+hinder his communication with the rest of the family, but he could not
+altogether hinder the circumstances of the visit from compromising
+himself and alarming his wife.  Raffles proved more unmanageable than
+he had shown himself to be in his former appearances, his chronic state
+of mental restlessness, the growing effect of habitual intemperance,
+quickly shaking off every impression from what was said to him.  He
+insisted on staying in the house, and Bulstrode, weighing two sets of
+evils, felt that this was at least not a worse alternative than his
+going into the town.  He kept him in his own room for the evening and
+saw him to bed, Raffles all the while amusing himself with the
+annoyance he was causing this decent and highly prosperous
+fellow-sinner, an amusement which he facetiously expressed as sympathy
+with his friend's pleasure in entertaining a man who had been
+serviceable to him, and who had not had all his earnings.  There was a
+cunning calculation under this noisy joking--a cool resolve to extract
+something the handsomer from Bulstrode as payment for release from this
+new application of torture.  But his cunning had a little overcast its
+mark.
+
+Bulstrode was indeed more tortured than the coarse fibre of Raffles
+could enable him to imagine.  He had told his wife that he was simply
+taking care of this wretched creature, the victim of vice, who might
+otherwise injure himself; he implied, without the direct form of
+falsehood, that there was a family tie which bound him to this care,
+and that there were signs of mental alienation in Raffles which urged
+caution.  He would himself drive the unfortunate being away the next
+morning.  In these hints he felt that he was supplying Mrs. Bulstrode
+with precautionary information for his daughters and servants, and
+accounting for his allowing no one but himself to enter the room even
+with food and drink.  But he sat in an agony of fear lest Raffles
+should be overheard in his loud and plain references to past facts--lest
+Mrs. Bulstrode should be even tempted to listen at the door.  How
+could he hinder her, how betray his terror by opening the door to
+detect her?  She was a woman of honest direct habits, and little likely
+to take so low a course in order to arrive at painful knowledge; but
+fear was stronger than the calculation of probabilities.
+
+In this way Raffles had pushed the torture too far, and produced an
+effect which had not been in his plan.  By showing himself hopelessly
+unmanageable he had made Bulstrode feel that a strong defiance was the
+only resource left.  After taking Raffles to bed that night the banker
+ordered his closed carriage to be ready at half-past seven the next
+morning.  At six o'clock he had already been long dressed, and had
+spent some of his wretchedness in prayer, pleading his motives for
+averting the worst evil if in anything he had used falsity and spoken
+what was not true before God.  For Bulstrode shrank from a direct lie
+with an intensity disproportionate to the number of his more indirect
+misdeeds.  But many of these misdeeds were like the subtle muscular
+movements which are not taken account of in the consciousness, though
+they bring about the end that we fix our mind on and desire.  And it is
+only what we are vividly conscious of that we can vividly imagine to be
+seen by Omniscience.
+
+Bulstrode carried his candle to the bedside of Raffles, who was
+apparently in a painful dream.  He stood silent, hoping that the
+presence of the light would serve to waken the sleeper gradually and
+gently, for he feared some noise as the consequence of a too sudden
+awakening.  He had watched for a couple of minutes or more the
+shudderings and pantings which seemed likely to end in waking, when
+Raffles, with a long half-stifled moan, started up and stared round him
+in terror, trembling and gasping.  But he made no further noise, and
+Bulstrode, setting down the candle, awaited his recovery.
+
+It was a quarter of an hour later before Bulstrode, with a cold
+peremptoriness of manner which he had not before shown, said, "I came
+to call you thus early, Mr. Raffles, because I have ordered the
+carriage to be ready at half-past seven, and intend myself to conduct
+you as far as Ilsely, where you can either take the railway or await a
+coach." Raffles was about to speak, but Bulstrode anticipated him
+imperiously with the words, "Be silent, sir, and hear what I have to
+say.  I shall supply you with money now, and I will furnish you with a
+reasonable sum from time to time, on your application to me by letter;
+but if you choose to present yourself here again, if you return to
+Middlemarch, if you use your tongue in a manner injurious to me, you
+will have to live on such fruits as your malice can bring you, without
+help from me.  Nobody will pay you well for blasting my name: I know
+the worst you can do against me, and I shall brave it if you dare to
+thrust yourself upon me again.  Get up, sir, and do as I order you,
+without noise, or I will send for a policeman to take you off my
+premises, and you may carry your stories into every pothouse in the
+town, but you shall have no sixpence from me to pay your expenses
+there."
+
+Bulstrode had rarely in his life spoken with such nervous energy: he
+had been deliberating on this speech and its probable effects through a
+large part of the night; and though he did not trust to its ultimately
+saving him from any return of Raffles, he had concluded that it was the
+best throw he could make.  It succeeded in enforcing submission from
+the jaded man this morning: his empoisoned system at this moment
+quailed before Bulstrode's cold, resolute bearing, and he was taken off
+quietly in the carriage before the family breakfast time.  The servants
+imagined him to be a poor relation, and were not surprised that a
+strict man like their master, who held his head high in the world,
+should be ashamed of such a cousin and want to get rid of him.  The
+banker's drive of ten miles with his hated companion was a dreary
+beginning of the Christmas day; but at the end of the drive, Raffles
+had recovered his spirits, and parted in a contentment for which there
+was the good reason that the banker had given him a hundred pounds.
+Various motives urged Bulstrode to this open-handedness, but he did not
+himself inquire closely into all of them.  As he had stood watching
+Raffles in his uneasy sleep, it had certainly entered his mind that the
+man had been much shattered since the first gift of two hundred pounds.
+
+He had taken care to repeat the incisive statement of his resolve not
+to be played on any more; and had tried to penetrate Raffles with the
+fact that he had shown the risks of bribing him to be quite equal to
+the risks of defying him.  But when, freed from his repulsive presence,
+Bulstrode returned to his quiet home, he brought with him no confidence
+that he had secured more than a respite.  It was as if he had had a
+loathsome dream, and could not shake off its images with their hateful
+kindred of sensations--as if on all the pleasant surroundings of his
+life a dangerous reptile had left his slimy traces.
+
+Who can know how much of his most inward life is made up of the
+thoughts he believes other men to have about him, until that fabric of
+opinion is threatened with ruin?
+
+Bulstrode was only the more conscious that there was a deposit of
+uneasy presentiment in his wife's mind, because she carefully avoided
+any allusion to it.  He had been used every day to taste the flavor of
+supremacy and the tribute of complete deference: and the certainty that
+he was watched or measured with a hidden suspicion of his having some
+discreditable secret, made his voice totter when he was speaking to
+edification.  Foreseeing, to men of Bulstrode's anxious temperament, is
+often worse than seeing; and his imagination continually heightened the
+anguish of an imminent disgrace.  Yes, imminent; for if his defiance of
+Raffles did not keep the man away--and though he prayed for this result
+he hardly hoped for it--the disgrace was certain.  In vain he said to
+himself that, if permitted, it would be a divine visitation, a
+chastisement, a preparation; he recoiled from the imagined burning; and
+he judged that it must be more for the Divine glory that he should
+escape dishonor.  That recoil had at last urged him to make
+preparations for quitting Middlemarch.  If evil truth must be reported
+of him, he would then be at a less scorching distance from the contempt
+of his old neighbors; and in a new scene, where his life would not have
+gathered the same wide sensibility, the tormentor, if he pursued him,
+would be less formidable.  To leave the place finally would, he knew,
+be extremely painful to his wife, and on other grounds he would have
+preferred to stay where he had struck root.  Hence he made his
+preparations at first in a conditional way, wishing to leave on all
+sides an opening for his return after brief absence, if any favorable
+intervention of Providence should dissipate his fears.  He was
+preparing to transfer his management of the Bank, and to give up any
+active control of other commercial affairs in the neighborhood, on the
+ground of his failing health, but without excluding his future
+resumption of such work.  The measure would cause him some added
+expense and some diminution of income beyond what he had already
+undergone from the general depression of trade; and the Hospital
+presented itself as a principal object of outlay on which he could
+fairly economize.
+
+This was the experience which had determined his conversation with
+Lydgate.  But at this time his arrangements had most of them gone no
+farther than a stage at which he could recall them if they proved to be
+unnecessary.  He continually deferred the final steps; in the midst of
+his fears, like many a man who is in danger of shipwreck or of being
+dashed from his carriage by runaway horses, he had a clinging
+impression that something would happen to hinder the worst, and that to
+spoil his life by a late transplantation might be over-hasty--especially
+since it was difficult to account satisfactorily to his wife for the
+project of their indefinite exile from the only place where she would
+like to live.
+
+Among the affairs Bulstrode had to care for, was the management of the
+farm at Stone Court in case of his absence; and on this as well as on
+all other matters connected with any houses and land he possessed in or
+about Middlemarch, he had consulted Caleb Garth.  Like every one else
+who had business of that sort, he wanted to get the agent who was more
+anxious for his employer's interests than his own.  With regard to
+Stone Court, since Bulstrode wished to retain his hold on the stock,
+and to have an arrangement by which he himself could, if he chose,
+resume his favorite recreation of superintendence, Caleb had advised
+him not to trust to a mere bailiff, but to let the land, stock, and
+implements yearly, and take a proportionate share of the proceeds.
+
+"May I trust to you to find me a tenant on these terms, Mr. Garth?"
+said Bulstrode.  "And will you mention to me the yearly sum which would
+repay you for managing these affairs which we have discussed together?"
+
+"I'll think about it," said Caleb, in his blunt way.  "I'll see how I
+can make it out."
+
+If it had not been that he had to consider Fred Vincy's future, Mr.
+Garth would not probably have been glad of any addition to his work, of
+which his wife was always fearing an excess for him as he grew older.
+But on quitting Bulstrode after that conversation, a very alluring idea
+occurred to him about this said letting of Stone Court.  What if
+Bulstrode would agree to his placing Fred Vincy there on the
+understanding that he, Caleb Garth, should be responsible for the
+management?  It would be an excellent schooling for Fred; he might make
+a modest income there, and still have time left to get knowledge by
+helping in other business.  He mentioned his notion to Mrs. Garth with
+such evident delight that she could not bear to chill his pleasure by
+expressing her constant fear of his undertaking too much.
+
+"The lad would be as happy as two," he said, throwing himself back in
+his chair, and looking radiant, "if I could tell him it was all
+settled.  Think; Susan!  His mind had been running on that place for
+years before old Featherstone died.  And it would be as pretty a turn
+of things as could be that he should hold the place in a good
+industrious way after all--by his taking to business.  For it's likely
+enough Bulstrode might let him go on, and gradually buy the stock.  He
+hasn't made up his mind, I can see, whether or not he shall settle
+somewhere else as a lasting thing.  I never was better pleased with a
+notion in my life.  And then the children might be married by-and-by,
+Susan."
+
+"You will not give any hint of the plan to Fred, until you are sure
+that Bulstrode would agree to the plan?" said Mrs. Garth, in a tone of
+gentle caution.  "And as to marriage, Caleb, we old people need not
+help to hasten it."
+
+"Oh, I don't know," said Caleb, swinging his head aside.  "Marriage is
+a taming thing.  Fred would want less of my bit and bridle.  However, I
+shall say nothing till I know the ground I'm treading on.  I shall
+speak to Bulstrode again."
+
+He took his earliest opportunity of doing so.  Bulstrode had anything
+but a warm interest in his nephew Fred Vincy, but he had a strong wish
+to secure Mr. Garth's services on many scattered points of business at
+which he was sure to be a considerable loser, if they were under less
+conscientious management.  On that ground he made no objection to Mr.
+Garth's proposal; and there was also another reason why he was not
+sorry to give a consent which was to benefit one of the Vincy family.
+It was that Mrs. Bulstrode, having heard of Lydgate's debts, had been
+anxious to know whether her husband could not do something for poor
+Rosamond, and had been much troubled on learning from him that
+Lydgate's affairs were not easily remediable, and that the wisest plan
+was to let them "take their course." Mrs. Bulstrode had then said for
+the first time, "I think you are always a little hard towards my
+family, Nicholas.  And I am sure I have no reason to deny any of my
+relatives.  Too worldly they may be, but no one ever had to say that
+they were not respectable."
+
+"My dear Harriet," said Mr. Bulstrode, wincing under his wife's eyes,
+which were filling with tears, "I have supplied your brother with a
+great deal of capital.  I cannot be expected to take care of his
+married children."
+
+That seemed to be true, and Mrs. Bulstrode's remonstrance subsided into
+pity for poor Rosamond, whose extravagant education she had always
+foreseen the fruits of.
+
+But remembering that dialogue, Mr. Bulstrode felt that when he had to
+talk to his wife fully about his plan of quitting Middlemarch, he
+should be glad to tell her that he had made an arrangement which might
+be for the good of her nephew Fred.  At present he had merely mentioned
+to her that he thought of shutting up The Shrubs for a few months, and
+taking a house on the Southern Coast.
+
+Hence Mr. Garth got the assurance he desired, namely, that in case of
+Bulstrode's departure from Middlemarch for an indefinite time, Fred
+Vincy should be allowed to have the tenancy of Stone Court on the terms
+proposed.
+
+Caleb was so elated with his hope of this "neat turn" being given to
+things, that if his self-control had not been braced by a little
+affectionate wifely scolding, he would have betrayed everything to
+Mary, wanting "to give the child comfort."  However, he restrained
+himself, and kept in strict privacy from Fred certain visits which he
+was making to Stone Court, in order to look more thoroughly into the
+state of the land and stock, and take a preliminary estimate.  He was
+certainly more eager in these visits than the probable speed of events
+required him to be; but he was stimulated by a fatherly delight in
+occupying his mind with this bit of probable happiness which he held in
+store like a hidden birthday gift for Fred and Mary.
+
+"But suppose the whole scheme should turn out to be a castle in the
+air?" said Mrs. Garth.
+
+"Well, well," replied Caleb; "the castle will tumble about nobody's
+head."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXIX.
+
+    "If thou hast heard a word, let it die with thee."
+                                       --Ecclesiasticus.
+
+
+Mr. Bulstrode was still seated in his manager's room at the Bank, about
+three o'clock of the same day on which he had received Lydgate there,
+when the clerk entered to say that his horse was waiting, and also that
+Mr. Garth was outside and begged to speak with him.
+
+"By all means," said Bulstrode; and Caleb entered.  "Pray sit down, Mr.
+Garth," continued the banker, in his suavest tone.
+
+"I am glad that you arrived just in time to find me here.  I know you
+count your minutes."
+
+"Oh," said Caleb, gently, with a slow swing of his head on one side, as
+he seated himself and laid his hat on the floor.
+
+He looked at the ground, leaning forward and letting his long fingers
+droop between his legs, while each finger moved in succession, as if it
+were sharing some thought which filled his large quiet brow.
+
+Mr. Bulstrode, like every one else who knew Caleb, was used to his
+slowness in beginning to speak on any topic which he felt to be
+important, and rather expected that he was about to recur to the buying
+of some houses in Blindman's Court, for the sake of pulling them down,
+as a sacrifice of property which would be well repaid by the influx of
+air and light on that spot.  It was by propositions of this kind that
+Caleb was sometimes troublesome to his employers; but he had usually
+found Bulstrode ready to meet him in projects of improvement, and they
+had got on well together.  When he spoke again, however, it was to say,
+in rather a subdued voice--
+
+"I have just come away from Stone Court, Mr. Bulstrode."
+
+"You found nothing wrong there, I hope," said the banker; "I was there
+myself yesterday.  Abel has done well with the lambs this year."
+
+"Why, yes," said Caleb, looking up gravely, "there is something wrong--a
+stranger, who is very ill, I think.  He wants a doctor, and I came to
+tell you of that.  His name is Raffles."
+
+He saw the shock of his words passing through Bulstrode's frame.  On
+this subject the banker had thought that his fears were too constantly
+on the watch to be taken by surprise; but he had been mistaken.
+
+"Poor wretch!" he said in a compassionate tone, though his lips
+trembled a little.  "Do you know how he came there?"
+
+"I took him myself," said Caleb, quietly--"took him up in my gig.  He
+had got down from the coach, and was walking a little beyond the
+turning from the toll-house, and I overtook him.  He remembered seeing
+me with you once before, at Stone Court, and he asked me to take him
+on.  I saw he was ill: it seemed to me the right thing to do, to carry
+him under shelter.  And now I think you should lose no time in getting
+advice for him." Caleb took up his hat from the floor as he ended, and
+rose slowly from his seat.
+
+"Certainly," said Bulstrode, whose mind was very active at this moment.
+"Perhaps you will yourself oblige me, Mr. Garth, by calling at Mr.
+Lydgate's as you pass--or stay! he may at this hour probably be at the
+Hospital.  I will first send my man on the horse there with a note this
+instant, and then I will myself ride to Stone Court."
+
+Bulstrode quickly wrote a note, and went out himself to give the
+commission to his man.  When he returned, Caleb was standing as before
+with one hand on the back of the chair, holding his hat with the other.
+In Bulstrode's mind the dominant thought was, "Perhaps Raffles only
+spoke to Garth of his illness.  Garth may wonder, as he must have done
+before, at this disreputable fellow's claiming intimacy with me; but he
+will know nothing.  And he is friendly to me--I can be of use to him."
+
+He longed for some confirmation of this hopeful conjecture, but to have
+asked any question as to what Raffles had said or done would have been
+to betray fear.
+
+"I am exceedingly obliged to you, Mr. Garth," he said, in his usual
+tone of politeness.  "My servant will be back in a few minutes, and I
+shall then go myself to see what can be done for this unfortunate man.
+Perhaps you had some other business with me?  If so, pray be seated."
+
+"Thank you," said Caleb, making a slight gesture with his right hand to
+waive the invitation.  "I wish to say, Mr. Bulstrode, that I must
+request you to put your business into some other hands than mine.  I am
+obliged to you for your handsome way of meeting me--about the letting
+of Stone Court, and all other business.  But I must give it up."  A
+sharp certainty entered like a stab into Bulstrode's soul.
+
+"This is sudden, Mr. Garth," was all he could say at first.
+
+"It is," said Caleb; "but it is quite fixed.  I must give it up."
+
+He spoke with a firmness which was very gentle, and yet he could see
+that Bulstrode seemed to cower under that gentleness, his face looking
+dried and his eyes swerving away from the glance which rested on him.
+Caleb felt a deep pity for him, but he could have used no pretexts to
+account for his resolve, even if they would have been of any use.
+
+"You have been led to this, I apprehend, by some slanders concerning me
+uttered by that unhappy creature," said Bulstrode, anxious now to know
+the utmost.
+
+"That is true.  I can't deny that I act upon what I heard from him."
+
+"You are a conscientious man, Mr. Garth--a man, I trust, who feels
+himself accountable to God.  You would not wish to injure me by being
+too ready to believe a slander," said Bulstrode, casting about for
+pleas that might be adapted to his hearer's mind.  "That is a poor
+reason for giving up a connection which I think I may say will be
+mutually beneficial."
+
+"I would injure no man if I could help it," said Caleb; "even if I
+thought God winked at it.  I hope I should have a feeling for my
+fellow-creature. But, sir--I am obliged to believe that this Raffles
+has told me the truth.  And I can't be happy in working with you, or
+profiting by you.  It hurts my mind.  I must beg you to seek another
+agent."
+
+"Very well, Mr. Garth.  But I must at least claim to know the worst
+that he has told you.  I must know what is the foul speech that I am
+liable to be the victim of," said Bulstrode, a certain amount of anger
+beginning to mingle with his humiliation before this quiet man who
+renounced his benefits.
+
+"That's needless," said Caleb, waving his hand, bowing his head
+slightly, and not swerving from the tone which had in it the merciful
+intention to spare this pitiable man.  "What he has said to me will
+never pass from my lips, unless something now unknown forces it from
+me.  If you led a harmful life for gain, and kept others out of their
+rights by deceit, to get the more for yourself, I dare say you
+repent--you would like to go back, and can't: that must be a bitter
+thing"--Caleb paused a moment and shook his head--"it is not for me to
+make your life harder to you."
+
+"But you do--you do make it harder to me," said Bulstrode constrained
+into a genuine, pleading cry.  "You make it harder to me by turning
+your back on me."
+
+"That I'm forced to do," said Caleb, still more gently, lifting up his
+hand.  "I am sorry.  I don't judge you and say, he is wicked, and I am
+righteous.  God forbid.  I don't know everything.  A man may do wrong,
+and his will may rise clear out of it, though he can't get his life
+clear.  That's a bad punishment.  If it is so with you,--well, I'm
+very sorry for you.  But I have that feeling inside me, that I can't go
+on working with you.  That's all, Mr. Bulstrode.  Everything else is
+buried, so far as my will goes.  And I wish you good-day."
+
+"One moment, Mr. Garth!" said Bulstrode, hurriedly.  "I may trust then
+to your solemn assurance that you will not repeat either to man or
+woman what--even if it have any degree of truth in it--is yet a
+malicious representation?"  Caleb's wrath was stirred, and he said,
+indignantly--
+
+"Why should I have said it if I didn't mean it?  I am in no fear of
+you.  Such tales as that will never tempt my tongue."
+
+"Excuse me--I am agitated--I am the victim of this abandoned man."
+
+"Stop a bit! you have got to consider whether you didn't help to make
+him worse, when you profited by his vices."
+
+"You are wronging me by too readily believing him," said Bulstrode,
+oppressed, as by a nightmare, with the inability to deny flatly what
+Raffles might have said; and yet feeling it an escape that Caleb had
+not so stated it to him as to ask for that flat denial.
+
+"No," said Caleb, lifting his hand deprecatingly; "I am ready to
+believe better, when better is proved.  I rob you of no good chance.
+As to speaking, I hold it a crime to expose a man's sin unless I'm
+clear it must be done to save the innocent.  That is my way of
+thinking, Mr. Bulstrode, and what I say, I've no need to swear.  I wish
+you good-day."
+
+Some hours later, when he was at home, Caleb said to his wife,
+incidentally, that he had had some little differences with Bulstrode,
+and that in consequence, he had given up all notion of taking Stone
+Court, and indeed had resigned doing further business for him.
+
+"He was disposed to interfere too much, was he?" said Mrs. Garth,
+imagining that her husband had been touched on his sensitive point, and
+not been allowed to do what he thought right as to materials and modes
+of work.
+
+"Oh," said Caleb, bowing his head and waving his hand gravely.  And
+Mrs. Garth knew that this was a sign of his not intending to speak
+further on the subject.
+
+As for Bulstrode, he had almost immediately mounted his horse and set
+off for Stone Court, being anxious to arrive there before Lydgate.
+
+His mind was crowded with images and conjectures, which were a language
+to his hopes and fears, just as we hear tones from the vibrations which
+shake our whole system.  The deep humiliation with which he had winced
+under Caleb Garth's knowledge of his past and rejection of his
+patronage, alternated with and almost gave way to the sense of safety
+in the fact that Garth, and no other, had been the man to whom Raffles
+had spoken.  It seemed to him a sort of earnest that Providence
+intended his rescue from worse consequences; the way being thus left
+open for the hope of secrecy.  That Raffles should be afflicted with
+illness, that he should have been led to Stone Court rather than
+elsewhere--Bulstrode's heart fluttered at the vision of probabilities
+which these events conjured up.  If it should turn out that he was
+freed from all danger of disgrace--if he could breathe in perfect
+liberty--his life should be more consecrated than it had ever been
+before.  He mentally lifted up this vow as if it would urge the result
+he longed for--he tried to believe in the potency of that prayerful
+resolution--its potency to determine death.  He knew that he ought to
+say, "Thy will be done;" and he said it often.  But the intense desire
+remained that the will of God might be the death of that hated man.
+
+Yet when he arrived at Stone Court he could not see the change in
+Raffles without a shock.  But for his pallor and feebleness, Bulstrode
+would have called the change in him entirely mental.  Instead of his
+loud tormenting mood, he showed an intense, vague terror, and seemed to
+deprecate Bulstrode's anger, because the money was all gone--he had
+been robbed--it had half of it been taken from him.  He had only come
+here because he was ill and somebody was hunting him--somebody was
+after him, he had told nobody anything, he had kept his mouth shut.
+Bulstrode, not knowing the significance of these symptoms, interpreted
+this new nervous susceptibility into a means of alarming Raffles into
+true confessions, and taxed him with falsehood in saying that he had
+not told anything, since he had just told the man who took him up in
+his gig and brought him to Stone Court.  Raffles denied this with
+solemn adjurations; the fact being that the links of consciousness were
+interrupted in him, and that his minute terror-stricken narrative to
+Caleb Garth had been delivered under a set of visionary impulses which
+had dropped back into darkness.
+
+Bulstrode's heart sank again at this sign that he could get no grasp
+over the wretched man's mind, and that no word of Raffles could be
+trusted as to the fact which he most wanted to know, namely, whether or
+not he had really kept silence to every one in the neighborhood except
+Caleb Garth.  The housekeeper had told him without the least constraint
+of manner that since Mr. Garth left, Raffles had asked her for beer,
+and after that had not spoken, seeming very ill.  On that side it might
+be concluded that there had been no betrayal.  Mrs. Abel thought, like
+the servants at The Shrubs, that the strange man belonged to the
+unpleasant "kin" who are among the troubles of the rich; she had at
+first referred the kinship to Mr. Rigg, and where there was property
+left, the buzzing presence of such large blue-bottles seemed natural
+enough.  How he could be "kin" to Bulstrode as well was not so clear,
+but Mrs. Abel agreed with her husband that there was "no knowing," a
+proposition which had a great deal of mental food for her, so that she
+shook her head over it without further speculation.
+
+In less than an hour Lydgate arrived.  Bulstrode met him outside the
+wainscoted parlor, where Raffles was, and said--
+
+"I have called you in, Mr. Lydgate, to an unfortunate man who was once
+in my employment, many years ago.  Afterwards he went to America, and
+returned I fear to an idle dissolute life.  Being destitute, he has a
+claim on me.  He was slightly connected with Rigg, the former owner of
+this place, and in consequence found his way here.  I believe he is
+seriously ill: apparently his mind is affected.  I feel bound to do the
+utmost for him."
+
+Lydgate, who had the remembrance of his last conversation with
+Bulstrode strongly upon him, was not disposed to say an unnecessary
+word to him, and bowed slightly in answer to this account; but just
+before entering the room he turned automatically and said, "What is his
+name?"--to know names being as much a part of the medical man's
+accomplishment as of the practical politician's.
+
+"Raffles, John Raffles," said Bulstrode, who hoped that whatever became
+of Raffles, Lydgate would never know any more of him.
+
+When he had thoroughly examined and considered the patient, Lydgate
+ordered that he should go to bed, and be kept there in as complete
+quiet as possible, and then went with Bulstrode into another room.
+
+"It is a serious case, I apprehend," said the banker, before Lydgate
+began to speak.
+
+"No--and yes," said Lydgate, half dubiously.  "It is difficult to
+decide as to the possible effect of long-standing complications; but
+the man had a robust constitution to begin with.  I should not expect
+this attack to be fatal, though of course the system is in a ticklish
+state.  He should be well watched and attended to."
+
+"I will remain here myself," said Bulstrode.  "Mrs. Abel and her
+husband are inexperienced.  I can easily remain here for the night, if
+you will oblige me by taking a note for Mrs. Bulstrode."
+
+"I should think that is hardly necessary," said Lydgate.  "He seems
+tame and terrified enough.  He might become more unmanageable.  But
+there is a man here--is there not?"
+
+"I have more than once stayed here a few nights for the sake of
+seclusion," said Bulstrode, indifferently; "I am quite disposed to do
+so now.  Mrs. Abel and her husband can relieve or aid me, if necessary."
+
+"Very well.  Then I need give my directions only to you," said Lydgate,
+not feeling surprised at a little peculiarity in Bulstrode.
+
+"You think, then, that the case is hopeful?" said Bulstrode, when
+Lydgate had ended giving his orders.
+
+"Unless there turn out to be further complications, such as I have not
+at present detected--yes," said Lydgate.  "He may pass on to a worse
+stage; but I should not wonder if he got better in a few days, by
+adhering to the treatment I have prescribed.  There must be firmness.
+Remember, if he calls for liquors of any sort, not to give them to him.
+In my opinion, men in his condition are oftener killed by treatment
+than by the disease.  Still, new symptoms may arise.  I shall come
+again to-morrow morning."
+
+After waiting for the note to be carried to Mrs. Bulstrode, Lydgate
+rode away, forming no conjectures, in the first instance, about the
+history of Raffles, but rehearsing the whole argument, which had lately
+been much stirred by the publication of Dr. Ware's abundant experience
+in America, as to the right way of treating cases of alcoholic
+poisoning such as this.  Lydgate, when abroad, had already been
+interested in this question: he was strongly convinced against the
+prevalent practice of allowing alcohol and persistently administering
+large doses of opium; and he had repeatedly acted on this conviction
+with a favorable result.
+
+"The man is in a diseased state," he thought, "but there's a good deal
+of wear in him still.  I suppose he is an object of charity to
+Bulstrode.  It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie
+side by side in men's dispositions.  Bulstrode seems the most
+unsympathetic fellow I ever saw about some people, and yet he has taken
+no end of trouble, and spent a great deal of money, on benevolent
+objects.  I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven
+cares for--he has made up his mind that it doesn't care for me."
+
+This streak of bitterness came from a plenteous source, and kept
+widening in the current of his thought as he neared Lowick Gate.  He
+had not been there since his first interview with Bulstrode in the
+morning, having been found at the Hospital by the banker's messenger;
+and for the first time he was returning to his home without the vision
+of any expedient in the background which left him a hope of raising
+money enough to deliver him from the coming destitution of everything
+which made his married life tolerable--everything which saved him and
+Rosamond from that bare isolation in which they would be forced to
+recognize how little of a comfort they could be to each other.  It was
+more bearable to do without tenderness for himself than to see that his
+own tenderness could make no amends for the lack of other things to
+her.  The sufferings of his own pride from humiliations past and to
+come were keen enough, yet they were hardly distinguishable to himself
+from that more acute pain which dominated them--the pain of foreseeing
+that Rosamond would come to regard him chiefly as the cause of
+disappointment and unhappiness to her.  He had never liked the
+makeshifts of poverty, and they had never before entered into his
+prospects for himself; but he was beginning now to imagine how two
+creatures who loved each other, and had a stock of thoughts in common,
+might laugh over their shabby furniture, and their calculations how far
+they could afford butter and eggs.  But the glimpse of that poetry
+seemed as far off from him as the carelessness of the golden age; in
+poor Rosamond's mind there was not room enough for luxuries to look
+small in.  He got down from his horse in a very sad mood, and went into
+the house, not expecting to be cheered except by his dinner, and
+reflecting that before the evening closed it would be wise to tell
+Rosamond of his application to Bulstrode and its failure.  It would be
+well not to lose time in preparing her for the worst.
+
+But his dinner waited long for him before he was able to eat it.  For
+on entering he found that Dover's agent had already put a man in the
+house, and when he asked where Mrs. Lydgate was, he was told that she
+was in her bedroom.  He went up and found her stretched on the bed pale
+and silent, without an answer even in her face to any word or look of
+his.  He sat down by the bed and leaning over her said with almost a
+cry of prayer--
+
+"Forgive me for this misery, my poor Rosamond!  Let us only love one
+another."
+
+She looked at him silently, still with the blank despair on her face;
+but then the tears began to fill her blue eyes, and her lip trembled.
+The strong man had had too much to bear that day.  He let his head fall
+beside hers and sobbed.
+
+He did not hinder her from going to her father early in the morning--it
+seemed now that he ought not to hinder her from doing as she
+pleased.  In half an hour she came back, and said that papa and mamma
+wished her to go and stay with them while things were in this miserable
+state.  Papa said he could do nothing about the debt--if he paid this,
+there would be half-a-dozen more.  She had better come back home again
+till Lydgate had got a comfortable home for her.  "Do you object,
+Tertius?"
+
+"Do as you like," said Lydgate.  "But things are not coming to a crisis
+immediately.  There is no hurry."
+
+"I should not go till to-morrow," said Rosamond; "I shall want to pack
+my clothes."
+
+"Oh, I would wait a little longer than to-morrow--there is no knowing
+what may happen," said Lydgate, with bitter irony.  "I may get my neck
+broken, and that may make things easier to you."
+
+It was Lydgate's misfortune and Rosamond's too, that his tenderness
+towards her, which was both an emotional prompting and a
+well-considered resolve, was inevitably interrupted by these outbursts
+of indignation either ironical or remonstrant.  She thought them
+totally unwarranted, and the repulsion which this exceptional severity
+excited in her was in danger of making the more persistent tenderness
+unacceptable.
+
+"I see you do not wish me to go," she said, with chill mildness; "why
+can you not say so, without that kind of violence?  I shall stay until
+you request me to do otherwise."
+
+Lydgate said no more, but went out on his rounds.  He felt bruised and
+shattered, and there was a dark line under his eyes which Rosamond had
+not seen before.  She could not bear to look at him.  Tertius had a way
+of taking things which made them a great deal worse for her.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXX.
+
+    Our deeds still travel with us from afar,
+    And what we have been makes us what we are."
+
+
+Bulstrode's first object after Lydgate had left Stone Court was to
+examine Raffles's pockets, which he imagined were sure to carry signs
+in the shape of hotel-bills of the places he had stopped in, if he had
+not told the truth in saying that he had come straight from Liverpool
+because he was ill and had no money.  There were various bills crammed
+into his pocketbook, but none of a later date than Christmas at any
+other place, except one, which bore date that morning.  This was
+crumpled up with a hand-bill about a horse-fair in one of his
+tail-pockets, and represented the cost of three days' stay at an inn at
+Bilkley, where the fair was held--a town at least forty miles from
+Middlemarch.  The bill was heavy, and since Raffles had no luggage with
+him, it seemed probable that he had left his portmanteau behind in
+payment, in order to save money for his travelling fare; for his purse
+was empty, and he had only a couple of sixpences and some loose pence
+in his pockets.
+
+Bulstrode gathered a sense of safety from these indications that
+Raffles had really kept at a distance from Middlemarch since his
+memorable visit at Christmas.  At a distance and among people who were
+strangers to Bulstrode, what satisfaction could there be to Raffles's
+tormenting, self-magnifying vein in telling old scandalous stories
+about a Middlemarch banker?  And what harm if he did talk?  The chief
+point now was to keep watch over him as long as there was any danger of
+that intelligible raving, that unaccountable impulse to tell, which
+seemed to have acted towards Caleb Garth; and Bulstrode felt much
+anxiety lest some such impulse should come over him at the sight of
+Lydgate.  He sat up alone with him through the night, only ordering the
+housekeeper to lie down in her clothes, so as to be ready when he
+called her, alleging his own indisposition to sleep, and his anxiety to
+carry out the doctor's orders.  He did carry them out faithfully,
+although Raffles was incessantly asking for brandy, and declaring that
+he was sinking away--that the earth was sinking away from under him.
+He was restless and sleepless, but still quailing and manageable.  On
+the offer of the food ordered by Lydgate, which he refused, and the
+denial of other things which he demanded, he seemed to concentrate all
+his terror on Bulstrode, imploringly deprecating his anger, his revenge
+on him by starvation, and declaring with strong oaths that he had never
+told any mortal a word against him.  Even this Bulstrode felt that he
+would not have liked Lydgate to hear; but a more alarming sign of
+fitful alternation in his delirium was, that in-the morning twilight
+Raffles suddenly seemed to imagine a doctor present, addressing him and
+declaring that Bulstrode wanted to starve him to death out of revenge
+for telling, when he never had told.
+
+Bulstrode's native imperiousness and strength of determination served
+him well.  This delicate-looking man, himself nervously perturbed,
+found the needed stimulus in his strenuous circumstances, and through
+that difficult night and morning, while he had the air of an animated
+corpse returned to movement without warmth, holding the mastery by its
+chill impassibility his mind was intensely at work thinking of what he
+had to guard against and what would win him security.  Whatever prayers
+he might lift up, whatever statements he might inwardly make of this
+man's wretched spiritual condition, and the duty he himself was under
+to submit to the punishment divinely appointed for him rather than to
+wish for evil to another--through all this effort to condense words
+into a solid mental state, there pierced and spread with irresistible
+vividness the images of the events he desired.  And in the train of
+those images came their apology.  He could not but see the death of
+Raffles, and see in it his own deliverance.  What was the removal of
+this wretched creature?  He was impenitent--but were not public
+criminals impenitent?--yet the law decided on their fate.  Should
+Providence in this case award death, there was no sin in contemplating
+death as the desirable issue--if he kept his hands from hastening
+it--if he scrupulously did what was prescribed.  Even here there might
+be a mistake: human prescriptions were fallible things: Lydgate had
+said that treatment had hastened death,--why not his own method of
+treatment?  But of course intention was everything in the question of
+right and wrong.
+
+And Bulstrode set himself to keep his intention separate from his
+desire.  He inwardly declared that he intended to obey orders.  Why
+should he have got into any argument about the validity of these
+orders?  It was only the common trick of desire--which avails itself of
+any irrelevant scepticism, finding larger room for itself in all
+uncertainty about effects, in every obscurity that looks like the
+absence of law.  Still, he did obey the orders.
+
+His anxieties continually glanced towards Lydgate, and his remembrance
+of what had taken place between them the morning before was accompanied
+with sensibilities which had not been roused at all during the actual
+scene.  He had then cared but little about Lydgate's painful
+impressions with regard to the suggested change in the Hospital, or
+about the disposition towards himself which what he held to be his
+justifiable refusal of a rather exorbitant request might call forth.
+He recurred to the scene now with a perception that he had probably
+made Lydgate his enemy, and with an awakened desire to propitiate him,
+or rather to create in him a strong sense of personal obligation.  He
+regretted that he had not at once made even an unreasonable
+money-sacrifice. For in case of unpleasant suspicions, or even
+knowledge gathered from the raving of Raffles, Bulstrode would have
+felt that he had a defence in Lydgate's mind by having conferred a
+momentous benefit on him.  But the regret had perhaps come too late.
+
+Strange, piteous conflict in the soul of this unhappy man, who had
+longed for years to be better than he was--who had taken his selfish
+passions into discipline and clad them in severe robes, so that he had
+walked with them as a devout choir, till now that a terror had risen
+among them, and they could chant no longer, but threw out their common
+cries for safety.
+
+It was nearly the middle of the day before Lydgate arrived: he had
+meant to come earlier, but had been detained, he said; and his
+shattered looks were noticed by Balstrode.  But he immediately threw
+himself into the consideration of the patient, and inquired strictly
+into all that had occurred.  Raffles was worse, would take hardly any
+food, was persistently wakeful and restlessly raving; but still not
+violent.  Contrary to Bulstrode's alarmed expectation, he took little
+notice of Lydgate's presence, and continued to talk or murmur
+incoherently.
+
+"What do you think of him?" said Bulstrode, in private.
+
+"The symptoms are worse."
+
+"You are less hopeful?"
+
+"No; I still think he may come round.  Are you going to stay here
+yourself?" said Lydgate, looking at Bulstrode with an abrupt question,
+which made him uneasy, though in reality it was not due to any
+suspicious conjecture.
+
+"Yes, I think so," said Bulstrode, governing himself and speaking with
+deliberation.  "Mrs. Bulstrode is advised of the reasons which detain
+me.  Mrs. Abel and her husband are not experienced enough to be left
+quite alone, and this kind of responsibility is scarcely included in
+their service of me.  You have some fresh instructions, I presume."
+
+The chief new instruction that Lydgate had to give was on the
+administration of extremely moderate doses of opium, in case of the
+sleeplessness continuing after several hours.  He had taken the
+precaution of bringing opium in his pocket, and he gave minute
+directions to Bulstrode as to the doses, and the point at which they
+should cease.  He insisted on the risk of not ceasing; and repeated his
+order that no alcohol should be given.
+
+"From what I see of the case," he ended, "narcotism is the only thing I
+should be much afraid of.  He may wear through even without much food.
+There's a good deal of strength in him."
+
+"You look ill yourself, Mr. Lydgate--a most unusual, I may say
+unprecedented thing in my knowledge of you," said Bulstrode, showing a
+solicitude as unlike his indifference the day before, as his present
+recklessness about his own fatigue was unlike his habitual
+self-cherishing anxiety.  "I fear you are harassed."
+
+"Yes, I am," said Lydgate, brusquely, holding his hat, and ready to go.
+
+"Something new, I fear," said Bulstrode, inquiringly.  "Pray be seated."
+
+"No, thank you," said Lydgate, with some hauteur. "I mentioned to you
+yesterday what was the state of my affairs.  There is nothing to add,
+except that the execution has since then been actually put into my
+house.  One can tell a good deal of trouble in a short sentence.  I
+will say good morning."
+
+"Stay, Mr. Lydgate, stay," said Bulstrode; "I have been reconsidering
+this subject.  I was yesterday taken by surprise, and saw it
+superficially.  Mrs. Bulstrode is anxious for her niece, and I myself
+should grieve at a calamitous change in your position.  Claims on me
+are numerous, but on reconsideration, I esteem it right that I should
+incur a small sacrifice rather than leave you unaided.  You said, I
+think, that a thousand pounds would suffice entirely to free you from
+your burthens, and enable you to recover a firm stand?"
+
+"Yes," said Lydgate, a great leap of joy within him surmounting every
+other feeling; "that would pay all my debts, and leave me a little on
+hand.  I could set about economizing in our way of living.  And
+by-and-by my practice might look up."
+
+"If you will wait a moment, Mr. Lydgate, I will draw a check to that
+amount.  I am aware that help, to be effectual in these cases, should
+be thorough."
+
+While Bulstrode wrote, Lydgate turned to the window thinking of his
+home--thinking of his life with its good start saved from frustration,
+its good purposes still unbroken.
+
+"You can give me a note of hand for this, Mr. Lydgate," said the
+banker, advancing towards him with the check.  "And by-and-by, I hope,
+you may be in circumstances gradually to repay me.  Meanwhile, I have
+pleasure in thinking that you will be released from further difficulty."
+
+"I am deeply obliged to you," said Lydgate.  "You have restored to me
+the prospect of working with some happiness and some chance of good."
+
+It appeared to him a very natural movement in Bulstrode that he should
+have reconsidered his refusal: it corresponded with the more munificent
+side of his character.  But as he put his hack into a canter, that he
+might get the sooner home, and tell the good news to Rosamond, and get
+cash at the bank to pay over to Dover's agent, there crossed his mind,
+with an unpleasant impression, as from a dark-winged flight of evil
+augury across his vision, the thought of that contrast in himself which
+a few months had brought--that he should be overjoyed at being under a
+strong personal obligation--that he should be overjoyed at getting
+money for himself from Bulstrode.
+
+The banker felt that he had done something to nullify one cause of
+uneasiness, and yet he was scarcely the easier.  He did not measure the
+quantity of diseased motive which had made him wish for Lydgate's
+good-will, but the quantity was none the less actively there, like an
+irritating agent in his blood.  A man vows, and yet will not cast away
+the means of breaking his vow.  Is it that he distinctly means to break
+it?  Not at all; but the desires which tend to break it are at work in
+him dimly, and make their way into his imagination, and relax his
+muscles in the very moments when he is telling himself over again the
+reasons for his vow.  Raffles, recovering quickly, returning to the
+free use of his odious powers--how could Bulstrode wish for that?
+Raffles dead was the image that brought release, and indirectly he
+prayed for that way of release, beseeching that, if it were possible,
+the rest of his days here below might be freed from the threat of an
+ignominy which would break him utterly as an instrument of God's
+service.  Lydgate's opinion was not on the side of promise that this
+prayer would be fulfilled; and as the day advanced, Bulstrode felt
+himself getting irritated at the persistent life in this man, whom he
+would fain have seen sinking into the silence of death: imperious will
+stirred murderous impulses towards this brute life, over which will, by
+itself, had no power.  He said inwardly that he was getting too much
+worn; he would not sit up with the patient to-night, but leave him to
+Mrs. Abel, who, if necessary, could call her husband.
+
+At six o'clock, Raffles, having had only fitful perturbed snatches of
+sleep, from which he waked with fresh restlessness and perpetual cries
+that he was sinking away, Bulstrode began to administer the opium
+according to Lydgate's directions.  At the end of half an hour or more
+he called Mrs. Abel and told her that he found himself unfit for
+further watching.  He must now consign the patient to her care; and he
+proceeded to repeat to her Lydgate's directions as to the quantity of
+each dose.  Mrs. Abel had not before known anything of Lydgate's
+prescriptions; she had simply prepared and brought whatever Bulstrode
+ordered, and had done what he pointed out to her.  She began now to ask
+what else she should do besides administering the opium.
+
+"Nothing at present, except the offer of the soup or the soda-water:
+you can come to me for further directions.  Unless there is any
+important change, I shall not come into the room again to-night. You
+will ask your husband for help if necessary.  I must go to bed early."
+
+"You've much need, sir, I'm sure," said Mrs. Abel, "and to take
+something more strengthening than what you've done."
+
+Bulstrode went away now without anxiety as to what Raffles might say in
+his raving, which had taken on a muttering incoherence not likely to
+create any dangerous belief.  At any rate he must risk this.  He went
+down into the wainscoted parlor first, and began to consider whether he
+would not have his horse saddled and go home by the moonlight, and give
+up caring for earthly consequences.  Then, he wished that he had begged
+Lydgate to come again that evening.  Perhaps he might deliver a
+different opinion, and think that Raffles was getting into a less
+hopeful state.  Should he send for Lydgate?  If Raffles were really
+getting worse, and slowly dying, Bulstrode felt that he could go to bed
+and sleep in gratitude to Providence.  But was he worse?  Lydgate might
+come and simply say that he was going on as he expected, and predict
+that he would by-and-by fall into a good sleep, and get well.  What was
+the use of sending for him?  Bulstrode shrank from that result.  No
+ideas or opinions could hinder him from seeing the one probability to
+be, that Raffles recovered would be just the same man as before, with
+his strength as a tormentor renewed, obliging him to drag away his wife
+to spend her years apart from her friends and native place, carrying an
+alienating suspicion against him in her heart.
+
+He had sat an hour and a half in this conflict by the firelight only,
+when a sudden thought made him rise and light the bed-candle, which he
+had brought down with him.  The thought was, that he had not told Mrs.
+Abel when the doses of opium must cease.
+
+He took hold of the candlestick, but stood motionless for a long while.
+She might already have given him more than Lydgate had prescribed.  But
+it was excusable in him, that he should forget part of an order, in his
+present wearied condition.  He walked up-stairs, candle in hand, not
+knowing whether he should straightway enter his own room and go to bed,
+or turn to the patient's room and rectify his omission.  He paused in
+the passage, with his face turned towards Raffles's room, and he could
+hear him moaning and murmuring.  He was not asleep, then.  Who could
+know that Lydgate's prescription would not be better disobeyed than
+followed, since there was still no sleep?
+
+He turned into his own room.  Before he had quite undressed, Mrs. Abel
+rapped at the door; he opened it an inch, so that he could hear her
+speak low.
+
+"If you please, sir, should I have no brandy nor nothing to give the
+poor creetur?  He feels sinking away, and nothing else will he
+swaller--and but little strength in it, if he did--only the opium.  And
+he says more and more he's sinking down through the earth."
+
+To her surprise, Mr. Bulstrode did not answer.  A struggle was going on
+within him.
+
+"I think he must die for want o' support, if he goes on in that way.
+When I nursed my poor master, Mr. Robisson, I had to give him port-wine
+and brandy constant, and a big glass at a time," added Mrs. Abel, with
+a touch of remonstrance in her tone.
+
+But again Mr. Bulstrode did not answer immediately, and she continued,
+"It's not a time to spare when people are at death's door, nor would
+you wish it, sir, I'm sure.  Else I should give him our own bottle o'
+rum as we keep by us.  But a sitter-up so as you've been, and doing
+everything as laid in your power--"
+
+Here a key was thrust through the inch of doorway, and Mr. Bulstrode
+said huskily, "That is the key of the wine-cooler. You will find plenty
+of brandy there."
+
+Early in the morning--about six--Mr. Bulstrode rose and spent some time
+in prayer.  Does any one suppose that private prayer is necessarily
+candid--necessarily goes to the roots of action?  Private prayer is
+inaudible speech, and speech is representative: who can represent
+himself just as he is, even in his own reflections?  Bulstrode had not
+yet unravelled in his thought the confused promptings of the last
+four-and-twenty hours.
+
+He listened in the passage, and could hear hard stertorous breathing.
+Then he walked out in the garden, and looked at the early rime on the
+grass and fresh spring leaves.  When he re-entered the house, he felt
+startled at the sight of Mrs. Abel.
+
+"How is your patient--asleep, I think?" he said, with an attempt at
+cheerfulness in his tone.
+
+"He's gone very deep, sir," said Mrs. Abel.  "He went off gradual
+between three and four o'clock.  Would you please to go and look at
+him?  I thought it no harm to leave him.  My man's gone afield, and the
+little girl's seeing to the kettles."
+
+Bulstrode went up.  At a glance he knew that Raffles was not in the
+sleep which brings revival, but in the sleep which streams deeper and
+deeper into the gulf of death.
+
+He looked round the room and saw a bottle with some brandy in it, and
+the almost empty opium phial.  He put the phial out of sight, and
+carried the brandy-bottle down-stairs with him, locking it again in the
+wine-cooler.
+
+While breakfasting he considered whether he should ride to Middlemarch
+at once, or wait for Lydgate's arrival.  He decided to wait, and told
+Mrs. Abel that she might go about her work--he could watch in the
+bed-chamber.
+
+As he sat there and beheld the enemy of his peace going irrevocably
+into silence, he felt more at rest than he had done for many months.
+His conscience was soothed by the enfolding wing of secrecy, which
+seemed just then like an angel sent down for his relief.  He drew out
+his pocket-book to review various memoranda there as to the
+arrangements he had projected and partly carried out in the prospect of
+quitting Middlemarch, and considered how far he would let them stand or
+recall them, now that his absence would be brief.  Some economies which
+he felt desirable might still find a suitable occasion in his temporary
+withdrawal from management, and he hoped still that Mrs. Casaubon would
+take a large share in the expenses of the Hospital.  In that way the
+moments passed, until a change in the stertorous breathing was marked
+enough to draw his attention wholly to the bed, and forced him to think
+of the departing life, which had once been subservient to his
+own--which he had once been glad to find base enough for him to act on
+as he would.  It was his gladness then which impelled him now to be
+glad that the life was at an end.
+
+And who could say that the death of Raffles had been hastened?  Who
+knew what would have saved him?
+
+Lydgate arrived at half-past ten, in time to witness the final pause of
+the breath.  When he entered the room Bulstrode observed a sudden
+expression in his face, which was not so much surprise as a recognition
+that he had not judged correctly.  He stood by the bed in silence for
+some time, with his eyes turned on the dying man, but with that subdued
+activity of expression which showed that he was carrying on an inward
+debate.
+
+"When did this change begin?" said he, looking at Bulstrode.
+
+"I did not watch by him last night," said Bulstrode.  "I was over-worn,
+and left him under Mrs. Abel's care.  She said that he sank into sleep
+between three and four o'clock.  When I came in before eight he was
+nearly in this condition."
+
+Lydgate did not ask another question, but watched in silence until he
+said, "It's all over."
+
+This morning Lydgate was in a state of recovered hope and freedom.  He
+had set out on his work with all his old animation, and felt himself
+strong enough to bear all the deficiencies of his married life.  And he
+was conscious that Bulstrode had been a benefactor to him.  But he was
+uneasy about this case.  He had not expected it to terminate as it had
+done.  Yet he hardly knew how to put a question on the subject to
+Bulstrode without appearing to insult him; and if he examined the
+housekeeper--why, the man was dead.  There seemed to be no use in
+implying that somebody's ignorance or imprudence had killed him.  And
+after all, he himself might be wrong.
+
+He and Bulstrode rode back to Middlemarch together, talking of many
+things--chiefly cholera and the chances of the Reform Bill in the House
+of Lords, and the firm resolve of the political Unions.  Nothing was
+said about Raffles, except that Bulstrode mentioned the necessity of
+having a grave for him in Lowick churchyard, and observed that, so far
+as he knew, the poor man had no connections, except Rigg, whom he had
+stated to be unfriendly towards him.
+
+On returning home Lydgate had a visit from Mr. Farebrother.  The Vicar
+had not been in the town the day before, but the news that there was an
+execution in Lydgate's house had got to Lowick by the evening, having
+been carried by Mr. Spicer, shoemaker and parish-clerk, who had it from
+his brother, the respectable bell-hanger in Lowick Gate.  Since that
+evening when Lydgate had come down from the billiard room with Fred
+Vincy, Mr. Farebrother's thoughts about him had been rather gloomy.
+Playing at the Green Dragon once or oftener might have been a trifle in
+another man; but in Lydgate it was one of several signs that he was
+getting unlike his former self.  He was beginning to do things for
+which he had formerly even an excessive scorn.  Whatever certain
+dissatisfactions in marriage, which some silly tinklings of gossip had
+given him hints of, might have to do with this change, Mr. Farebrother
+felt sure that it was chiefly connected with the debts which were being
+more and more distinctly reported, and he began to fear that any notion
+of Lydgate's having resources or friends in the background must be
+quite illusory.  The rebuff he had met with in his first attempt to win
+Lydgate's confidence, disinclined him to a second; but this news of the
+execution being actually in the house, determined the Vicar to overcome
+his reluctance.
+
+Lydgate had just dismissed a poor patient, in whom he was much
+interested, and he came forward to put out his hand--with an open
+cheerfulness which surprised Mr. Farebrother.  Could this too be a
+proud rejection of sympathy and help?  Never mind; the sympathy and
+help should be offered.
+
+"How are you, Lydgate?  I came to see you because I had heard something
+which made me anxious about you," said the Vicar, in the tone of a good
+brother, only that there was no reproach in it.  They were both seated
+by this time, and Lydgate answered immediately--
+
+"I think I know what you mean.  You had heard that there was an
+execution in the house?"
+
+"Yes; is it true?"
+
+"It was true," said Lydgate, with an air of freedom, as if he did not
+mind talking about the affair now.  "But the danger is over; the debt
+is paid.  I am out of my difficulties now: I shall be freed from debts,
+and able, I hope, to start afresh on a better plan."
+
+"I am very thankful to hear it," said the Vicar, falling back in his
+chair, and speaking with that low-toned quickness which often follows
+the removal of a load.  "I like that better than all the news in the
+'Times.' I confess I came to you with a heavy heart."
+
+"Thank you for coming," said Lydgate, cordially.  "I can enjoy the
+kindness all the more because I am happier.  I have certainly been a
+good deal crushed.  I'm afraid I shall find the bruises still painful
+by-and by," he added, smiling rather sadly; "but just now I can only
+feel that the torture-screw is off."
+
+Mr. Farebrother was silent for a moment, and then said earnestly, "My
+dear fellow, let me ask you one question.  Forgive me if I take a
+liberty."
+
+"I don't believe you will ask anything that ought to offend me."
+
+"Then--this is necessary to set my heart quite at rest--you have
+not--have you?--in order to pay your debts, incurred another debt which
+may harass you worse hereafter?"
+
+"No," said Lydgate, coloring slightly.  "There is no reason why I
+should not tell you--since the fact is so--that the person to whom I am
+indebted is Bulstrode.  He has made me a very handsome advance--a
+thousand pounds--and he can afford to wait for repayment."
+
+"Well, that is generous," said Mr. Farebrother, compelling himself to
+approve of the man whom he disliked.  His delicate feeling shrank from
+dwelling even in his thought on the fact that he had always urged
+Lydgate to avoid any personal entanglement with Bulstrode.  He added
+immediately, "And Bulstrode must naturally feel an interest in your
+welfare, after you have worked with him in a way which has probably
+reduced your income instead of adding to it.  I am glad to think that
+he has acted accordingly."
+
+Lydgate felt uncomfortable under these kindly suppositions.  They made
+more distinct within him the uneasy consciousness which had shown its
+first dim stirrings only a few hours before, that Bulstrode's motives
+for his sudden beneficence following close upon the chillest
+indifference might be merely selfish.  He let the kindly suppositions
+pass.  He could not tell the history of the loan, but it was more
+vividly present with him than ever, as well as the fact which the Vicar
+delicately ignored--that this relation of personal indebtedness to
+Bulstrode was what he had once been most resolved to avoid.
+
+He began, instead of answering, to speak of his projected economies,
+and of his having come to look at his life from a different point of
+view.
+
+"I shall set up a surgery," he said.  "I really think I made a mistaken
+effort in that respect.  And if Rosamond will not mind, I shall take an
+apprentice.  I don't like these things, but if one carries them out
+faithfully they are not really lowering.  I have had a severe galling
+to begin with: that will make the small rubs seem easy."
+
+Poor Lydgate! the "if Rosamond will not mind," which had fallen from
+him involuntarily as part of his thought, was a significant mark of the
+yoke he bore.  But Mr. Farebrother, whose hopes entered strongly into
+the same current with Lydgate's, and who knew nothing about him that
+could now raise a melancholy presentiment, left him with affectionate
+congratulation.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXI.
+
+    Clown. . . . 'Twas in the Bunch of Grapes, where, indeed,
+            you have a delight to sit, have you not?
+    Froth. I have so: because it is an open room, and good for winter.
+      Clo. Why, very well then: I hope here be truths.
+                                     --Measure for Measure.
+
+
+Five days after the death of Raffles, Mr. Bambridge was standing at his
+leisure under the large archway leading into the yard of the Green
+Dragon.  He was not fond of solitary contemplation, but he had only
+just come out of the house, and any human figure standing at ease under
+the archway in the early afternoon was as certain to attract
+companionship as a pigeon which has found something worth pecking at.
+In this case there was no material object to feed upon, but the eye of
+reason saw a probability of mental sustenance in the shape of gossip.
+Mr. Hopkins, the meek-mannered draper opposite, was the first to act on
+this inward vision, being the more ambitious of a little masculine talk
+because his customers were chiefly women.  Mr. Bambridge was rather
+curt to the draper, feeling that Hopkins was of course glad to talk to
+_him_, but that he was not going to waste much of his talk on Hopkins.
+Soon, however, there was a small cluster of more important listeners,
+who were either deposited from the passers-by, or had sauntered to the
+spot expressly to see if there were anything going on at the Green
+Dragon; and Mr. Bambridge was finding it worth his while to say many
+impressive things about the fine studs he had been seeing and the
+purchases he had made on a journey in the north from which he had just
+returned.  Gentlemen present were assured that when they could show him
+anything to cut out a blood mare, a bay, rising four, which was to be
+seen at Doncaster if they chose to go and look at it, Mr. Bambridge
+would gratify them by being shot "from here to Hereford."  Also, a pair
+of blacks which he was going to put into the break recalled vividly to
+his mind a pair which he had sold to Faulkner in '19, for a hundred
+guineas, and which Faulkner had sold for a hundred and sixty two months
+later--any gent who could disprove this statement being offered the
+privilege of calling Mr. Bambridge by a very ugly name until the
+exercise made his throat dry.
+
+When the discourse was at this point of animation, came up Mr. Frank
+Hawley.  He was not a man to compromise his dignity by lounging at the
+Green Dragon, but happening to pass along the High Street and seeing
+Bambridge on the other side, he took some of his long strides across to
+ask the horsedealer whether he had found the first-rate gig-horse which
+he had engaged to look for.  Mr. Hawley was requested to wait until he
+had seen a gray selected at Bilkley: if that did not meet his wishes to
+a hair, Bambridge did not know a horse when he saw it, which seemed to
+be the highest conceivable unlikelihood.  Mr. Hawley, standing with his
+back to the street, was fixing a time for looking at the gray and
+seeing it tried, when a horseman passed slowly by.
+
+"Bulstrode!" said two or three voices at once in a low tone, one of
+them, which was the draper's, respectfully prefixing the "Mr.;" but
+nobody having more intention in this interjectural naming than if they
+had said "the Riverston coach" when that vehicle appeared in the
+distance.  Mr. Hawley gave a careless glance round at Bulstrode's back,
+but as Bambridge's eyes followed it he made a sarcastic grimace.
+
+"By jingo! that reminds me," he began, lowering his voice a little, "I
+picked up something else at Bilkley besides your gig-horse, Mr. Hawley.
+I picked up a fine story about Bulstrode.  Do you know how he came by
+his fortune?  Any gentleman wanting a bit of curious information, I can
+give it him free of expense.  If everybody got their deserts, Bulstrode
+might have had to say his prayers at Botany Bay."
+
+"What do you mean?" said Mr. Hawley, thrusting his hands into his
+pockets, and pushing a little forward under the archway.  If Bulstrode
+should turn out to be a rascal, Frank Hawley had a prophetic soul.
+
+"I had it from a party who was an old chum of Bulstrode's.  I'll tell
+you where I first picked him up," said Bambridge, with a sudden gesture
+of his fore-finger. "He was at Larcher's sale, but I knew nothing of
+him then--he slipped through my fingers--was after Bulstrode, no
+doubt.  He tells me he can tap Bulstrode to any amount, knows all his
+secrets.  However, he blabbed to me at Bilkley: he takes a stiff glass.
+Damme if I think he meant to turn king's evidence; but he's that sort
+of bragging fellow, the bragging runs over hedge and ditch with him,
+till he'd brag of a spavin as if it 'ud fetch money.  A man should know
+when to pull up." Mr. Bambridge made this remark with an air of
+disgust, satisfied that his own bragging showed a fine sense of the
+marketable.
+
+"What's the man's name?  Where can he be found?" said Mr. Hawley.
+
+"As to where he is to be found, I left him to it at the Saracen's Head;
+but his name is Raffles."
+
+"Raffles!" exclaimed Mr. Hopkins.  "I furnished his funeral yesterday.
+He was buried at Lowick.  Mr. Bulstrode followed him.  A very decent
+funeral."  There was a strong sensation among the listeners.  Mr.
+Bambridge gave an ejaculation in which "brimstone" was the mildest
+word, and Mr. Hawley, knitting his brows and bending his head forward,
+exclaimed, "What?--where did the man die?"
+
+"At Stone Court," said the draper.  "The housekeeper said he was a
+relation of the master's. He came there ill on Friday."
+
+"Why, it was on Wednesday I took a glass with him," interposed
+Bambridge.
+
+"Did any doctor attend him?" said Mr. Hawley
+
+"Yes.  Mr. Lydgate.  Mr. Bulstrode sat up with him one night.  He died
+the third morning."
+
+"Go on, Bambridge," said Mr. Hawley, insistently.  "What did this
+fellow say about Bulstrode?"
+
+The group had already become larger, the town-clerk's presence being a
+guarantee that something worth listening to was going on there; and Mr.
+Bambridge delivered his narrative in the hearing of seven.  It was
+mainly what we know, including the fact about Will Ladislaw, with some
+local color and circumstance added: it was what Bulstrode had dreaded
+the betrayal of--and hoped to have buried forever with the corpse of
+Raffles--it was that haunting ghost of his earlier life which as he
+rode past the archway of the Green Dragon he was trusting that
+Providence had delivered him from.  Yes, Providence.  He had not
+confessed to himself yet that he had done anything in the way of
+contrivance to this end; he had accepted what seemed to have been
+offered.  It was impossible to prove that he had done anything which
+hastened the departure of that man's soul.
+
+But this gossip about Bulstrode spread through Middlemarch like the
+smell of fire.  Mr. Frank Hawley followed up his information by sending
+a clerk whom he could trust to Stone Court on a pretext of inquiring
+about hay, but really to gather all that could be learned about Raffles
+and his illness from Mrs. Abel.  In this way it came to his knowledge
+that Mr. Garth had carried the man to Stone Court in his gig; and Mr.
+Hawley in consequence took an opportunity of seeing Caleb, calling at
+his office to ask whether he had time to undertake an arbitration if it
+were required, and then asking him incidentally about Raffles.  Caleb
+was betrayed into no word injurious to Bulstrode beyond the fact which
+he was forced to admit, that he had given up acting for him within the
+last week.  Mr Hawley drew his inferences, and feeling convinced that
+Raffles had told his story to Garth, and that Garth had given up
+Bulstrode's affairs in consequence, said so a few hours later to Mr.
+Toller.  The statement was passed on until it had quite lost the stamp
+of an inference, and was taken as information coming straight from
+Garth, so that even a diligent historian might have concluded Caleb to
+be the chief publisher of Bulstrode's misdemeanors.
+
+Mr. Hawley was not slow to perceive that there was no handle for the
+law either in the revelations made by Raffles or in the circumstances
+of his death.  He had himself ridden to Lowick village that he might
+look at the register and talk over the whole matter with Mr.
+Farebrother, who was not more surprised than the lawyer that an ugly
+secret should have come to light about Bulstrode, though he had always
+had justice enough in him to hinder his antipathy from turning into
+conclusions.  But while they were talking another combination was
+silently going forward in Mr. Farebrother's mind, which foreshadowed
+what was soon to be loudly spoken of in Middlemarch as a necessary
+"putting of two and two together."  With the reasons which kept
+Bulstrode in dread of Raffles there flashed the thought that the dread
+might have something to do with his munificence towards his medical
+man; and though he resisted the suggestion that it had been consciously
+accepted in any way as a bribe, he had a foreboding that this
+complication of things might be of malignant effect on Lydgate's
+reputation.  He perceived that Mr. Hawley knew nothing at present of
+the sudden relief from debt, and he himself was careful to glide away
+from all approaches towards the subject.
+
+"Well," he said, with a deep breath, wanting to wind up the illimitable
+discussion of what might have been, though nothing could be legally
+proven, "it is a strange story.  So our mercurial Ladislaw has a queer
+genealogy!  A high-spirited young lady and a musical Polish patriot
+made a likely enough stock for him to spring from, but I should never
+have suspected a grafting of the Jew pawnbroker.  However, there's no
+knowing what a mixture will turn out beforehand.  Some sorts of dirt
+serve to clarify."
+
+"It's just what I should have expected," said Mr. Hawley, mounting his
+horse.  "Any cursed alien blood, Jew, Corsican, or Gypsy."
+
+"I know he's one of your black sheep, Hawley.  But he is really a
+disinterested, unworldly fellow," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling.
+
+"Ay, ay, that is your Whiggish twist," said Mr. Hawley, who had been in
+the habit of saying apologetically that Farebrother was such a damned
+pleasant good-hearted fellow you would mistake him for a Tory.
+
+Mr. Hawley rode home without thinking of Lydgate's attendance on
+Raffles in any other light than as a piece of evidence on the side of
+Bulstrode.  But the news that Lydgate had all at once become able not
+only to get rid of the execution in his house but to pay all his debts
+in Middlemarch was spreading fast, gathering round it conjectures and
+comments which gave it new body and impetus, and soon filling the ears
+of other persons besides Mr. Hawley, who were not slow to see a
+significant relation between this sudden command of money and
+Bulstrode's desire to stifle the scandal of Raffles.  That the money
+came from Bulstrode would infallibly have been guessed even if there
+had been no direct evidence of it; for it had beforehand entered into
+the gossip about Lydgate's affairs, that neither his father-in-law nor
+his own family would do anything for him, and direct evidence was
+furnished not only by a clerk at the Bank, but by innocent Mrs.
+Bulstrode herself, who mentioned the loan to Mrs. Plymdale, who
+mentioned it to her daughter-in-law of the house of Toller, who
+mentioned it generally.  The business was felt to be so public and
+important that it required dinners to feed it, and many invitations
+were just then issued and accepted on the strength of this scandal
+concerning Bulstrode and Lydgate; wives, widows, and single ladies took
+their work and went out to tea oftener than usual; and all public
+conviviality, from the Green Dragon to Dollop's, gathered a zest which
+could not be won from the question whether the Lords would throw out
+the Reform Bill.
+
+For hardly anybody doubted that some scandalous reason or other was at
+the bottom of Bulstrode's liberality to Lydgate.  Mr. Hawley indeed, in
+the first instance, invited a select party, including the two
+physicians, with Mr Toller and Mr. Wrench, expressly to hold a close
+discussion as to the probabilities of Raffles's illness, reciting to
+them all the particulars which had been gathered from Mrs. Abel in
+connection with Lydgate's certificate, that the death was due to
+delirium tremens; and the medical gentlemen, who all stood
+undisturbedly on the old paths in relation to this disease, declared
+that they could see nothing in these particulars which could be
+transformed into a positive ground of suspicion.  But the moral grounds
+of suspicion remained: the strong motives Bulstrode clearly had for
+wishing to be rid of Raffles, and the fact that at this critical moment
+he had given Lydgate the help which he must for some time have known
+the need for; the disposition, moreover, to believe that Bulstrode
+would be unscrupulous, and the absence of any indisposition to believe
+that Lydgate might be as easily bribed as other haughty-minded men when
+they have found themselves in want of money.  Even if the money had
+been given merely to make him hold his tongue about the scandal of
+Bulstrode's earlier life, the fact threw an odious light on Lydgate,
+who had long been sneered at as making himself subservient to the
+banker for the sake of working himself into predominance, and
+discrediting the elder members of his profession.  Hence, in spite of
+the negative as to any direct sign of guilt in relation to the death at
+Stone Court, Mr. Hawley's select party broke up with the sense that the
+affair had "an ugly look."
+
+But this vague conviction of indeterminable guilt, which was enough to
+keep up much head-shaking and biting innuendo even among substantial
+professional seniors, had for the general mind all the superior power
+of mystery over fact.  Everybody liked better to conjecture how the
+thing was, than simply to know it; for conjecture soon became more
+confident than knowledge, and had a more liberal allowance for the
+incompatible.  Even the more definite scandal concerning Bulstrode's
+earlier life was, for some minds, melted into the mass of mystery, as
+so much lively metal to be poured out in dialogue, and to take such
+fantastic shapes as heaven pleased.
+
+This was the tone of thought chiefly sanctioned by Mrs. Dollop, the
+spirited landlady of the Tankard in Slaughter Lane, who had often to
+resist the shallow pragmatism of customers disposed to think that their
+reports from the outer world were of equal force with what had "come
+up" in her mind.  How it had been brought to her she didn't know, but
+it was there before her as if it had been "scored with the chalk on the
+chimney-board--" as Bulstrode should say, "his inside was _that black_
+as if the hairs of his head knowed the thoughts of his heart, he'd tear
+'em up by the roots."
+
+"That's odd," said Mr. Limp, a meditative shoemaker, with weak eyes and
+a piping voice.  "Why, I read in the 'Trumpet' that was what the Duke
+of Wellington said when he turned his coat and went over to the Romans."
+
+"Very like," said Mrs. Dollop.  "If one raskill said it, it's more
+reason why another should.  But hypo_crite_ as he's been, and holding
+things with that high hand, as there was no parson i' the country good
+enough for him, he was forced to take Old Harry into his counsel, and
+Old Harry's been too many for him."
+
+"Ay, ay, he's a 'complice you can't send out o' the country," said Mr.
+Crabbe, the glazier, who gathered much news and groped among it dimly.
+"But by what I can make out, there's them says Bulstrode was for
+running away, for fear o' being found out, before now."
+
+"He'll be drove away, whether or no," said Mr. Dill, the barber, who
+had just dropped in.  "I shaved Fletcher, Hawley's clerk, this
+morning--he's got a bad finger--and he says they're all of one mind to
+get rid of Bulstrode.  Mr. Thesiger is turned against him, and wants
+him out o' the parish.  And there's gentlemen in this town says they'd
+as soon dine with a fellow from the hulks.  'And a deal sooner I
+would,' says Fletcher; 'for what's more against one's stomach than a
+man coming and making himself bad company with his religion, and giving
+out as the Ten Commandments are not enough for him, and all the while
+he's worse than half the men at the tread-mill?' Fletcher said so
+himself."
+
+"It'll be a bad thing for the town though, if Bulstrode's money goes
+out of it," said Mr. Limp, quaveringly.
+
+"Ah, there's better folks spend their money worse," said a firm-voiced
+dyer, whose crimson hands looked out of keeping with his good-natured
+face.
+
+"But he won't keep his money, by what I can make out," said the
+glazier.  "Don't they say as there's somebody can strip it off him?  By
+what I can understan', they could take every penny off him, if they
+went to lawing."
+
+"No such thing!" said the barber, who felt himself a little above his
+company at Dollop's, but liked it none the worse.  "Fletcher says it's
+no such thing.  He says they might prove over and over again whose
+child this young Ladislaw was, and they'd do no more than if they
+proved I came out of the Fens--he couldn't touch a penny."
+
+"Look you there now!" said Mrs. Dollop, indignantly.  "I thank the Lord
+he took my children to Himself, if that's all the law can do for the
+motherless.  Then by that, it's o' no use who your father and mother
+is.  But as to listening to what one lawyer says without asking
+another--I wonder at a man o' your cleverness, Mr. Dill.  It's well
+known there's always two sides, if no more; else who'd go to law, I
+should like to know?  It's a poor tale, with all the law as there is up
+and down, if it's no use proving whose child you are.  Fletcher may say
+that if he likes, but I say, don't Fletcher _me_!"
+
+Mr. Dill affected to laugh in a complimentary way at Mrs. Dollop, as a
+woman who was more than a match for the lawyers; being disposed to
+submit to much twitting from a landlady who had a long score against
+him.
+
+"If they come to lawing, and it's all true as folks say, there's more
+to be looked to nor money," said the glazier.  "There's this poor
+creetur as is dead and gone; by what I can make out, he'd seen the day
+when he was a deal finer gentleman nor Bulstrode."
+
+"Finer gentleman!  I'll warrant him," said Mrs. Dollop; "and a far
+personabler man, by what I can hear.  As I said when Mr. Baldwin, the
+tax-gatherer, comes in, a-standing where you sit, and says, 'Bulstrode
+got all his money as he brought into this town by thieving and
+swindling,'--I said, 'You don't make me no wiser, Mr. Baldwin: it's set
+my blood a-creeping to look at him ever sin' here he came into
+Slaughter Lane a-wanting to buy the house over my head: folks don't
+look the color o' the dough-tub and stare at you as if they wanted to
+see into your backbone for nothingk.'  That was what I said, and Mr.
+Baldwin can bear me witness."
+
+"And in the rights of it too," said Mr. Crabbe.  "For by what I can
+make out, this Raffles, as they call him, was a lusty, fresh-colored
+man as you'd wish to see, and the best o' company--though dead he lies
+in Lowick churchyard sure enough; and by what I can understan', there's
+them knows more than they _should_ know about how he got there."
+
+"I'll believe you!" said Mrs. Dallop, with a touch of scorn at Mr.
+Crabbe's apparent dimness.  "When a man's been 'ticed to a lone house,
+and there's them can pay for hospitals and nurses for half the
+country-side choose to be sitters-up night and day, and nobody to come
+near but a doctor as is known to stick at nothingk, and as poor as he
+can hang together, and after that so flush o' money as he can pay off
+Mr. Byles the butcher as his bill has been running on for the best o'
+joints since last Michaelmas was a twelvemonth--I don't want anybody to
+come and tell me as there's been more going on nor the Prayer-book's
+got a service for--I don't want to stand winking and blinking and
+thinking."
+
+Mrs. Dollop looked round with the air of a landlady accustomed to
+dominate her company.  There was a chorus of adhesion from the more
+courageous; but Mr. Limp, after taking a draught, placed his flat hands
+together and pressed them hard between his knees, looking down at them
+with blear-eyed contemplation, as if the scorching power of Mrs.
+Dollop's speech had quite dried up and nullified his wits until they
+could be brought round again by further moisture.
+
+"Why shouldn't they dig the man up and have the Crowner?" said the
+dyer.  "It's been done many and many's the time.  If there's been foul
+play they might find it out."
+
+"Not they, Mr. Jonas!" said Mrs Dollop, emphatically.  "I know what
+doctors are.  They're a deal too cunning to be found out.  And this
+Doctor Lydgate that's been for cutting up everybody before the breath
+was well out o' their body--it's plain enough what use he wanted to
+make o' looking into respectable people's insides.  He knows drugs, you
+may be sure, as you can neither smell nor see, neither before they're
+swallowed nor after.  Why, I've seen drops myself ordered by Doctor
+Gambit, as is our club doctor and a good charikter, and has brought
+more live children into the world nor ever another i' Middlemarch--I
+say I've seen drops myself as made no difference whether they was in
+the glass or out, and yet have griped you the next day.  So I'll leave
+your own sense to judge.  Don't tell me!  All I say is, it's a mercy
+they didn't take this Doctor Lydgate on to our club.  There's many a
+mother's child might ha' rued it."
+
+The heads of this discussion at "Dollop's" had been the common theme
+among all classes in the town, had been carried to Lowick Parsonage on
+one side and to Tipton Grange on the other, had come fully to the ears
+of the Vincy family, and had been discussed with sad reference to "poor
+Harriet" by all Mrs. Bulstrode's friends, before Lydgate knew
+distinctly why people were looking strangely at him, and before
+Bulstrode himself suspected the betrayal of his secrets.  He had not
+been accustomed to very cordial relations with his neighbors, and hence
+he could not miss the signs of cordiality; moreover, he had been taking
+journeys on business of various kinds, having now made up his mind that
+he need not quit Middlemarch, and feeling able consequently to
+determine on matters which he had before left in suspense.
+
+"We will make a journey to Cheltenham in the course of a month or two,"
+he had said to his wife.  "There are great spiritual advantages to be
+had in that town along with the air and the waters, and six weeks there
+will be eminently refreshing to us."
+
+He really believed in the spiritual advantages, and meant that his life
+henceforth should be the more devoted because of those later sins which
+he represented to himself as hypothetic, praying hypothetically for
+their pardon:--"if I have herein transgressed."
+
+As to the Hospital, he avoided saying anything further to Lydgate,
+fearing to manifest a too sudden change of plans immediately on the
+death of Raffles.  In his secret soul he believed that Lydgate
+suspected his orders to have been intentionally disobeyed, and
+suspecting this he must also suspect a motive. But nothing had been
+betrayed to him as to the history of Raffles, and Bulstrode was anxious
+not to do anything which would give emphasis to his undefined
+suspicions.  As to any certainty that a particular method of treatment
+would either save or kill, Lydgate himself was constantly arguing
+against such dogmatism; he had no right to speak, and he had every
+motive for being silent.  Hence Bulstrode felt himself providentially
+secured.  The only incident he had strongly winced under had been an
+occasional encounter with Caleb Garth, who, however, had raised his hat
+with mild gravity.
+
+Meanwhile, on the part of the principal townsmen a strong determination
+was growing against him.
+
+A meeting was to be held in the Town-Hall on a sanitary question which
+had risen into pressing importance by the occurrence of a cholera case
+in the town.  Since the Act of Parliament, which had been hurriedly
+passed, authorizing assessments for sanitary measures, there had been a
+Board for the superintendence of such measures appointed in
+Middlemarch, and much cleansing and preparation had been concurred in
+by Whigs and Tories.  The question now was, whether a piece of ground
+outside the town should be secured as a burial-ground by means of
+assessment or by private subscription.  The meeting was to be open, and
+almost everybody of importance in the town was expected to be there.
+
+Mr. Bulstrode was a member of the Board, and just before twelve o'clock
+he started from the Bank with the intention of urging the plan of
+private subscription.  Under the hesitation of his projects, he had for
+some time kept himself in the background, and he felt that he should
+this morning resume his old position as a man of action and influence
+in the public affairs of the town where he expected to end his days.
+Among the various persons going in the same direction, he saw Lydgate;
+they joined, talked over the object of the meeting, and entered it
+together.
+
+It seemed that everybody of mark had been earlier than they.  But there
+were still spaces left near the head of the large central table, and
+they made their way thither.  Mr. Farebrother sat opposite, not far
+from Mr. Hawley; all the medical men were there; Mr. Thesiger was in
+the chair, and Mr. Brooke of Tipton was on his right hand.
+
+Lydgate noticed a peculiar interchange of glances when he and Bulstrode
+took their seats.
+
+After the business had been fully opened by the chairman, who pointed
+out the advantages of purchasing by subscription a piece of ground
+large enough to be ultimately used as a general cemetery, Mr.
+Bulstrode, whose rather high-pitched but subdued and fluent voice the
+town was used to at meetings of this sort, rose and asked leave to
+deliver his opinion.  Lydgate could see again the peculiar interchange
+of glances before Mr. Hawley started up, and said in his firm resonant
+voice, "Mr. Chairman, I request that before any one delivers his
+opinion on this point I may be permitted to speak on a question of
+public feeling, which not only by myself, but by many gentlemen
+present, is regarded as preliminary."
+
+Mr. Hawley's mode of speech, even when public decorum repressed his
+"awful language," was formidable in its curtness and self-possession.
+Mr. Thesiger sanctioned the request, Mr. Bulstrode sat down, and Mr.
+Hawley continued.
+
+"In what I have to say, Mr. Chairman, I am not speaking simply on my
+own behalf: I am speaking with the concurrence and at the express
+request of no fewer than eight of my fellow-townsmen, who are
+immediately around us.  It is our united sentiment that Mr. Bulstrode
+should be called upon--and I do now call upon him--to resign public
+positions which he holds not simply as a tax-payer, but as a gentleman
+among gentlemen.  There are practices and there are acts which, owing
+to circumstances, the law cannot visit, though they may be worse than
+many things which are legally punishable.  Honest men and gentlemen, if
+they don't want the company of people who perpetrate such acts, have
+got to defend themselves as they best can, and that is what I and the
+friends whom I may call my clients in this affair are determined to do.
+I don't say that Mr. Bulstrode has been guilty of shameful acts, but I
+call upon him either publicly to deny and confute the scandalous
+statements made against him by a man now dead, and who died in his
+house--the statement that he was for many years engaged in nefarious
+practices, and that he won his fortune by dishonest procedures--or else
+to withdraw from positions which could only have been allowed him as a
+gentleman among gentlemen."
+
+All eyes in the room were turned on Mr. Bulstrode, who, since the first
+mention of his name, had been going through a crisis of feeling almost
+too violent for his delicate frame to support.  Lydgate, who himself
+was undergoing a shock as from the terrible practical interpretation of
+some faint augury, felt, nevertheless, that his own movement of
+resentful hatred was checked by that instinct of the Healer which
+thinks first of bringing rescue or relief to the sufferer, when he
+looked at the shrunken misery of Bulstrode's livid face.
+
+The quick vision that his life was after all a failure, that he was a
+dishonored man, and must quail before the glance of those towards whom
+he had habitually assumed the attitude of a reprover--that God had
+disowned him before men and left him unscreened to the triumphant scorn
+of those who were glad to have their hatred justified--the sense of
+utter futility in that equivocation with his conscience in dealing with
+the life of his accomplice, an equivocation which now turned venomously
+upon him with the full-grown fang of a discovered lie:--all this
+rushed through him like the agony of terror which fails to kill, and
+leaves the ears still open to the returning wave of execration.  The
+sudden sense of exposure after the re-established sense of safety
+came--not to the coarse organization of a criminal but to--the
+susceptible nerve of a man whose intensest being lay in such mastery
+and predominance as the conditions of his life had shaped for him.
+
+But in that intense being lay the strength of reaction.  Through all
+his bodily infirmity there ran a tenacious nerve of ambitious
+self-preserving will, which had continually leaped out like a flame,
+scattering all doctrinal fears, and which, even while he sat an object
+of compassion for the merciful, was beginning to stir and glow under
+his ashy paleness.  Before the last words were out of Mr. Hawley's
+mouth, Bulstrode felt that he should answer, and that his answer would
+be a retort.  He dared not get up and say, "I am not guilty, the whole
+story is false"--even if he had dared this, it would have seemed to
+him, under his present keen sense of betrayal, as vain as to pull, for
+covering to his nakedness, a frail rag which would rend at every little
+strain.
+
+For a few moments there was total silence, while every man in the room
+was looking at Bulstrode.  He sat perfectly still, leaning hard against
+the back of his chair; he could not venture to rise, and when he began
+to speak he pressed his hands upon the seat on each side of him.  But
+his voice was perfectly audible, though hoarser than usual, and his
+words were distinctly pronounced, though he paused between sentence as
+if short of breath.  He said, turning first toward Mr. Thesiger, and
+then looking at Mr. Hawley--
+
+"I protest before you, sir, as a Christian minister, against the
+sanction of proceedings towards me which are dictated by virulent
+hatred.  Those who are hostile to me are glad to believe any libel
+uttered by a loose tongue against me.  And their consciences become
+strict against me.  Say that the evil-speaking of which I am to be made
+the victim accuses me of malpractices--" here Bulstrode's voice rose
+and took on a more biting accent, till it seemed a low cry--"who shall
+be my accuser?  Not men whose own lives are unchristian, nay,
+scandalous--not men who themselves use low instruments to carry out
+their ends--whose profession is a tissue of chicanery--who have been
+spending their income on their own sensual enjoyments, while I have
+been devoting mine to advance the best objects with regard to this life
+and the next."
+
+After the word chicanery there was a growing noise, half of murmurs and
+half of hisses, while four persons started up at once--Mr. Hawley, Mr.
+Toller, Mr. Chichely, and Mr. Hackbutt; but Mr. Hawley's outburst was
+instantaneous, and left the others behind in silence.
+
+"If you mean me, sir, I call you and every one else to the inspection
+of my professional life.  As to Christian or unchristian, I repudiate
+your canting palavering Christianity; and as to the way in which I
+spend my income, it is not my principle to maintain thieves and cheat
+offspring of their due inheritance in order to support religion and set
+myself up as a saintly Killjoy.  I affect no niceness of conscience--I
+have not found any nice standards necessary yet to measure your actions
+by, sir.  And I again call upon you to enter into satisfactory
+explanations concerning the scandals against you, or else to withdraw
+from posts in which we at any rate decline you as a colleague.  I say,
+sir, we decline to co-operate with a man whose character is not cleared
+from infamous lights cast upon it, not only by reports but by recent
+actions."
+
+"Allow me, Mr. Hawley," said the chairman; and Mr. Hawley, still
+fuming, bowed half impatiently, and sat down with his hands thrust deep
+in his pockets.
+
+"Mr. Bulstrode, it is not desirable, I think, to prolong the present
+discussion," said Mr. Thesiger, turning to the pallid trembling man; "I
+must so far concur with what has fallen from Mr. Hawley in expression
+of a general feeling, as to think it due to your Christian profession
+that you should clear yourself, if possible, from unhappy aspersions.
+I for my part should be willing to give you full opportunity and
+hearing.  But I must say that your present attitude is painfully
+inconsistent with those principles which you have sought to identify
+yourself with, and for the honor of which I am bound to care.  I
+recommend you at present, as your clergyman, and one who hopes for your
+reinstatement in respect, to quit the room, and avoid further hindrance
+to business."
+
+Bulstrode, after a moment's hesitation, took his hat from the floor and
+slowly rose, but he grasped the corner of the chair so totteringly that
+Lydgate felt sure there was not strength enough in him to walk away
+without support.  What could he do?  He could not see a man sink close
+to him for want of help.  He rose and gave his arm to Bulstrode, and in
+that way led him out of the room; yet this act, which might have been
+one of gentle duty and pure compassion, was at this moment unspeakably
+bitter to him.  It seemed as if he were putting his sign-manual to that
+association of himself with Bulstrode, of which he now saw the full
+meaning as it must have presented itself to other minds.  He now felt
+the conviction that this man who was leaning tremblingly on his arm,
+had given him the thousand pounds as a bribe, and that somehow the
+treatment of Raffles had been tampered with from an evil motive.  The
+inferences were closely linked enough; the town knew of the loan,
+believed it to be a bribe, and believed that he took it as a bribe.
+
+Poor Lydgate, his mind struggling under the terrible clutch of this
+revelation, was all the while morally forced to take Mr. Bulstrode to
+the Bank, send a man off for his carriage, and wait to accompany him
+home.
+
+Meanwhile the business of the meeting was despatched, and fringed off
+into eager discussion among various groups concerning this affair of
+Bulstrode--and Lydgate.
+
+Mr. Brooke, who had before heard only imperfect hints of it, and was
+very uneasy that he had "gone a little too far" in countenancing
+Bulstrode, now got himself fully informed, and felt some benevolent
+sadness in talking to Mr. Farebrother about the ugly light in which
+Lydgate had come to be regarded.  Mr. Farebrother was going to walk
+back to Lowick.
+
+"Step into my carriage," said Mr. Brooke.  "I am going round to see
+Mrs. Casaubon.  She was to come back from Yorkshire last night.  She
+will like to see me, you know."
+
+So they drove along, Mr. Brooke chatting with good-natured hope that
+there had not really been anything black in Lydgate's behavior--a
+young fellow whom he had seen to be quite above the common mark, when
+he brought a letter from his uncle Sir Godwin.  Mr. Farebrother said
+little: he was deeply mournful: with a keen perception of human
+weakness, he could not be confident that under the pressure of
+humiliating needs Lydgate had not fallen below himself.
+
+When the carriage drove up to the gate of the Manor, Dorothea was out
+on the gravel, and came to greet them.
+
+"Well, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, "we have just come from a meeting--a
+sanitary meeting, you know."
+
+"Was Mr. Lydgate there?" said Dorothea, who looked full of health and
+animation, and stood with her head bare under the gleaming April
+lights.  "I want to see him and have a great consultation with him
+about the Hospital.  I have engaged with Mr. Bulstrode to do so."
+
+"Oh, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, "we have been hearing bad news--bad
+news, you know."
+
+They walked through the garden towards the churchyard gate, Mr.
+Farebrother wanting to go on to the parsonage; and Dorothea heard the
+whole sad story.
+
+She listened with deep interest, and begged to hear twice over the
+facts and impressions concerning Lydgate.  After a short silence,
+pausing at the churchyard gate, and addressing Mr. Farebrother, she
+said energetically--
+
+"You don't believe that Mr. Lydgate is guilty of anything base?  I will
+not believe it.  Let us find out the truth and clear him!"
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK VIII.
+
+
+
+
+
+SUNSET AND SUNRISE.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXII.
+
+    Full souls are double mirrors, making still
+    An endless vista of fair things before,
+    Repeating things behind.
+
+
+Dorothea's impetuous generosity, which would have leaped at once to the
+vindication of Lydgate from the suspicion of having accepted money as a
+bribe, underwent a melancholy check when she came to consider all the
+circumstances of the case by the light of Mr. Farebrother's experience.
+
+"It is a delicate matter to touch," he said.  "How can we begin to
+inquire into it?  It must be either publicly by setting the magistrate
+and coroner to work, or privately by questioning Lydgate.  As to the
+first proceeding there is no solid ground to go upon, else Hawley would
+have adopted it; and as to opening the subject with Lydgate, I confess
+I should shrink from it.  He would probably take it as a deadly insult.
+I have more than once experienced the difficulty of speaking to him on
+personal matters.  And--one should know the truth about his conduct
+beforehand, to feel very confident of a good result."
+
+"I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that
+people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,"
+said Dorothea.  Some of her intensest experience in the last two years
+had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavorable construction
+of others; and for the first time she felt rather discontented with Mr.
+Farebrother.  She disliked this cautious weighing of consequences,
+instead of an ardent faith in efforts of justice and mercy, which would
+conquer by their emotional force.  Two days afterwards, he was dining
+at the Manor with her uncle and the Chettams, and when the dessert was
+standing uneaten, the servants were out of the room, and Mr. Brooke was
+nodding in a nap, she returned to the subject with renewed vivacity.
+
+"Mr. Lydgate would understand that if his friends hear a calumny about
+him their first wish must be to justify him.  What do we live for, if
+it is not to make life less difficult to each other?  I cannot be
+indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me in _my_ trouble,
+and attended me in my illness."
+
+Dorothea's tone and manner were not more energetic than they had been
+when she was at the head of her uncle's table nearly three years
+before, and her experience since had given her more right to express a
+decided opinion.  But Sir James Chettam was no longer the diffident and
+acquiescent suitor: he was the anxious brother-in-law, with a devout
+admiration for his sister, but with a constant alarm lest she should
+fall under some new illusion almost as bad as marrying Casaubon.  He
+smiled much less; when he said "Exactly" it was more often an
+introduction to a dissentient opinion than in those submissive bachelor
+days; and Dorothea found to her surprise that she had to resolve not to
+be afraid of him--all the more because he was really her best friend.
+He disagreed with her now.
+
+"But, Dorothea," he said, remonstrantly, "you can't undertake to manage
+a man's life for him in that way.  Lydgate must know--at least he will
+soon come to know how he stands.  If he can clear himself, he will.  He
+must act for himself."
+
+"I think his friends must wait till they find an opportunity," added
+Mr. Farebrother.  "It is possible--I have often felt so much weakness
+in myself that I can conceive even a man of honorable disposition, such
+as I have always believed Lydgate to be, succumbing to such a
+temptation as that of accepting money which was offered more or less
+indirectly as a bribe to insure his silence about scandalous facts long
+gone by.  I say, I can conceive this, if he were under the pressure of
+hard circumstances--if he had been harassed as I feel sure Lydgate has
+been.  I would not believe anything worse of him except under stringent
+proof.  But there is the terrible Nemesis following on some errors,
+that it is always possible for those who like it to interpret them into
+a crime: there is no proof in favor of the man outside his own
+consciousness and assertion."
+
+"Oh, how cruel!" said Dorothea, clasping her hands.  "And would you not
+like to be the one person who believed in that man's innocence, if the
+rest of the world belied him?  Besides, there is a man's character
+beforehand to speak for him."
+
+"But, my dear Mrs. Casaubon," said Mr. Farebrother, smiling gently at
+her ardor, "character is not cut in marble--it is not something solid
+and unalterable.  It is something living and changing, and may become
+diseased as our bodies do."
+
+"Then it may be rescued and healed," said Dorothea "I should not be
+afraid of asking Mr. Lydgate to tell me the truth, that I might help
+him.  Why should I be afraid?  Now that I am not to have the land,
+James, I might do as Mr. Bulstrode proposed, and take his place in
+providing for the Hospital; and I have to consult Mr. Lydgate, to know
+thoroughly what are the prospects of doing good by keeping up the
+present plans.  There is the best opportunity in the world for me to
+ask for his confidence; and he would be able to tell me things which
+might make all the circumstances clear.  Then we would all stand by him
+and bring him out of his trouble.  People glorify all sorts of bravery
+except the bravery they might show on behalf of their nearest
+neighbors."  Dorothea's eyes had a moist brightness in them, and the
+changed tones of her voice roused her uncle, who began to listen.
+
+"It is true that a woman may venture on some efforts of sympathy which
+would hardly succeed if we men undertook them," said Mr. Farebrother,
+almost converted by Dorothea's ardor.
+
+"Surely, a woman is bound to be cautious and listen to those who know
+the world better than she does."  said Sir James, with his little
+frown.  "Whatever you do in the end, Dorothea, you should really keep
+back at present, and not volunteer any meddling with this Bulstrode
+business.  We don't know yet what may turn up.  You must agree with
+me?" he ended, looking at Mr. Farebrother.
+
+"I do think it would be better to wait," said the latter.
+
+"Yes, yes, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, not quite knowing at what point
+the discussion had arrived, but coming up to it with a contribution
+which was generally appropriate.  "It is easy to go too far, you know.
+You must not let your ideas run away with you.  And as to being in a
+hurry to put money into schemes--it won't do, you know.  Garth has
+drawn me in uncommonly with repairs, draining, that sort of thing: I'm
+uncommonly out of pocket with one thing or another.  I must pull up.
+As for you, Chettam, you are spending a fortune on those oak fences
+round your demesne."
+
+Dorothea, submitting uneasily to this discouragement, went with Celia
+into the library, which was her usual drawing-room.
+
+"Now, Dodo, do listen to what James says," said Celia, "else you will
+be getting into a scrape.  You always did, and you always will, when
+you set about doing as you please.  And I think it is a mercy now after
+all that you have got James to think for you.  He lets you have your
+plans, only he hinders you from being taken in.  And that is the good
+of having a brother instead of a husband.  A husband would not let you
+have your plans."
+
+"As if I wanted a husband!" said Dorothea.  "I only want not to have my
+feelings checked at every turn."  Mrs. Casaubon was still undisciplined
+enough to burst into angry tears.
+
+"Now, really, Dodo," said Celia, with rather a deeper guttural than
+usual, "you _are_ contradictory: first one thing and then another.  You
+used to submit to Mr. Casaubon quite shamefully: I think you would have
+given up ever coming to see me if he had asked you."
+
+"Of course I submitted to him, because it was my duty; it was my
+feeling for him," said Dorothea, looking through the prism of her tears.
+
+"Then why can't you think it your duty to submit a little to what James
+wishes?" said Celia, with a sense of stringency in her argument.
+"Because he only wishes what is for your own good.  And, of course, men
+know best about everything, except what women know better." Dorothea
+laughed and forgot her tears.
+
+"Well, I mean about babies and those things," explained Celia.  "I
+should not give up to James when I knew he was wrong, as you used to do
+to Mr. Casaubon."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIII.
+
+    Pity the laden one; this wandering woe
+    May visit you and me.
+
+
+When Lydgate had allayed Mrs. Bulstrode's anxiety by telling her that
+her husband had been seized with faintness at the meeting, but that he
+trusted soon to see him better and would call again the next day,
+unless she sent for him earlier, he went directly home, got on his
+horse, and rode three miles out of the town for the sake of being out
+of reach.
+
+He felt himself becoming violent and unreasonable as if raging under
+the pain of stings: he was ready to curse the day on which he had come
+to Middlemarch.  Everything that bad happened to him there seemed a
+mere preparation for this hateful fatality, which had come as a blight
+on his honorable ambition, and must make even people who had only
+vulgar standards regard his reputation as irrevocably damaged.  In such
+moments a man can hardly escape being unloving.  Lydgate thought of
+himself as the sufferer, and of others as the agents who had injured
+his lot.  He had meant everything to turn out differently; and others
+had thrust themselves into his life and thwarted his purposes.  His
+marriage seemed an unmitigated calamity; and he was afraid of going to
+Rosamond before he had vented himself in this solitary rage, lest the
+mere sight of her should exasperate him and make him behave
+unwarrantably.  There are episodes in most men's lives in which their
+highest qualities can only cast a deterring shadow over the objects
+that fill their inward vision: Lydgate's tenderheartedness was present
+just then only as a dread lest he should offend against it, not as an
+emotion that swayed him to tenderness.  For he was very miserable.
+Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life--the life
+which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it--can
+understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into
+the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.
+
+How was he to live on without vindicating himself among people who
+suspected him of baseness?  How could he go silently away from
+Middlemarch as if he were retreating before a just condemnation?  And
+yet how was he to set about vindicating himself?
+
+For that scene at the meeting, which he had just witnessed, although it
+had told him no particulars, had been enough to make his own situation
+thoroughly clear to him.  Bulstrode had been in dread of scandalous
+disclosures on the part of Raffles.  Lydgate could now construct all
+the probabilities of the case.  "He was afraid of some betrayal in my
+hearing: all he wanted was to bind me to him by a strong obligation:
+that was why he passed on a sudden from hardness to liberality.  And he
+may have tampered with the patient--he may have disobeyed my orders.  I
+fear he did.  But whether he did or not, the world believes that he
+somehow or other poisoned the man and that I winked at the crime, if I
+didn't help in it.  And yet--and yet he may not be guilty of the last
+offence; and it is just possible that the change towards me may have
+been a genuine relenting--the effect of second thoughts such as he
+alleged.  What we call the 'just possible' is sometimes true and the
+thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false.  In his last
+dealings with this man Bulstrode may have kept his hands pure, in spite
+of my suspicion to the contrary."
+
+There was a benumbing cruelty in his position.  Even if he renounced
+every other consideration than that of justifying himself--if he met
+shrugs, cold glances, and avoidance as an accusation, and made a public
+statement of all the facts as he knew them, who would be convinced?  It
+would be playing the part of a fool to offer his own testimony on
+behalf of himself, and say, "I did not take the money as a bribe."  The
+circumstances would always be stronger than his assertion.  And
+besides, to come forward and tell everything about himself must include
+declarations about Bulstrode which would darken the suspicions of
+others against him.  He must tell that he had not known of Raffles's
+existence when he first mentioned his pressing need of money to
+Bulstrode, and that he took the money innocently as a result of that
+communication, not knowing that a new motive for the loan might have
+arisen on his being called in to this man.  And after all, the
+suspicion of Bulstrode's motives might be unjust.
+
+But then came the question whether he should have acted in precisely
+the same way if he had not taken the money?  Certainly, if Raffles had
+continued alive and susceptible of further treatment when he arrived,
+and he had then imagined any disobedience to his orders on the part of
+Bulstrode, he would have made a strict inquiry, and if his conjecture
+had been verified he would have thrown up the case, in spite of his
+recent heavy obligation.  But if he had not received any money--if
+Bulstrode had never revoked his cold recommendation of bankruptcy--would
+he, Lydgate, have abstained from all inquiry even on finding the
+man dead?--would the shrinking from an insult to Bulstrode--would the
+dubiousness of all medical treatment and the argument that his own
+treatment would pass for the wrong with most members of his
+profession--have had just the same force or significance with him?
+
+That was the uneasy corner of Lydgate's consciousness while he was
+reviewing the facts and resisting all reproach.  If he had been
+independent, this matter of a patient's treatment and the distinct rule
+that he must do or see done that which he believed best for the life
+committed to him, would have been the point on which he would have been
+the sturdiest.  As it was, he had rested in the consideration that
+disobedience to his orders, however it might have arisen, could not be
+considered a crime, that in the dominant opinion obedience to his
+orders was just as likely to be fatal, and that the affair was simply
+one of etiquette.  Whereas, again and again, in his time of freedom, he
+had denounced the perversion of pathological doubt into moral doubt and
+had said--"the purest experiment in treatment may still be
+conscientious: my business is to take care of life, and to do the best
+I can think of for it.  Science is properly more scrupulous than dogma.
+Dogma gives a charter to mistake, but the very breath of science is a
+contest with mistake, and must keep the conscience alive." Alas! the
+scientific conscience had got into the debasing company of money
+obligation and selfish respects.
+
+"Is there a medical man of them all in Middlemarch who would question
+himself as I do?" said poor Lydgate, with a renewed outburst of
+rebellion against the oppression of his lot.  "And yet they will all
+feel warranted in making a wide space between me and them, as if I were
+a leper!  My practice and my reputation are utterly damned--I can see
+that.  Even if I could be cleared by valid evidence, it would make
+little difference to the blessed world here.  I have been set down as
+tainted and should be cheapened to them all the same."
+
+Already there had been abundant signs which had hitherto puzzled him,
+that just when he had been paying off his debts and getting cheerfully
+on his feet, the townsmen were avoiding him or looking strangely at
+him, and in two instances it came to his knowledge that patients of his
+had called in another practitioner.  The reasons were too plain now.
+The general black-balling had begun.
+
+No wonder that in Lydgate's energetic nature the sense of a hopeless
+misconstruction easily turned into a dogged resistance.  The scowl
+which occasionally showed itself on his square brow was not a
+meaningless accident.  Already when he was re-entering the town after
+that ride taken in the first hours of stinging pain, he was setting his
+mind on remaining in Middlemarch in spite of the worst that could be
+done against him.  He would not retreat before calumny, as if he
+submitted to it.  He would face it to the utmost, and no act of his
+should show that he was afraid.  It belonged to the generosity as well
+as defiant force of his nature that he resolved not to shrink from
+showing to the full his sense of obligation to Bulstrode.  It was true
+that the association with this man had been fatal to him--true that if
+he had had the thousand pounds still in his hands with all his debts
+unpaid he would have returned the money to Bulstrode, and taken beggary
+rather than the rescue which had been sullied with the suspicion of a
+bribe (for, remember, he was one of the proudest among the sons of
+men)--nevertheless, he would not turn away from this crushed
+fellow-mortal whose aid he had used, and make a pitiful effort to get
+acquittal for himself by howling against another.  "I shall do as I
+think right, and explain to nobody.  They will try to starve me out,
+but--" he was going on with an obstinate resolve, but he was getting
+near home, and the thought of Rosamond urged itself again into that
+chief place from which it had been thrust by the agonized struggles of
+wounded honor and pride.
+
+How would Rosamond take it all?  Here was another weight of chain to
+drag, and poor Lydgate was in a bad mood for bearing her dumb mastery.
+He had no impulse to tell her the trouble which must soon be common to
+them both.  He preferred waiting for the incidental disclosure which
+events must soon bring about.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIV.
+
+    "Mercifully grant that we may grow aged together."
+                             --BOOK OF TOBIT: Marriage Prayer.
+
+
+In Middlemarch a wife could not long remain ignorant that the town held
+a bad opinion of her husband.  No feminine intimate might carry her
+friendship so far as to make a plain statement to the wife of the
+unpleasant fact known or believed about her husband; but when a woman
+with her thoughts much at leisure got them suddenly employed on
+something grievously disadvantageous to her neighbors, various moral
+impulses were called into play which tended to stimulate utterance.
+Candor was one.  To be candid, in Middlemarch phraseology, meant, to
+use an early opportunity of letting your friends know that you did not
+take a cheerful view of their capacity, their conduct, or their
+position; and a robust candor never waited to be asked for its opinion.
+Then, again, there was the love of truth--a wide phrase, but meaning in
+this relation, a lively objection to seeing a wife look happier than
+her husband's character warranted, or manifest too much satisfaction in
+her lot--the poor thing should have some hint given her that if she
+knew the truth she would have less complacency in her bonnet, and in
+light dishes for a supper-party. Stronger than all, there was the
+regard for a friend's moral improvement, sometimes called her soul,
+which was likely to be benefited by remarks tending to gloom, uttered
+with the accompaniment of pensive staring at the furniture and a manner
+implying that the speaker would not tell what was on her mind, from
+regard to the feelings of her hearer.  On the whole, one might say that
+an ardent charity was at work setting the virtuous mind to make a
+neighbor unhappy for her good.
+
+There were hardly any wives in Middlemarch whose matrimonial
+misfortunes would in different ways be likely to call forth more of
+this moral activity than Rosamond and her aunt Bulstrode.  Mrs.
+Bulstrode was not an object of dislike, and had never consciously
+injured any human being.  Men had always thought her a handsome
+comfortable woman, and had reckoned it among the signs of Bulstrode's
+hypocrisy that he had chosen a red-blooded Vincy, instead of a ghastly
+and melancholy person suited to his low esteem for earthly pleasure.
+When the scandal about her husband was disclosed they remarked of
+her--"Ah, poor woman!  She's as honest as the day--_she_ never
+suspected anything wrong in him, you may depend on it."  Women, who
+were intimate with her, talked together much of "poor Harriet,"
+imagined what her feelings must be when she came to know everything,
+and conjectured how much she had already come to know.  There was no
+spiteful disposition towards her; rather, there was a busy benevolence
+anxious to ascertain what it would be well for her to feel and do under
+the circumstances, which of course kept the imagination occupied with
+her character and history from the times when she was Harriet Vincy
+till now.  With the review of Mrs. Bulstrode and her position it was
+inevitable to associate Rosamond, whose prospects were under the same
+blight with her aunt's. Rosamond was more severely criticised and less
+pitied, though she too, as one of the good old Vincy family who had
+always been known in Middlemarch, was regarded as a victim to marriage
+with an interloper.  The Vincys had their weaknesses, but then they lay
+on the surface: there was never anything bad to be "found out"
+concerning them.  Mrs. Bulstrode was vindicated from any resemblance to
+her husband.  Harriet's faults were her own.
+
+"She has always been showy," said Mrs. Hackbutt, making tea for a small
+party, "though she has got into the way of putting her religion
+forward, to conform to her husband; she has tried to hold her head up
+above Middlemarch by making it known that she invites clergymen and
+heaven-knows-who from Riverston and those places."
+
+"We can hardly blame her for that," said Mrs. Sprague; "because few of
+the best people in the town cared to associate with Bulstrode, and she
+must have somebody to sit down at her table."
+
+"Mr. Thesiger has always countenanced him," said Mrs. Hackbutt.  "I
+think he must be sorry now."
+
+"But he was never fond of him in his heart--that every one knows," said
+Mrs. Tom Toller.  "Mr. Thesiger never goes into extremes.  He keeps to
+the truth in what is evangelical.  It is only clergymen like Mr. Tyke,
+who want to use Dissenting hymn-books and that low kind of religion,
+who ever found Bulstrode to their taste."
+
+"I understand, Mr. Tyke is in great distress about him," said Mrs.
+Hackbutt.  "And well he may be: they say the Bulstrodes have half kept
+the Tyke family."
+
+"And of course it is a discredit to his doctrines," said Mrs. Sprague,
+who was elderly, and old-fashioned in her opinions.
+
+"People will not make a boast of being methodistical in Middlemarch for
+a good while to come."
+
+"I think we must not set down people's bad actions to their religion,"
+said falcon-faced Mrs. Plymdale, who had been listening hitherto.
+
+"Oh, my dear, we are forgetting," said Mrs. Sprague.  "We ought not to
+be talking of this before you."
+
+"I am sure I have no reason to be partial," said Mrs. Plymdale,
+coloring.  "It's true Mr. Plymdale has always been on good terms with
+Mr. Bulstrode, and Harriet Vincy was my friend long before she married
+him.  But I have always kept my own opinions and told her where she was
+wrong, poor thing.  Still, in point of religion, I must say, Mr.
+Bulstrode might have done what he has, and worse, and yet have been a
+man of no religion.  I don't say that there has not been a little too
+much of that--I like moderation myself.  But truth is truth.  The men
+tried at the assizes are not all over-religious, I suppose."
+
+"Well," said Mrs. Hackbutt, wheeling adroitly, "all I can say is, that
+I think she ought to separate from him."
+
+"I can't say that," said Mrs. Sprague.  "She took him for better or
+worse, you know."
+
+"But 'worse' can never mean finding out that your husband is fit for
+Newgate," said Mrs. Hackbutt.  "Fancy living with such a man!  I should
+expect to be poisoned."
+
+"Yes, I think myself it is an encouragement to crime if such men are to
+be taken care of and waited on by good wives," said Mrs. Tom Toller.
+
+"And a good wife poor Harriet has been," said Mrs. Plymdale.  "She
+thinks her husband the first of men.  It's true he has never denied her
+anything."
+
+"Well, we shall see what she will do," said Mrs. Hackbutt.  "I suppose
+she knows nothing yet, poor creature.  I do hope and trust I shall not
+see her, for I should be frightened to death lest I should say anything
+about her husband.  Do you think any hint has reached her?"
+
+"I should hardly think so," said Mrs. Tom Toller.  "We hear that he is
+ill, and has never stirred out of the house since the meeting on
+Thursday; but she was with her girls at church yesterday, and they had
+new Tuscan bonnets.  Her own had a feather in it.  I have never seen
+that her religion made any difference in her dress."
+
+"She wears very neat patterns always," said Mrs. Plymdale, a little
+stung.  "And that feather I know she got dyed a pale lavender on
+purpose to be consistent.  I must say it of Harriet that she wishes to
+do right."
+
+"As to her knowing what has happened, it can't be kept from her long,"
+said Mrs. Hackbutt.  "The Vincys know, for Mr. Vincy was at the
+meeting.  It will be a great blow to him.  There is his daughter as
+well as his sister."
+
+"Yes, indeed," said Mrs. Sprague.  "Nobody supposes that Mr. Lydgate
+can go on holding up his head in Middlemarch, things look so black
+about the thousand pounds he took just at that man's death.  It really
+makes one shudder."
+
+"Pride must have a fall," said Mrs. Hackbutt.
+
+"I am not so sorry for Rosamond Vincy that was as I am for her aunt,"
+said Mrs. Plymdale.  "She needed a lesson."
+
+"I suppose the Bulstrodes will go and live abroad somewhere," said Mrs.
+Sprague.  "That is what is generally done when there is anything
+disgraceful in a family."
+
+"And a most deadly blow it will be to Harriet," said Mrs. Plymdale.
+"If ever a woman was crushed, she will be.  I pity her from my heart.
+And with all her faults, few women are better.  From a girl she had the
+neatest ways, and was always good-hearted, and as open as the day.  You
+might look into her drawers when you would--always the same.  And so
+she has brought up Kate and Ellen.  You may think how hard it will be
+for her to go among foreigners."
+
+"The doctor says that is what he should recommend the Lydgates to do,"
+said Mrs. Sprague.  "He says Lydgate ought to have kept among the
+French."
+
+"That would suit _her_ well enough, I dare say," said Mrs. Plymdale;
+"there is that kind of lightness about her.  But she got that from her
+mother; she never got it from her aunt Bulstrode, who always gave her
+good advice, and to my knowledge would rather have had her marry
+elsewhere."
+
+Mrs. Plymdale was in a situation which caused her some complication of
+feeling.  There had been not only her intimacy with Mrs. Bulstrode, but
+also a profitable business relation of the great Plymdale dyeing house
+with Mr. Bulstrode, which on the one hand would have inclined her to
+desire that the mildest view of his character should be the true one,
+but on the other, made her the more afraid of seeming to palliate his
+culpability.  Again, the late alliance of her family with the Tollers
+had brought her in connection with the best circle, which gratified her
+in every direction except in the inclination to those serious views
+which she believed to be the best in another sense.  The sharp little
+woman's conscience was somewhat troubled in the adjustment of these
+opposing "bests," and of her griefs and satisfactions under late
+events, which were likely to humble those who needed humbling, but also
+to fall heavily on her old friend whose faults she would have preferred
+seeing on a background of prosperity.
+
+Poor Mrs. Bulstrode, meanwhile, had been no further shaken by the
+oncoming tread of calamity than in the busier stirring of that secret
+uneasiness which had always been present in her since the last visit of
+Raffles to The Shrubs.  That the hateful man had come ill to Stone
+Court, and that her husband had chosen to remain there and watch over
+him, she allowed to be explained by the fact that Raffles had been
+employed and aided in earlier-days, and that this made a tie of
+benevolence towards him in his degraded helplessness; and she had been
+since then innocently cheered by her husband's more hopeful speech
+about his own health and ability to continue his attention to business.
+The calm was disturbed when Lydgate had brought him home ill from the
+meeting, and in spite of comforting assurances during the next few
+days, she cried in private from the conviction that her husband was not
+suffering from bodily illness merely, but from something that afflicted
+his mind.  He would not allow her to read to him, and scarcely to sit
+with him, alleging nervous susceptibility to sounds and movements; yet
+she suspected that in shutting himself up in his private room he wanted
+to be busy with his papers.  Something, she felt sure, had happened.
+Perhaps it was some great loss of money; and she was kept in the dark.
+Not daring to question her husband, she said to Lydgate, on the fifth
+day after the meeting, when she had not left home except to go to
+church--
+
+"Mr. Lydgate, pray be open with me: I like to know the truth.  Has
+anything happened to Mr. Bulstrode?"
+
+"Some little nervous shock," said Lydgate, evasively.  He felt that it
+was not for him to make the painful revelation.
+
+"But what brought it on?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, looking directly at him
+with her large dark eyes.
+
+"There is often something poisonous in the air of public rooms," said
+Lydgate.  "Strong men can stand it, but it tells on people in
+proportion to the delicacy of their systems.  It is often impossible to
+account for the precise moment of an attack--or rather, to say why the
+strength gives way at a particular moment."
+
+Mrs. Bulstrode was not satisfied with this answer.  There remained in
+her the belief that some calamity had befallen her husband, of which
+she was to be kept in ignorance; and it was in her nature strongly to
+object to such concealment.  She begged leave for her daughters to sit
+with their father, and drove into the town to pay some visits,
+conjecturing that if anything were known to have gone wrong in Mr.
+Bulstrode's affairs, she should see or hear some sign of it.
+
+She called on Mrs. Thesiger, who was not at home, and then drove to
+Mrs. Hackbutt's on the other side of the churchyard.  Mrs. Hackbutt saw
+her coming from an up-stairs window, and remembering her former alarm
+lest she should meet Mrs. Bulstrode, felt almost bound in consistency
+to send word that she was not at home; but against that, there was a
+sudden strong desire within her for the excitement of an interview in
+which she was quite determined not to make the slightest allusion to
+what was in her mind.
+
+Hence Mrs. Bulstrode was shown into the drawing-room, and Mrs. Hackbutt
+went to her, with more tightness of lip and rubbing of her hands than
+was usually observable in her, these being precautions adopted against
+freedom of speech.  She was resolved not to ask how Mr. Bulstrode was.
+
+"I have not been anywhere except to church for nearly a week," said
+Mrs. Bulstrode, after a few introductory remarks.  "But Mr. Bulstrode
+was taken so ill at the meeting on Thursday that I have not liked to
+leave the house."
+
+Mrs. Hackbutt rubbed the back of one hand with the palm of the other
+held against her chest, and let her eyes ramble over the pattern on the
+rug.
+
+"Was Mr. Hackbutt at the meeting?" persevered Mrs. Bulstrode.
+
+"Yes, he was," said Mrs. Hackbutt, with the same attitude.  "The land
+is to be bought by subscription, I believe."
+
+"Let us hope that there will be no more cases of cholera to be buried
+in it," said Mrs. Bulstrode.  "It is an awful visitation.  But I always
+think Middlemarch a very healthy spot.  I suppose it is being used to
+it from a child; but I never saw the town I should like to live at
+better, and especially our end."
+
+"I am sure I should be glad that you always should live at Middlemarch,
+Mrs. Bulstrode," said Mrs. Hackbutt, with a slight sigh.  "Still, we
+must learn to resign ourselves, wherever our lot may be cast.  Though I
+am sure there will always be people in this town who will wish you
+well."
+
+Mrs. Hackbutt longed to say, "if you take my advice you will part from
+your husband," but it seemed clear to her that the poor woman knew
+nothing of the thunder ready to bolt on her head, and she herself could
+do no more than prepare her a little.  Mrs. Bulstrode felt suddenly
+rather chill and trembling: there was evidently something unusual
+behind this speech of Mrs. Hackbutt's; but though she had set out with
+the desire to be fully informed, she found herself unable now to pursue
+her brave purpose, and turning the conversation by an inquiry about the
+young Hackbutts, she soon took her leave saying that she was going to
+see Mrs. Plymdale.  On her way thither she tried to imagine that there
+might have been some unusually warm sparring at the meeting between Mr.
+Bulstrode and some of his frequent opponents--perhaps Mr. Hackbutt
+might have been one of them.  That would account for everything.
+
+But when she was in conversation with Mrs. Plymdale that comforting
+explanation seemed no longer tenable.  "Selina" received her with a
+pathetic affectionateness and a disposition to give edifying answers on
+the commonest topics, which could hardly have reference to an ordinary
+quarrel of which the most important consequence was a perturbation of
+Mr. Bulstrode's health.  Beforehand Mrs. Bulstrode had thought that she
+would sooner question Mrs. Plymdale than any one else; but she found to
+her surprise that an old friend is not always the person whom it is
+easiest to make a confidant of: there was the barrier of remembered
+communication under other circumstances--there was the dislike of
+being pitied and informed by one who had been long wont to allow her
+the superiority.  For certain words of mysterious appropriateness that
+Mrs. Plymdale let fall about her resolution never to turn her back on
+her friends, convinced Mrs. Bulstrode that what had happened must be
+some kind of misfortune, and instead of being able to say with her
+native directness, "What is it that you have in your mind?" she found
+herself anxious to get away before she had heard anything more
+explicit.  She began to have an agitating certainty that the misfortune
+was something more than the mere loss of money, being keenly sensitive
+to the fact that Selina now, just as Mrs. Hackbutt had done before,
+avoided noticing what she said about her husband, as they would have
+avoided noticing a personal blemish.
+
+She said good-by with nervous haste, and told the coachman to drive to
+Mr. Vincy's warehouse.  In that short drive her dread gathered so much
+force from the sense of darkness, that when she entered the private
+counting-house where her brother sat at his desk, her knees trembled
+and her usually florid face was deathly pale.  Something of the same
+effect was produced in him by the sight of her: he rose from his seat
+to meet her, took her by the hand, and said, with his impulsive
+rashness--
+
+"God help you, Harriet! you know all."
+
+That moment was perhaps worse than any which came after.  It contained
+that concentrated experience which in great crises of emotion reveals
+the bias of a nature, and is prophetic of the ultimate act which will
+end an intermediate struggle.  Without that memory of Raffles she might
+still have thought only of monetary ruin, but now along with her
+brother's look and words there darted into her mind the idea of some
+guilt in her husband--then, under the working of terror came the image
+of her husband exposed to disgrace--and then, after an instant of
+scorching shame in which she felt only the eyes of the world, with one
+leap of her heart she was at his side in mournful but unreproaching
+fellowship with shame and isolation.  All this went on within her in a
+mere flash of time--while she sank into the chair, and raised her eyes
+to her brother, who stood over her.  "I know nothing, Walter.  What is
+it?" she said, faintly.
+
+He told her everything, very inartificially, in slow fragments, making
+her aware that the scandal went much beyond proof, especially as to the
+end of Raffles.
+
+"People will talk," he said.  "Even if a man has been acquitted by a
+jury, they'll talk, and nod and wink--and as far as the world goes, a
+man might often as well be guilty as not.  It's a breakdown blow, and
+it damages Lydgate as much as Bulstrode.  I don't pretend to say what
+is the truth.  I only wish we had never heard the name of either
+Bulstrode or Lydgate.  You'd better have been a Vincy all your life,
+and so had Rosamond."  Mrs. Bulstrode made no reply.
+
+"But you must bear up as well as you can, Harriet.  People don't blame
+_you_. And I'll stand by you whatever you make up your mind to do,"
+said the brother, with rough but well-meaning affectionateness.
+
+"Give me your arm to the carriage, Walter," said Mrs. Bulstrode.  "I
+feel very weak."
+
+And when she got home she was obliged to say to her daughter, "I am not
+well, my dear; I must go and lie down.  Attend to your papa.  Leave me
+in quiet.  I shall take no dinner."
+
+She locked herself in her room.  She needed time to get used to her
+maimed consciousness, her poor lopped life, before she could walk
+steadily to the place allotted her.  A new searching light had fallen
+on her husband's character, and she could not judge him leniently: the
+twenty years in which she had believed in him and venerated him by
+virtue of his concealments came back with particulars that made them
+seem an odious deceit.  He had married her with that bad past life
+hidden behind him, and she had no faith left to protest his innocence
+of the worst that was imputed to him.  Her honest ostentatious nature
+made the sharing of a merited dishonor as bitter as it could be to any
+mortal.
+
+But this imperfectly taught woman, whose phrases and habits were an odd
+patchwork, had a loyal spirit within her.  The man whose prosperity she
+had shared through nearly half a life, and who had unvaryingly
+cherished her--now that punishment had befallen him it was not possible
+to her in any sense to forsake him.  There is a forsaking which still
+sits at the same board and lies on the same couch with the forsaken
+soul, withering it the more by unloving proximity.  She knew, when she
+locked her door, that she should unlock it ready to go down to her
+unhappy husband and espouse his sorrow, and say of his guilt, I will
+mourn and not reproach.  But she needed time to gather up her strength;
+she needed to sob out her farewell to all the gladness and pride of her
+life.  When she had resolved to go down, she prepared herself by some
+little acts which might seem mere folly to a hard onlooker; they were
+her way of expressing to all spectators visible or invisible that she
+had begun a new life in which she embraced humiliation.  She took off
+all her ornaments and put on a plain black gown, and instead of wearing
+her much-adorned cap and large bows of hair, she brushed her hair down
+and put on a plain bonnet-cap, which made her look suddenly like an
+early Methodist.
+
+Bulstrode, who knew that his wife had been out and had come in saying
+that she was not well, had spent the time in an agitation equal to
+hers.  He had looked forward to her learning the truth from others, and
+had acquiesced in that probability, as something easier to him than any
+confession.  But now that he imagined the moment of her knowledge come,
+he awaited the result in anguish.  His daughters had been obliged to
+consent to leave him, and though he had allowed some food to be brought
+to him, he had not touched it.  He felt himself perishing slowly in
+unpitied misery.  Perhaps he should never see his wife's face with
+affection in it again.  And if he turned to God there seemed to be no
+answer but the pressure of retribution.
+
+It was eight o'clock in the evening before the door opened and his wife
+entered.  He dared not look up at her.  He sat with his eyes bent down,
+and as she went towards him she thought he looked smaller--he seemed
+so withered and shrunken.  A movement of new compassion and old
+tenderness went through her like a great wave, and putting one hand on
+his which rested on the arm of the chair, and the other on his
+shoulder, she said, solemnly but kindly--
+
+"Look up, Nicholas."
+
+He raised his eyes with a little start and looked at her half amazed
+for a moment: her pale face, her changed, mourning dress, the trembling
+about her mouth, all said, "I know;" and her hands and eyes rested
+gently on him.  He burst out crying and they cried together, she
+sitting at his side.  They could not yet speak to each other of the
+shame which she was bearing with him, or of the acts which had brought
+it down on them.  His confession was silent, and her promise of
+faithfulness was silent.  Open-minded as she was, she nevertheless
+shrank from the words which would have expressed their mutual
+consciousness, as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire.  She could
+not say, "How much is only slander and false suspicion?" and he did not
+say, "I am innocent."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXV.
+
+    "Le sentiment de la fausseté des plaisirs présents, et
+    l'ignorance de la vanité des plaisirs absents causent
+    l'inconstance."--PASCAL.
+
+
+Rosamond had a gleam of returning cheerfulness when the house was freed
+from the threatening figure, and when all the disagreeable creditors
+were paid.  But she was not joyous: her married life had fulfilled none
+of her hopes, and had been quite spoiled for her imagination.  In this
+brief interval of calm, Lydgate, remembering that he had often been
+stormy in his hours of perturbation, and mindful of the pain Rosamond
+had had to bear, was carefully gentle towards her; but he, too, had
+lost some of his old spirit, and he still felt it necessary to refer to
+an economical change in their way of living as a matter of course,
+trying to reconcile her to it gradually, and repressing his anger when
+she answered by wishing that he would go to live in London.  When she
+did not make this answer, she listened languidly, and wondered what she
+had that was worth living for.  The hard and contemptuous words which
+had fallen from her husband in his anger had deeply offended that
+vanity which he had at first called into active enjoyment; and what she
+regarded as his perverse way of looking at things, kept up a secret
+repulsion, which made her receive all his tenderness as a poor
+substitute for the happiness he had failed to give her.  They were at a
+disadvantage with their neighbors, and there was no longer any outlook
+towards Quallingham--there was no outlook anywhere except in an
+occasional letter from Will Ladislaw.  She had felt stung and
+disappointed by Will's resolution to quit Middlemarch, for in spite of
+what she knew and guessed about his admiration for Dorothea, she
+secretly cherished the belief that he had, or would necessarily come to
+have, much more admiration for herself; Rosamond being one of those
+women who live much in the idea that each man they meet would have
+preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.  Mrs. Casaubon
+was all very well; but Will's interest in her dated before he knew Mrs.
+Lydgate.  Rosamond took his way of talking to herself, which was a
+mixture of playful fault-finding and hyperbolical gallantry, as the
+disguise of a deeper feeling; and in his presence she felt that
+agreeable titillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama which
+Lydgate's presence had no longer the magic to create.  She even
+fancied--what will not men and women fancy in these matters?--that
+Will exaggerated his admiration for Mrs. Casaubon in order to pique
+herself.  In this way poor Rosamond's brain had been busy before Will's
+departure.  He would have made, she thought, a much more suitable
+husband for her than she had found in Lydgate.  No notion could have
+been falser than this, for Rosamond's discontent in her marriage was
+due to the conditions of marriage itself, to its demand for
+self-suppression and tolerance, and not to the nature of her husband;
+but the easy conception of an unreal Better had a sentimental charm
+which diverted her ennui.  She constructed a little romance which was
+to vary the flatness of her life: Will Ladislaw was always to be a
+bachelor and live near her, always to be at her command, and have an
+understood though never fully expressed passion for her, which would be
+sending out lambent flames every now and then in interesting scenes.
+His departure had been a proportionate disappointment, and had sadly
+increased her weariness of Middlemarch; but at first she had the
+alternative dream of pleasures in store from her intercourse with the
+family at Quallingham.  Since then the troubles of her married life had
+deepened, and the absence of other relief encouraged her regretful
+rumination over that thin romance which she had once fed on.  Men and
+women make sad mistakes about their own symptoms, taking their vague
+uneasy longings, sometimes for genius, sometimes for religion, and
+oftener still for a mighty love.  Will Ladislaw had written chatty
+letters, half to her and half to Lydgate, and she had replied: their
+separation, she felt, was not likely to be final, and the change she
+now most longed for was that Lydgate should go to live in London;
+everything would be agreeable in London; and she had set to work with
+quiet determination to win this result, when there came a sudden,
+delightful promise which inspirited her.
+
+It came shortly before the memorable meeting at the town-hall, and was
+nothing less than a letter from Will Ladislaw to Lydgate, which turned
+indeed chiefly on his new interest in plans of colonization, but
+mentioned incidentally, that he might find it necessary to pay a visit
+to Middlemarch within the next few weeks--a very pleasant necessity, he
+said, almost as good as holidays to a schoolboy.  He hoped there was
+his old place on the rug, and a great deal of music in store for him.
+But he was quite uncertain as to the time.  While Lydgate was reading
+the letter to Rosamond, her face looked like a reviving flower--it grew
+prettier and more blooming.  There was nothing unendurable now: the
+debts were paid, Mr. Ladislaw was coming, and Lydgate would be
+persuaded to leave Middlemarch and settle in London, which was "so
+different from a provincial town."
+
+That was a bright bit of morning.  But soon the sky became black over
+poor Rosamond.  The presence of a new gloom in her husband, about which
+he was entirely reserved towards her--for he dreaded to expose his
+lacerated feeling to her neutrality and misconception--soon received a
+painfully strange explanation, alien to all her previous notions of
+what could affect her happiness.  In the new gayety of her spirits,
+thinking that Lydgate had merely a worse fit of moodiness than usual,
+causing him to leave her remarks unanswered, and evidently to keep out
+of her way as much as possible, she chose, a few days after the
+meeting, and without speaking to him on the subject, to send out notes
+of invitation for a small evening party, feeling convinced that this
+was a judicious step, since people seemed to have been keeping aloof
+from them, and wanted restoring to the old habit of intercourse.  When
+the invitations had been accepted, she would tell Lydgate, and give him
+a wise admonition as to how a medical man should behave to his
+neighbors; for Rosamond had the gravest little airs possible about
+other people's duties.  But all the invitations were declined, and the
+last answer came into Lydgate's hands.
+
+"This is Chichely's scratch.  What is he writing to you about?" said
+Lydgate, wonderingly, as he handed the note to her.  She was obliged to
+let him see it, and, looking at her severely, he said--
+
+"Why on earth have you been sending out invitations without telling me,
+Rosamond?  I beg, I insist that you will not invite any one to this
+house.  I suppose you have been inviting others, and they have refused
+too."  She said nothing.
+
+"Do you hear me?" thundered Lydgate.
+
+"Yes, certainly I hear you," said Rosamond, turning her head aside with
+the movement of a graceful long-necked bird.
+
+Lydgate tossed his head without any grace and walked out of the room,
+feeling himself dangerous.  Rosamond's thought was, that he was getting
+more and more unbearable--not that there was any new special reason for
+this peremptoriness.  His indisposition to tell her anything in which
+he was sure beforehand that she would not be interested was growing
+into an unreflecting habit, and she was in ignorance of everything
+connected with the thousand pounds except that the loan had come from
+her uncle Bulstrode.  Lydgate's odious humors and their neighbors'
+apparent avoidance of them had an unaccountable date for her in their
+relief from money difficulties.  If the invitations had been accepted
+she would have gone to invite her mamma and the rest, whom she had seen
+nothing of for several days; and she now put on her bonnet to go and
+inquire what had become of them all, suddenly feeling as if there were
+a conspiracy to leave her in isolation with a husband disposed to
+offend everybody.  It was after the dinner hour, and she found her
+father and mother seated together alone in the drawing-room. They
+greeted her with sad looks, saying "Well, my dear!" and no more.  She
+had never seen her father look so downcast; and seating herself near
+him she said--
+
+"Is there anything the matter, papa?"
+
+He did not answer, but Mrs. Vincy said, "Oh, my dear, have you heard
+nothing?  It won't be long before it reaches you."
+
+"Is it anything about Tertius?" said Rosamond, turning pale.  The idea
+of trouble immediately connected itself with what had been
+unaccountable to her in him.
+
+"Oh, my dear, yes.  To think of your marrying into this trouble.  Debt
+was bad enough, but this will be worse."
+
+"Stay, stay, Lucy," said Mr. Vincy.  "Have you heard nothing about your
+uncle Bulstrode, Rosamond?"
+
+"No, papa," said the poor thing, feeling as if trouble were not
+anything she had before experienced, but some invisible power with an
+iron grasp that made her soul faint within her.
+
+Her father told her everything, saying at the end, "It's better for you
+to know, my dear.  I think Lydgate must leave the town.  Things have
+gone against him.  I dare say he couldn't help it.  I don't accuse him
+of any harm," said Mr. Vincy.  He had always before been disposed to
+find the utmost fault with Lydgate.
+
+The shock to Rosamond was terrible.  It seemed to her that no lot could
+be so cruelly hard as hers to have married a man who had become the
+centre of infamous suspicions.  In many cases it is inevitable that the
+shame is felt to be the worst part of crime; and it would have required
+a great deal of disentangling reflection, such as had never entered
+into Rosamond's life, for her in these moments to feel that her trouble
+was less than if her husband had been certainly known to have done
+something criminal.  All the shame seemed to be there.  And she had
+innocently married this man with the belief that he and his family were
+a glory to her!  She showed her usual reticence to her parents, and
+only said, that if Lydgate had done as she wished he would have left
+Middlemarch long ago.
+
+"She bears it beyond anything," said her mother when she was gone.
+
+"Ah, thank God!" said Mr. Vincy, who was much broken down.
+
+But Rosamond went home with a sense of justified repugnance towards her
+husband.  What had he really done--how had he really acted?  She did
+not know.  Why had he not told her everything?  He did not speak to her
+on the subject, and of course she could not speak to him.  It came into
+her mind once that she would ask her father to let her go home again;
+but dwelling on that prospect made it seem utter dreariness to her: a
+married woman gone back to live with her parents--life seemed to have
+no meaning for her in such a position: she could not contemplate
+herself in it.
+
+The next two days Lydgate observed a change in her, and believed that
+she had heard the bad news.  Would she speak to him about it, or would
+she go on forever in the silence which seemed to imply that she
+believed him guilty?  We must remember that he was in a morbid state of
+mind, in which almost all contact was pain.  Certainly Rosamond in this
+case had equal reason to complain of reserve and want of confidence on
+his part; but in the bitterness of his soul he excused himself;--was
+he not justified in shrinking from the task of telling her, since now
+she knew the truth she had no impulse to speak to him?  But a
+deeper-lying consciousness that he was in fault made him restless, and
+the silence between them became intolerable to him; it was as if they
+were both adrift on one piece of wreck and looked away from each other.
+
+He thought, "I am a fool.  Haven't I given up expecting anything?  I
+have married care, not help."  And that evening he said--
+
+"Rosamond, have you heard anything that distresses you?"
+
+"Yes," she answered, laying down her work, which she had been carrying
+on with a languid semi-consciousness, most unlike her usual self.
+
+"What have you heard?"
+
+"Everything, I suppose.  Papa told me."
+
+"That people think me disgraced?"
+
+"Yes," said Rosamond, faintly, beginning to sew again automatically.
+
+There was silence.  Lydgate thought, "If she has any trust in me--any
+notion of what I am, she ought to speak now and say that she does not
+believe I have deserved disgrace."
+
+But Rosamond on her side went on moving her fingers languidly.
+Whatever was to be said on the subject she expected to come from
+Tertius.  What did she know?  And if he were innocent of any wrong, why
+did he not do something to clear himself?
+
+This silence of hers brought a new rush of gall to that bitter mood in
+which Lydgate had been saying to himself that nobody believed in
+him--even Farebrother had not come forward.  He had begun to question
+her with the intent that their conversation should disperse the chill
+fog which had gathered between them, but he felt his resolution checked
+by despairing resentment.  Even this trouble, like the rest, she seemed
+to regard as if it were hers alone.  He was always to her a being
+apart, doing what she objected to.  He started from his chair with an
+angry impulse, and thrusting his hands in his pockets, walked up and
+down the room.  There was an underlying consciousness all the while
+that he should have to master this anger, and tell her everything, and
+convince her of the facts.  For he had almost learned the lesson that
+he must bend himself to her nature, and that because she came short in
+her sympathy, he must give the more.  Soon he recurred to his intention
+of opening himself: the occasion must not be lost.  If he could bring
+her to feel with some solemnity that here was a slander which must be
+met and not run away from, and that the whole trouble had come out of
+his desperate want of money, it would be a moment for urging powerfully
+on her that they should be one in the resolve to do with as little
+money as possible, so that they might weather the bad time and keep
+themselves independent.  He would mention the definite measures which
+he desired to take, and win her to a willing spirit.  He was bound to
+try this--and what else was there for him to do?
+
+He did not know how long he had been walking uneasily backwards and
+forwards, but Rosamond felt that it was long, and wished that he would
+sit down.  She too had begun to think this an opportunity for urging on
+Tertius what he ought to do.  Whatever might be the truth about all
+this misery, there was one dread which asserted itself.
+
+Lydgate at last seated himself, not in his usual chair, but in one
+nearer to Rosamond, leaning aside in it towards her, and looking at her
+gravely before he reopened the sad subject.  He had conquered himself
+so far, and was about to speak with a sense of solemnity, as on an
+occasion which was not to be repeated.  He had even opened his lips,
+when Rosamond, letting her hands fall, looked at him and said--
+
+"Surely, Tertius--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Surely now at last you have given up the idea of staying in
+Middlemarch.  I cannot go on living here.  Let us go to London.  Papa,
+and every one else, says you had better go.  Whatever misery I have to
+put up with, it will be easier away from here."
+
+Lydgate felt miserably jarred.  Instead of that critical outpouring for
+which he had prepared himself with effort, here was the old round to be
+gone through again.  He could not bear it.  With a quick change of
+countenance he rose and went out of the room.
+
+Perhaps if he had been strong enough to persist in his determination to
+be the more because she was less, that evening might have had a better
+issue.  If his energy could have borne down that check, he might still
+have wrought on Rosamond's vision and will.  We cannot be sure that any
+natures, however inflexible or peculiar, will resist this effect from a
+more massive being than their own.  They may be taken by storm and for
+the moment converted, becoming part of the soul which enwraps them in
+the ardor of its movement.  But poor Lydgate had a throbbing pain
+within him, and his energy had fallen short of its task.
+
+The beginning of mutual understanding and resolve seemed as far off as
+ever; nay, it seemed blocked out by the sense of unsuccessful effort.
+They lived on from day to day with their thoughts still apart, Lydgate
+going about what work he had in a mood of despair, and Rosamond
+feeling, with some justification, that he was behaving cruelly.  It was
+of no use to say anything to Tertius; but when Will Ladislaw came, she
+was determined to tell him everything.  In spite of her general
+reticence, she needed some one who would recognize her wrongs.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXVI.
+
+    "To mercy, pity, peace, and love
+         All pray in their distress,
+     And to these virtues of delight,
+         Return their thankfulness.
+           .   .   .   .   .   .
+     For Mercy has a human heart,
+         Pity a human face;
+     And Love, the human form divine;
+         And Peace, the human dress.
+                       --WILLIAM BLAKE: Songs of Innocence.
+
+
+Some days later, Lydgate was riding to Lowick Manor, in consequence of
+a summons from Dorothea.  The summons had not been unexpected, since it
+had followed a letter from Mr. Bulstrode, in which he stated that he
+had resumed his arrangements for quitting Middlemarch, and must remind
+Lydgate of his previous communications about the Hospital, to the
+purport of which he still adhered.  It had been his duty, before taking
+further steps, to reopen the subject with Mrs. Casaubon, who now
+wished, as before, to discuss the question with Lydgate.  "Your views
+may possibly have undergone some change," wrote Mr. Bulstrode; "but, in
+that case also, it is desirable that you should lay them before her."
+
+Dorothea awaited his arrival with eager interest.  Though, in deference
+to her masculine advisers, she had refrained from what Sir James had
+called "interfering in this Bulstrode business," the hardship of
+Lydgate's position was continually in her mind, and when Bulstrode
+applied to her again about the hospital, she felt that the opportunity
+was come to her which she had been hindered from hastening.  In her
+luxurious home, wandering under the boughs of her own great trees, her
+thought was going out over the lot of others, and her emotions were
+imprisoned.  The idea of some active good within her reach, "haunted
+her like a passion," and another's need having once come to her as a
+distinct image, preoccupied her desire with the yearning to give
+relief, and made her own ease tasteless.  She was full of confident
+hope about this interview with Lydgate, never heeding what was said of
+his personal reserve; never heeding that she was a very young woman.
+Nothing could have seemed more irrelevant to Dorothea than insistence
+on her youth and sex when she was moved to show her human fellowship.
+
+As she sat waiting in the library, she could do nothing but live
+through again all the past scenes which had brought Lydgate into her
+memories.  They all owed their significance to her marriage and its
+troubles--but no; there were two occasions in which the image of
+Lydgate had come painfully in connection with his wife and some one
+else.  The pain had been allayed for Dorothea, but it had left in her
+an awakened conjecture as to what Lydgate's marriage might be to him, a
+susceptibility to the slightest hint about Mrs. Lydgate.  These
+thoughts were like a drama to her, and made her eyes bright, and gave
+an attitude of suspense to her whole frame, though she was only looking
+out from the brown library on to the turf and the bright green buds
+which stood in relief against the dark evergreens.
+
+When Lydgate came in, she was almost shocked at the change in his face,
+which was strikingly perceptible to her who had not seen him for two
+months.  It was not the change of emaciation, but that effect which
+even young faces will very soon show from the persistent presence of
+resentment and despondency.  Her cordial look, when she put out her
+hand to him, softened his expression, but only with melancholy.
+
+"I have wished very much to see you for a long while, Mr. Lydgate,"
+said Dorothea when they were seated opposite each other; "but I put off
+asking you to come until Mr. Bulstrode applied to me again about the
+Hospital.  I know that the advantage of keeping the management of it
+separate from that of the Infirmary depends on you, or, at least, on
+the good which you are encouraged to hope for from having it under your
+control.  And I am sure you will not refuse to tell me exactly what you
+think."
+
+"You want to decide whether you should give a generous support to the
+Hospital," said Lydgate.  "I cannot conscientiously advise you to do it
+in dependence on any activity of mine.  I may be obliged to leave the
+town."
+
+He spoke curtly, feeling the ache of despair as to his being able to
+carry out any purpose that Rosamond had set her mind against.
+
+"Not because there is no one to believe in you?" said Dorothea, pouring
+out her words in clearness from a full heart.  "I know the unhappy
+mistakes about you.  I knew them from the first moment to be mistakes.
+You have never done anything vile.  You would not do anything
+dishonorable."
+
+It was the first assurance of belief in him that had fallen on
+Lydgate's ears.  He drew a deep breath, and said, "Thank you." He could
+say no more: it was something very new and strange in his life that
+these few words of trust from a woman should be so much to him.
+
+"I beseech you to tell me how everything was," said Dorothea,
+fearlessly.  "I am sure that the truth would clear you."
+
+Lydgate started up from his chair and went towards the window,
+forgetting where he was.  He had so often gone over in his mind the
+possibility of explaining everything without aggravating appearances
+that would tell, perhaps unfairly, against Bulstrode, and had so often
+decided against it--he had so often said to himself that his assertions
+would not change people's impressions--that Dorothea's words sounded
+like a temptation to do something which in his soberness he had
+pronounced to be unreasonable.
+
+"Tell me, pray," said Dorothea, with simple earnestness; "then we can
+consult together.  It is wicked to let people think evil of any one
+falsely, when it can be hindered."
+
+Lydgate turned, remembering where he was, and saw Dorothea's face
+looking up at him with a sweet trustful gravity.  The presence of a
+noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes
+the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger,
+quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in
+the wholeness of our character.  That influence was beginning to act on
+Lydgate, who had for many days been seeing all life as one who is
+dragged and struggling amid the throng.  He sat down again, and felt
+that he was recovering his old self in the consciousness that he was
+with one who believed in it.
+
+"I don't want," he said, "to bear hard on Bulstrode, who has lent me
+money of which I was in need--though I would rather have gone without
+it now.  He is hunted down and miserable, and has only a poor thread of
+life in him.  But I should like to tell you everything.  It will be a
+comfort to me to speak where belief has gone beforehand, and where I
+shall not seem to be offering assertions of my own honesty.  You will
+feel what is fair to another, as you feel what is fair to me."
+
+"Do trust me," said Dorothea; "I will not repeat anything without your
+leave.  But at the very least, I could say that you have made all the
+circumstances clear to me, and that I know you are not in any way
+guilty.  Mr. Farebrother would believe me, and my uncle, and Sir James
+Chettam.  Nay, there are persons in Middlemarch to whom I could go;
+although they don't know much of me, they would believe me.  They would
+know that I could have no other motive than truth and justice.  I would
+take any pains to clear you.  I have very little to do.  There is
+nothing better that I can do in the world."
+
+Dorothea's voice, as she made this childlike picture of what she would
+do, might have been almost taken as a proof that she could do it
+effectively.  The searching tenderness of her woman's tones seemed made
+for a defence against ready accusers.  Lydgate did not stay to think
+that she was Quixotic: he gave himself up, for the first time in his
+life, to the exquisite sense of leaning entirely on a generous
+sympathy, without any check of proud reserve.  And he told her
+everything, from the time when, under the pressure of his difficulties,
+he unwillingly made his first application to Bulstrode; gradually, in
+the relief of speaking, getting into a more thorough utterance of what
+had gone on in his mind--entering fully into the fact that his
+treatment of the patient was opposed to the dominant practice, into his
+doubts at the last, his ideal of medical duty, and his uneasy
+consciousness that the acceptance of the money had made some difference
+in his private inclination and professional behavior, though not in his
+fulfilment of any publicly recognized obligation.
+
+"It has come to my knowledge since," he added, "that Hawley sent some
+one to examine the housekeeper at Stone Court, and she said that she
+gave the patient all the opium in the phial I left, as well as a good
+deal of brandy.  But that would not have been opposed to ordinary
+prescriptions, even of first-rate men.  The suspicions against me had
+no hold there: they are grounded on the knowledge that I took money,
+that Bulstrode had strong motives for wishing the man to die, and that
+he gave me the money as a bribe to concur in some malpractices or other
+against the patient--that in any case I accepted a bribe to hold my
+tongue.  They are just the suspicions that cling the most obstinately,
+because they lie in people's inclination and can never be disproved.
+How my orders came to be disobeyed is a question to which I don't know
+the answer.  It is still possible that Bulstrode was innocent of any
+criminal intention--even possible that he had nothing to do with the
+disobedience, and merely abstained from mentioning it.  But all that
+has nothing to do with the public belief.  It is one of those cases on
+which a man is condemned on the ground of his character--it is
+believed that he has committed a crime in some undefined way, because
+he had the motive for doing it; and Bulstrode's character has enveloped
+me, because I took his money.  I am simply blighted--like a damaged
+ear of corn--the business is done and can't be undone."
+
+"Oh, it is hard!" said Dorothea.  "I understand the difficulty there is
+in your vindicating yourself.  And that all this should have come to
+you who had meant to lead a higher life than the common, and to find
+out better ways--I cannot bear to rest in this as unchangeable.  I know
+you meant that.  I remember what you said to me when you first spoke to
+me about the hospital.  There is no sorrow I have thought more about
+than that--to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail."
+
+"Yes," said Lydgate, feeling that here he had found room for the full
+meaning of his grief.  "I had some ambition.  I meant everything to be
+different with me.  I thought I had more strength and mastery.  But the
+most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself."
+
+"Suppose," said Dorothea, meditatively,--"suppose we kept on the
+Hospital according to the present plan, and you stayed here though only
+with the friendship and support of a few, the evil feeling towards you
+would gradually die out; there would come opportunities in which people
+would be forced to acknowledge that they had been unjust to you,
+because they would see that your purposes were pure.  You may still win
+a great fame like the Louis and Laennec I have heard you speak of, and
+we shall all be proud of you," she ended, with a smile.
+
+"That might do if I had my old trust in myself," said Lydgate,
+mournfully.  "Nothing galls me more than the notion of turning round
+and running away before this slander, leaving it unchecked behind me.
+Still, I can't ask any one to put a great deal of money into a plan
+which depends on me."
+
+"It would be quite worth my while," said Dorothea, simply.  "Only
+think.  I am very uncomfortable with my money, because they tell me I
+have too little for any great scheme of the sort I like best, and yet I
+have too much.  I don't know what to do.  I have seven hundred a-year
+of my own fortune, and nineteen hundred a-year that Mr. Casaubon left
+me, and between three and four thousand of ready money in the bank.  I
+wished to raise money and pay it off gradually out of my income which I
+don't want, to buy land with and found a village which should be a
+school of industry; but Sir James and my uncle have convinced me that
+the risk would be too great.  So you see that what I should most
+rejoice at would be to have something good to do with my money: I
+should like it to make other people's lives better to them.  It makes
+me very uneasy--coming all to me who don't want it."
+
+A smile broke through the gloom of Lydgate's face.  The childlike
+grave-eyed earnestness with which Dorothea said all this was
+irresistible--blent into an adorable whole with her ready understanding
+of high experience.  (Of lower experience such as plays a great part in
+the world, poor Mrs. Casaubon had a very blurred shortsighted
+knowledge, little helped by her imagination.) But she took the smile as
+encouragement of her plan.
+
+"I think you see now that you spoke too scrupulously," she said, in a
+tone of persuasion.  "The hospital would be one good; and making your
+life quite whole and well again would be another."
+
+Lydgate's smile had died away.  "You have the goodness as well as the
+money to do all that; if it could be done," he said.  "But--"
+
+He hesitated a little while, looking vaguely towards the window; and
+she sat in silent expectation.  At last he turned towards her and said
+impetuously--
+
+"Why should I not tell you?--you know what sort of bond marriage is.
+You will understand everything."
+
+Dorothea felt her heart beginning to beat faster.  Had he that sorrow
+too?  But she feared to say any word, and he went on immediately.
+
+"It is impossible for me now to do anything--to take any step without
+considering my wife's happiness.  The thing that I might like to do if
+I were alone, is become impossible to me.  I can't see her miserable.
+She married me without knowing what she was going into, and it might
+have been better for her if she had not married me."
+
+"I know, I know--you could not give her pain, if you were not obliged
+to do it," said Dorothea, with keen memory of her own life.
+
+"And she has set her mind against staying.  She wishes to go.  The
+troubles she has had here have wearied her," said Lydgate, breaking off
+again, lest he should say too much.
+
+"But when she saw the good that might come of staying--" said Dorothea,
+remonstrantly, looking at Lydgate as if he had forgotten the reasons
+which had just been considered.  He did not speak immediately.
+
+"She would not see it," he said at last, curtly, feeling at first that
+this statement must do without explanation.  "And, indeed, I have lost
+all spirit about carrying on my life here."  He paused a moment and
+then, following the impulse to let Dorothea see deeper into the
+difficulty of his life, he said, "The fact is, this trouble has come
+upon her confusedly.  We have not been able to speak to each other
+about it.  I am not sure what is in her mind about it: she may fear
+that I have really done something base.  It is my fault; I ought to be
+more open.  But I have been suffering cruelly."
+
+"May I go and see her?" said Dorothea, eagerly.  "Would she accept my
+sympathy?  I would tell her that you have not been blamable before any
+one's judgment but your own.  I would tell her that you shall be
+cleared in every fair mind.  I would cheer her heart.  Will you ask her
+if I may go to see her?  I did see her once."
+
+"I am sure you may," said Lydgate, seizing the proposition with some
+hope.  "She would feel honored--cheered, I think, by the proof that you
+at least have some respect for me.  I will not speak to her about your
+coming--that she may not connect it with my wishes at all.  I know very
+well that I ought not to have left anything to be told her by others,
+but--"
+
+He broke off, and there was a moment's silence.  Dorothea refrained
+from saying what was in her mind--how well she knew that there might be
+invisible barriers to speech between husband and wife.  This was a
+point on which even sympathy might make a wound.  She returned to the
+more outward aspect of Lydgate's position, saying cheerfully--
+
+"And if Mrs. Lydgate knew that there were friends who would believe in
+you and support you, she might then be glad that you should stay in
+your place and recover your hopes--and do what you meant to do.
+Perhaps then you would see that it was right to agree with what I
+proposed about your continuing at the Hospital.  Surely you would, if
+you still have faith in it as a means of making your knowledge useful?"
+
+Lydgate did not answer, and she saw that he was debating with himself.
+
+"You need not decide immediately," she said, gently.  "A few days hence
+it will be early enough for me to send my answer to Mr. Bulstrode."
+
+Lydgate still waited, but at last turned to speak in his most decisive
+tones.
+
+"No; I prefer that there should be no interval left for wavering.  I am
+no longer sure enough of myself--I mean of what it would be possible
+for me to do under the changed circumstances of my life.  It would be
+dishonorable to let others engage themselves to anything serious in
+dependence on me.  I might be obliged to go away after all; I see
+little chance of anything else.  The whole thing is too problematic; I
+cannot consent to be the cause of your goodness being wasted.  No--let
+the new Hospital be joined with the old Infirmary, and everything go on
+as it might have done if I had never come.  I have kept a valuable
+register since I have been there; I shall send it to a man who will
+make use of it," he ended bitterly.  "I can think of nothing for a long
+while but getting an income."
+
+"It hurts me very much to hear you speak so hopelessly," said Dorothea.
+"It would be a happiness to your friends, who believe in your future,
+in your power to do great things, if you would let them save you from
+that.  Think how much money I have; it would be like taking a burthen
+from me if you took some of it every year till you got free from this
+fettering want of income.  Why should not people do these things?  It
+is so difficult to make shares at all even.  This is one way."
+
+"God bless you, Mrs. Casaubon!" said Lydgate, rising as if with the
+same impulse that made his words energetic, and resting his arm on the
+back of the great leather chair he had been sitting in.  "It is good
+that you should have such feelings.  But I am not the man who ought to
+allow himself to benefit by them.  I have not given guarantees enough.
+I must not at least sink into the degradation of being pensioned for
+work that I never achieved.  It is very clear to me that I must not
+count on anything else than getting away from Middlemarch as soon as I
+can manage it.  I should not be able for a long while, at the very
+best, to get an income here, and--and it is easier to make necessary
+changes in a new place.  I must do as other men do, and think what will
+please the world and bring in money; look for a little opening in the
+London crowd, and push myself; set up in a watering-place, or go to
+some southern town where there are plenty of idle English, and get
+myself puffed,--that is the sort of shell I must creep into and try to
+keep my soul alive in."
+
+"Now that is not brave," said Dorothea,--"to give up the fight."
+
+"No, it is not brave," said Lydgate, "but if a man is afraid of
+creeping paralysis?"  Then, in another tone, "Yet you have made a great
+difference in my courage by believing in me.  Everything seems more
+bearable since I have talked to you; and if you can clear me in a few
+other minds, especially in Farebrother's, I shall be deeply grateful.
+The point I wish you not to mention is the fact of disobedience to my
+orders.  That would soon get distorted.  After all, there is no
+evidence for me but people's opinion of me beforehand.  You can only
+repeat my own report of myself."
+
+"Mr. Farebrother will believe--others will believe," said Dorothea.  "I
+can say of you what will make it stupidity to suppose that you would be
+bribed to do a wickedness."
+
+"I don't know," said Lydgate, with something like a groan in his voice.
+"I have not taken a bribe yet.  But there is a pale shade of bribery
+which is sometimes called prosperity.  You will do me another great
+kindness, then, and come to see my wife?"
+
+"Yes, I will.  I remember how pretty she is," said Dorothea, into whose
+mind every impression about Rosamond had cut deep.  "I hope she will
+like me."
+
+As Lydgate rode away, he thought, "This young creature has a heart
+large enough for the Virgin Mary.  She evidently thinks nothing of her
+own future, and would pledge away half her income at once, as if she
+wanted nothing for herself but a chair to sit in from which she can
+look down with those clear eyes at the poor mortals who pray to her.
+She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before--a fountain of
+friendship towards men--a man can make a friend of her.  Casaubon must
+have raised some heroic hallucination in her.  I wonder if she could
+have any other sort of passion for a man?  Ladislaw?--there was
+certainly an unusual feeling between them.  And Casaubon must have had
+a notion of it.  Well--her love might help a man more than her money."
+
+Dorothea on her side had immediately formed a plan of relieving Lydgate
+from his obligation to Bulstrode, which she felt sure was a part,
+though small, of the galling pressure he had to bear.  She sat down at
+once under the inspiration of their interview, and wrote a brief note,
+in which she pleaded that she had more claim than Mr. Bulstrode had to
+the satisfaction of providing the money which had been serviceable to
+Lydgate--that it would be unkind in Lydgate not to grant her the
+position of being his helper in this small matter, the favor being
+entirely to her who had so little that was plainly marked out for her
+to do with her superfluous money.  He might call her a creditor or by
+any other name if it did but imply that he granted her request.  She
+enclosed a check for a thousand pounds, and determined to take the
+letter with her the next day when she went to see Rosamond.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXVII.
+
+    "And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
+     To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
+     With some suspicion."
+                                         --Henry V.
+
+
+The next day Lydgate had to go to Brassing, and told Rosamond that he
+should be away until the evening.  Of late she had never gone beyond
+her own house and garden, except to church, and once to see her papa,
+to whom she said, "If Tertius goes away, you will help us to move, will
+you not, papa?  I suppose we shall have very little money.  I am sure I
+hope some one will help us." And Mr. Vincy had said, "Yes, child, I
+don't mind a hundred or two.  I can see the end of that."  With these
+exceptions she had sat at home in languid melancholy and suspense,
+fixing her mind on Will Ladislaw's coming as the one point of hope and
+interest, and associating this with some new urgency on Lydgate to make
+immediate arrangements for leaving Middlemarch and going to London,
+till she felt assured that the coming would be a potent cause of the
+going, without at all seeing how.  This way of establishing sequences
+is too common to be fairly regarded as a peculiar folly in Rosamond.
+And it is precisely this sort of sequence which causes the greatest
+shock when it is sundered: for to see how an effect may be produced is
+often to see possible missings and checks; but to see nothing except
+the desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect, rids us of
+doubt and makes our minds strongly intuitive.  That was the process
+going on in poor Rosamond, while she arranged all objects around her
+with the same nicety as ever, only with more slowness--or sat down to
+the piano, meaning to play, and then desisting, yet lingering on the
+music stool with her white fingers suspended on the wooden front, and
+looking before her in dreamy ennui.  Her melancholy had become so
+marked that Lydgate felt a strange timidity before it, as a perpetual
+silent reproach, and the strong man, mastered by his keen sensibilities
+towards this fair fragile creature whose life he seemed somehow to have
+bruised, shrank from her look, and sometimes started at her approach,
+fear of her and fear for her rushing in only the more forcibly after it
+had been momentarily expelled by exasperation.
+
+But this morning Rosamond descended from her room upstairs--where she
+sometimes sat the whole day when Lydgate was out--equipped for a walk
+in the town.  She had a letter to post--a letter addressed to Mr.
+Ladislaw and written with charming discretion, but intended to hasten
+his arrival by a hint of trouble.  The servant-maid, their sole
+house-servant now, noticed her coming down-stairs in her walking dress,
+and thought "there never did anybody look so pretty in a bonnet poor
+thing."
+
+Meanwhile Dorothea's mind was filled with her project of going to
+Rosamond, and with the many thoughts, both of the past and the probable
+future, which gathered round the idea of that visit.  Until yesterday
+when Lydgate had opened to her a glimpse of some trouble in his married
+life, the image of Mrs. Lydgate had always been associated for her with
+that of Will Ladislaw.  Even in her most uneasy moments--even when she
+had been agitated by Mrs. Cadwallader's painfully graphic report of
+gossip--her effort, nay, her strongest impulsive prompting, had been
+towards the vindication of Will from any sullying surmises; and when,
+in her meeting with him afterwards, she had at first interpreted his
+words as a probable allusion to a feeling towards Mrs. Lydgate which he
+was determined to cut himself off from indulging, she had had a quick,
+sad, excusing vision of the charm there might be in his constant
+opportunities of companionship with that fair creature, who most likely
+shared his other tastes as she evidently did his delight in music.  But
+there had followed his parting words--the few passionate words in
+which he had implied that she herself was the object of whom his love
+held him in dread, that it was his love for her only which he was
+resolved not to declare but to carry away into banishment.  From the
+time of that parting, Dorothea, believing in Will's love for her,
+believing with a proud delight in his delicate sense of honor and his
+determination that no one should impeach him justly, felt her heart
+quite at rest as to the regard he might have for Mrs. Lydgate.  She was
+sure that the regard was blameless.
+
+There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having
+a sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us over to rectitude and
+purity by their pure belief about us; and our sins become that worst
+kind of sacrilege which tears down the invisible altar of trust.  "If
+you are not good, none is good"--those little words may give a
+terrific meaning to responsibility, may hold a vitriolic intensity for
+remorse.
+
+Dorothea's nature was of that kind: her own passionate faults lay along
+the easily counted open channels of her ardent character; and while she
+was full of pity for the visible mistakes of others, she had not yet
+any material within her experience for subtle constructions and
+suspicions of hidden wrong.  But that simplicity of hers, holding up an
+ideal for others in her believing conception of them, was one of the
+great powers of her womanhood.  And it had from the first acted
+strongly on Will Ladislaw.  He felt, when he parted from her, that the
+brief words by which he had tried to convey to her his feeling about
+herself and the division which her fortune made between them, would
+only profit by their brevity when Dorothea had to interpret them: he
+felt that in her mind he had found his highest estimate.
+
+And he was right there.  In the months since their parting Dorothea had
+felt a delicious though sad repose in their relation to each other, as
+one which was inwardly whole and without blemish.  She had an active
+force of antagonism within her, when the antagonism turned on the
+defence either of plans or persons that she believed in; and the wrongs
+which she felt that Will had received from her husband, and the
+external conditions which to others were grounds for slighting him,
+only gave the more tenacity to her affection and admiring judgment.
+And now with the disclosures about Bulstrode had come another fact
+affecting Will's social position, which roused afresh Dorothea's inward
+resistance to what was said about him in that part of her world which
+lay within park palings.
+
+"Young Ladislaw the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker" was a phrase
+which had entered emphatically into the dialogues about the Bulstrode
+business, at Lowick, Tipton, and Freshitt, and was a worse kind of
+placard on poor Will's back than the "Italian with white mice."
+Upright Sir James Chettam was convinced that his own satisfaction was
+righteous when he thought with some complacency that here was an added
+league to that mountainous distance between Ladislaw and Dorothea,
+which enabled him to dismiss any anxiety in that direction as too
+absurd.  And perhaps there had been some pleasure in pointing Mr.
+Brooke's attention to this ugly bit of Ladislaw's genealogy, as a fresh
+candle for him to see his own folly by.  Dorothea had observed the
+animus with which Will's part in the painful story had been recalled
+more than once; but she had uttered no word, being checked now, as she
+had not been formerly in speaking of Will, by the consciousness of a
+deeper relation between them which must always remain in consecrated
+secrecy.  But her silence shrouded her resistant emotion into a more
+thorough glow; and this misfortune in Will's lot which, it seemed,
+others were wishing to fling at his back as an opprobrium, only gave
+something more of enthusiasm to her clinging thought.
+
+She entertained no visions of their ever coming into nearer union, and
+yet she had taken no posture of renunciation.  She had accepted her
+whole relation to Will very simply as part of her marriage sorrows, and
+would have thought it very sinful in her to keep up an inward wail
+because she was not completely happy, being rather disposed to dwell on
+the superfluities of her lot.  She could bear that the chief pleasures
+of her tenderness should lie in memory, and the idea of marriage came
+to her solely as a repulsive proposition from some suitor of whom she
+at present knew nothing, but whose merits, as seen by her friends,
+would be a source of torment to her:--"somebody who will manage your
+property for you, my dear," was Mr. Brooke's attractive suggestion of
+suitable characteristics.  "I should like to manage it myself, if I
+knew what to do with it," said Dorothea.  No--she adhered to her
+declaration that she would never be married again, and in the long
+valley of her life which looked so flat and empty of waymarks, guidance
+would come as she walked along the road, and saw her fellow-passengers
+by the way.
+
+This habitual state of feeling about Will Ladislaw had been strong in
+all her waking hours since she had proposed to pay a visit to Mrs.
+Lydgate, making a sort of background against which she saw Rosamond's
+figure presented to her without hindrances to her interest and
+compassion.  There was evidently some mental separation, some barrier
+to complete confidence which had arisen between this wife and the
+husband who had yet made her happiness a law to him.  That was a
+trouble which no third person must directly touch.  But Dorothea
+thought with deep pity of the loneliness which must have come upon
+Rosamond from the suspicions cast on her husband; and there would
+surely be help in the manifestation of respect for Lydgate and sympathy
+with her.
+
+"I shall talk to her about her husband," thought Dorothea, as she was
+being driven towards the town.  The clear spring morning, the scent of
+the moist earth, the fresh leaves just showing their creased-up wealth
+of greenery from out their half-opened sheaths, seemed part of the
+cheerfulness she was feeling from a long conversation with Mr.
+Farebrother, who had joyfully accepted the justifying explanation of
+Lydgate's conduct.  "I shall take Mrs. Lydgate good news, and perhaps
+she will like to talk to me and make a friend of me."
+
+Dorothea had another errand in Lowick Gate: it was about a new
+fine-toned bell for the school-house, and as she had to get out of her
+carriage very near to Lydgate's, she walked thither across the street,
+having told the coachman to wait for some packages.  The street door
+was open, and the servant was taking the opportunity of looking out at
+the carriage which was pausing within sight when it became apparent to
+her that the lady who "belonged to it" was coming towards her.
+
+"Is Mrs. Lydgate at home?" said Dorothea.
+
+"I'm not sure, my lady; I'll see, if you'll please to walk in," said
+Martha, a little confused on the score of her kitchen apron, but
+collected enough to be sure that "mum" was not the right title for this
+queenly young widow with a carriage and pair.  "Will you please to walk
+in, and I'll go and see."
+
+"Say that I am Mrs. Casaubon," said Dorothea, as Martha moved forward
+intending to show her into the drawing-room and then to go up-stairs to
+see if Rosamond had returned from her walk.
+
+They crossed the broader part of the entrance-hall, and turned up the
+passage which led to the garden.  The drawing-room door was unlatched,
+and Martha, pushing it without looking into the room, waited for Mrs.
+Casaubon to enter and then turned away, the door having swung open and
+swung back again without noise.
+
+Dorothea had less of outward vision than usual this morning, being
+filled with images of things as they had been and were going to be.
+She found herself on the other side of the door without seeing anything
+remarkable, but immediately she heard a voice speaking in low tones
+which startled her as with a sense of dreaming in daylight, and
+advancing unconsciously a step or two beyond the projecting slab of a
+bookcase, she saw, in the terrible illumination of a certainty which
+filled up all outlines, something which made her pause, motionless,
+without self-possession enough to speak.
+
+Seated with his back towards her on a sofa which stood against the wall
+on a line with the door by which she had entered, she saw Will
+Ladislaw: close by him and turned towards him with a flushed
+tearfulness which gave a new brilliancy to her face sat Rosamond, her
+bonnet hanging back, while Will leaning towards her clasped both her
+upraised hands in his and spoke with low-toned fervor.
+
+Rosamond in her agitated absorption had not noticed the silently
+advancing figure; but when Dorothea, after the first immeasurable
+instant of this vision, moved confusedly backward and found herself
+impeded by some piece of furniture, Rosamond was suddenly aware of her
+presence, and with a spasmodic movement snatched away her hands and
+rose, looking at Dorothea who was necessarily arrested.  Will Ladislaw,
+starting up, looked round also, and meeting Dorothea's eyes with a new
+lightning in them, seemed changing to marble: But she immediately
+turned them away from him to Rosamond and said in a firm voice--
+
+"Excuse me, Mrs. Lydgate, the servant did not know that you were here.
+I called to deliver an important letter for Mr. Lydgate, which I wished
+to put into your own hands."
+
+She laid down the letter on the small table which had checked her
+retreat, and then including Rosamond and Will in one distant glance and
+bow, she went quickly out of the room, meeting in the passage the
+surprised Martha, who said she was sorry the mistress was not at home,
+and then showed the strange lady out with an inward reflection that
+grand people were probably more impatient than others.
+
+Dorothea walked across the street with her most elastic step and was
+quickly in her carriage again.
+
+"Drive on to Freshitt Hall," she said to the coachman, and any one
+looking at her might have thought that though she was paler than usual
+she was never animated by a more self-possessed energy.  And that was
+really her experience.  It was as if she had drunk a great draught of
+scorn that stimulated her beyond the susceptibility to other feelings.
+She had seen something so far below her belief, that her emotions
+rushed back from it and made an excited throng without an object.  She
+needed something active to turn her excitement out upon.  She felt
+power to walk and work for a day, without meat or drink.  And she would
+carry out the purpose with which she had started in the morning, of
+going to Freshitt and Tipton to tell Sir James and her uncle all that
+she wished them to know about Lydgate, whose married loneliness under
+his trial now presented itself to her with new significance, and made
+her more ardent in readiness to be his champion.  She had never felt
+anything like this triumphant power of indignation in the struggle of
+her married life, in which there had always been a quickly subduing
+pang; and she took it as a sign of new strength.
+
+"Dodo, how very bright your eyes are!" said Celia, when Sir James was
+gone out of the room.  "And you don't see anything you look at, Arthur
+or anything.  You are going to do something uncomfortable, I know.  Is
+it all about Mr. Lydgate, or has something else happened?" Celia had
+been used to watch her sister with expectation.
+
+"Yes, dear, a great many things have happened," said Dodo, in her full
+tones.
+
+"I wonder what," said Celia, folding her arms cozily and leaning
+forward upon them.
+
+"Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth," said
+Dorothea, lifting her arms to the back of her head.
+
+"Dear me, Dodo, are you going to have a scheme for them?" said Celia, a
+little uneasy at this Hamlet-like raving.
+
+But Sir James came in again, ready to accompany Dorothea to the Grange,
+and she finished her expedition well, not swerving in her resolution
+until she descended at her own door.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXVIII.
+
+    "Would it were yesterday and I i' the grave,
+     With her sweet faith above for monument"
+
+
+Rosamond and Will stood motionless--they did not know how long--he
+looking towards the spot where Dorothea had stood, and she looking
+towards him with doubt.  It seemed an endless time to Rosamond, in
+whose inmost soul there was hardly so much annoyance as gratification
+from what had just happened.  Shallow natures dream of an easy sway
+over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly in their own petty
+magic to turn the deepest streams, and confident, by pretty gestures
+and remarks, of making the thing that is not as though it were.  She
+knew that Will had received a severe blow, but she had been little used
+to imagining other people's states of mind except as a material cut
+into shape by her own wishes; and she believed in her own power to
+soothe or subdue.  Even Tertius, that most perverse of men, was always
+subdued in the long-run: events had been obstinate, but still Rosamond
+would have said now, as she did before her marriage, that she never
+gave up what she had set her mind on.
+
+She put out her arm and laid the tips of her fingers on Will's
+coat-sleeve.
+
+"Don't touch me!" he said, with an utterance like the cut of a lash,
+darting from her, and changing from pink to white and back again, as if
+his whole frame were tingling with the pain of the sting.  He wheeled
+round to the other side of the room and stood opposite to her, with the
+tips of his fingers in his pockets and his head thrown back, looking
+fiercely not at Rosamond but at a point a few inches away from her.
+
+She was keenly offended, but the Signs she made of this were such as
+only Lydgate was used to interpret.  She became suddenly quiet and
+seated herself, untying her hanging bonnet and laying it down with her
+shawl.  Her little hands which she folded before her were very cold.
+
+It would have been safer for Will in the first instance to have taken
+up his hat and gone away; but he had felt no impulse to do this; on the
+contrary, he had a horrible inclination to stay and shatter Rosamond
+with his anger.  It seemed as impossible to bear the fatality she had
+drawn down on him without venting his fury as it would be to a panther
+to bear the javelin-wound without springing and biting.  And yet--how
+could he tell a woman that he was ready to curse her?  He was fuming
+under a repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge: he was
+dangerously poised, and Rosamond's voice now brought the decisive
+vibration.  In flute-like tones of sarcasm she said--
+
+"You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and explain your preference."
+
+"Go after her!" he burst out, with a sharp edge in his voice.  "Do you
+think she would turn to look at me, or value any word I ever uttered to
+her again at more than a dirty feather?--Explain!  How can a man
+explain at the expense of a woman?"
+
+"You can tell her what you please," said Rosamond with more tremor.
+
+"Do you suppose she would like me better for sacrificing you?  She is
+not a woman to be flattered because I made myself despicable--to
+believe that I must be true to her because I was a dastard to you."
+
+He began to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal that sees
+prey but cannot reach it.  Presently he burst out again--
+
+"I had no hope before--not much--of anything better to come.  But I had
+one certainty--that she believed in me.  Whatever people had said or
+done about me, she believed in me.--That's gone!  She'll never again
+think me anything but a paltry pretence--too nice to take heaven
+except upon flattering conditions, and yet selling myself for any
+devil's change by the sly.  She'll think of me as an incarnate insult
+to her, from the first moment we--"
+
+Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping something that must
+not be thrown and shattered.  He found another vent for his rage by
+snatching up Rosamond's words again, as if they were reptiles to be
+throttled and flung off.
+
+"Explain!  Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell!  Explain my
+preference!  I never had a _preference_ for her, any more than I have a
+preference for breathing.  No other woman exists by the side of her.  I
+would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any
+other woman's living."
+
+Rosamond, while these poisoned weapons were being hurled at her, was
+almost losing the sense of her identity, and seemed to be waking into
+some new terrible existence.  She had no sense of chill resolute
+repulsion, of reticent self-justification such as she had known under
+Lydgate's most stormy displeasure: all her sensibility was turned into
+a bewildering novelty of pain; she felt a new terrified recoil under a
+lash never experienced before.  What another nature felt in opposition
+to her own was being burnt and bitten into her consciousness.  When
+Will had ceased to speak she had become an image of sickened misery:
+her lips were pale, and her eyes had a tearless dismay in them.  If it
+had been Tertius who stood opposite to her, that look of misery would
+have been a pang to him, and he would have sunk by her side to comfort
+her, with that strong-armed comfort which, she had often held very
+cheap.
+
+Let it be forgiven to Will that he had no such movement of pity.  He
+had felt no bond beforehand to this woman who had spoiled the ideal
+treasure of his life, and he held himself blameless.  He knew that he
+was cruel, but he had no relenting in him yet.
+
+After he had done speaking, he still moved about, half in absence of
+mind, and Rosamond sat perfectly still.  At length Will, seeming to
+bethink himself, took up his hat, yet stood some moments irresolute.
+He had spoken to her in a way that made a phrase of common politeness
+difficult to utter; and yet, now that he had come to the point of going
+away from her without further speech, he shrank from it as a brutality;
+he felt checked and stultified in his anger.  He walked towards the
+mantel-piece and leaned his arm on it, and waited in silence for--he
+hardly knew what.  The vindictive fire was still burning in him, and he
+could utter no word of retractation; but it was nevertheless in his
+mind that having come back to this hearth where he had enjoyed a
+caressing friendship he had found calamity seated there--he had had
+suddenly revealed to him a trouble that lay outside the home as well as
+within it.  And what seemed a foreboding was pressing upon him as with
+slow pincers:--that his life might come to be enslaved by this helpless
+woman who had thrown herself upon him in the dreary sadness of her
+heart.  But he was in gloomy rebellion against the fact that his quick
+apprehensiveness foreshadowed to him, and when his eyes fell on
+Rosamond's blighted face it seemed to him that he was the more pitiable
+of the two; for pain must enter into its glorified life of memory
+before it can turn into compassion.
+
+And so they remained for many minutes, opposite each other, far apart,
+in silence; Will's face still possessed by a mute rage, and Rosamond's
+by a mute misery.  The poor thing had no force to fling out any passion
+in return; the terrible collapse of the illusion towards which all her
+hope had been strained was a stroke which had too thoroughly shaken
+her: her little world was in ruins, and she felt herself tottering in
+the midst as a lonely bewildered consciousness.
+
+Will wished that she would speak and bring some mitigating shadow
+across his own cruel speech, which seemed to stand staring at them both
+in mockery of any attempt at revived fellowship.  But she said nothing,
+and at last with a desperate effort over himself, he asked, "Shall I
+come in and see Lydgate this evening?"
+
+"If you like," Rosamond answered, just audibly.
+
+And then Will went out of the house, Martha never knowing that he had
+been in.
+
+After he was gone, Rosamond tried to get up from her seat, but fell
+back fainting.  When she came to herself again, she felt too ill to
+make the exertion of rising to ring the bell, and she remained helpless
+until the girl, surprised at her long absence, thought for the first
+time of looking for her in all the down-stairs rooms.  Rosamond said
+that she had felt suddenly sick and faint, and wanted to be helped
+up-stairs. When there she threw herself on the bed with her clothes on,
+and lay in apparent torpor, as she had done once before on a memorable
+day of grief.
+
+Lydgate came home earlier than he had expected, about half-past five,
+and found her there.  The perception that she was ill threw every other
+thought into the background.  When he felt her pulse, her eyes rested
+on him with more persistence than they had done for a long while, as if
+she felt some content that he was there.  He perceived the difference
+in a moment, and seating himself by her put his arm gently under her,
+and bending over her said, "My poor Rosamond! has something agitated
+you?"  Clinging to him she fell into hysterical sobbings and cries, and
+for the next hour he did nothing but soothe and tend her.  He imagined
+that Dorothea had been to see her, and that all this effect on her
+nervous system, which evidently involved some new turning towards
+himself, was due to the excitement of the new impressions which that
+visit had raised.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXIX.
+
+    "Now, I saw in my dream, that just as they had ended their
+    talk, they drew nigh to a very miry slough, that was in the
+    midst of the plain; and they, being heedless, did both fall
+    suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was
+    Despond."--BUNYAN.
+
+
+When Rosamond was quiet, and Lydgate had left her, hoping that she
+might soon sleep under the effect of an anodyne, he went into the
+drawing-room to fetch a book which he had left there, meaning to spend
+the evening in his work-room, and he saw on the table Dorothea's letter
+addressed to him.  He had not ventured to ask Rosamond if Mrs. Casaubon
+had called, but the reading of this letter assured him of the fact, for
+Dorothea mentioned that it was to be carried by herself.
+
+When Will Ladislaw came in a little later Lydgate met him with a
+surprise which made it clear that he had not been told of the earlier
+visit, and Will could not say, "Did not Mrs. Lydgate tell you that I
+came this morning?"
+
+"Poor Rosamond is ill," Lydgate added immediately on his greeting.
+
+"Not seriously, I hope," said Will.
+
+"No--only a slight nervous shock--the effect of some agitation.  She
+has been overwrought lately.  The truth is, Ladislaw, I am an unlucky
+devil.  We have gone through several rounds of purgatory since you
+left, and I have lately got on to a worse ledge of it than ever.  I
+suppose you are only just come down--you look rather battered--you
+have not been long enough in the town to hear anything?"
+
+"I travelled all night and got to the White Hart at eight o'clock this
+morning. I have been shutting myself up and resting," said Will,
+feeling himself a sneak, but seeing no alternative to this evasion.
+
+And then he heard Lydgate's account of the troubles which Rosamond had
+already depicted to him in her way.  She had not mentioned the fact of
+Will's name being connected with the public story--this detail not
+immediately affecting her--and he now heard it for the first time.
+
+"I thought it better to tell you that your name is mixed up with the
+disclosures," said Lydgate, who could understand better than most men
+how Ladislaw might be stung by the revelation.  "You will be sure to
+hear it as soon as you turn out into the town.  I suppose it is true
+that Raffles spoke to you."
+
+"Yes," said Will, sardonically.  "I shall be fortunate if gossip does
+not make me the most disreputable person in the whole affair.  I should
+think the latest version must be, that I plotted with Raffles to murder
+Bulstrode, and ran away from Middlemarch for the purpose."
+
+He was thinking "Here is a new ring in the sound of my name to
+recommend it in her hearing; however--what does it signify now?"
+
+But he said nothing of Bulstrode's offer to him.  Will was very open
+and careless about his personal affairs, but it was among the more
+exquisite touches in nature's modelling of him that he had a delicate
+generosity which warned him into reticence here.  He shrank from saying
+that he had rejected Bulstrode's money, in the moment when he was
+learning that it was Lydgate's misfortune to have accepted it.
+
+Lydgate too was reticent in the midst of his confidence.  He made no
+allusion to Rosamond's feeling under their trouble, and of Dorothea he
+only said, "Mrs. Casaubon has been the one person to come forward and
+say that she had no belief in any of the suspicions against me."
+Observing a change in Will's face, he avoided any further mention of
+her, feeling himself too ignorant of their relation to each other not
+to fear that his words might have some hidden painful bearing on it.
+And it occurred to him that Dorothea was the real cause of the present
+visit to Middlemarch.
+
+The two men were pitying each other, but it was only Will who guessed
+the extent of his companion's trouble.  When Lydgate spoke with
+desperate resignation of going to settle in London, and said with a
+faint smile, "We shall have you again, old fellow." Will felt
+inexpressibly mournful, and said nothing.  Rosamond had that morning
+entreated him to urge this step on Lydgate; and it seemed to him as if
+he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was
+sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of
+circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single
+momentous bargain.
+
+We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our
+future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into
+insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.  Poor Lydgate was inwardly
+groaning on that margin, and Will was arriving at it.  It seemed to him
+this evening as if the cruelty of his outburst to Rosamond had made an
+obligation for him, and he dreaded the obligation: he dreaded Lydgate's
+unsuspecting good-will: he dreaded his own distaste for his spoiled
+life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXX.
+
+       "Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
+        The Godhead's most benignant grace;
+        Nor know we anything so fair
+        As is the smile upon thy face;
+        Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
+        And fragrance in thy footing treads;
+        Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong;
+    And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.
+                                        --WORDSWORTH: Ode to Duty.
+
+
+When Dorothea had seen Mr. Farebrother in the morning, she had promised
+to go and dine at the parsonage on her return from Freshitt.  There was
+a frequent interchange of visits between her and the Farebrother
+family, which enabled her to say that she was not at all lonely at the
+Manor, and to resist for the present the severe prescription of a lady
+companion.  When she reached home and remembered her engagement, she
+was glad of it; and finding that she had still an hour before she could
+dress for dinner, she walked straight to the schoolhouse and entered
+into a conversation with the master and mistress about the new bell,
+giving eager attention to their small details and repetitions, and
+getting up a dramatic sense that her life was very busy.  She paused on
+her way back to talk to old Master Bunney who was putting in some
+garden-seeds, and discoursed wisely with that rural sage about the
+crops that would make the most return on a perch of ground, and the
+result of sixty years' experience as to soils--namely, that if your
+soil was pretty mellow it would do, but if there came wet, wet, wet to
+make it all of a mummy, why then--
+
+Finding that the social spirit had beguiled her into being rather late,
+she dressed hastily and went over to the parsonage rather earlier than
+was necessary.  That house was never dull, Mr. Farebrother, like
+another White of Selborne, having continually something new to tell of
+his inarticulate guests and proteges, whom he was teaching the boys not
+to torment; and he had just set up a pair of beautiful goats to be pets
+of the village in general, and to walk at large as sacred animals.  The
+evening went by cheerfully till after tea, Dorothea talking more than
+usual and dilating with Mr. Farebrother on the possible histories of
+creatures that converse compendiously with their antennae, and for
+aught we know may hold reformed parliaments; when suddenly some
+inarticulate little sounds were heard which called everybody's
+attention.
+
+"Henrietta Noble," said Mrs. Farebrother, seeing her small sister
+moving about the furniture-legs distressfully, "what is the matter?"
+
+"I have lost my tortoise-shell lozenge-box. I fear the kitten has
+rolled it away," said the tiny old lady, involuntarily continuing her
+beaver-like notes.
+
+"Is it a great treasure, aunt?" said Mr. Farebrother, putting up his
+glasses and looking at the carpet.
+
+"Mr. Ladislaw gave it me," said Miss Noble.  "A German box--very
+pretty, but if it falls it always spins away as far as it can."
+
+"Oh, if it is Ladislaw's present," said Mr. Farebrother, in a deep tone
+of comprehension, getting up and hunting.  The box was found at last
+under a chiffonier, and Miss Noble grasped it with delight, saying, "it
+was under a fender the last time."
+
+"That is an affair of the heart with my aunt," said Mr. Farebrother,
+smiling at Dorothea, as he reseated himself.
+
+"If Henrietta Noble forms an attachment to any one, Mrs. Casaubon,"
+said his mother, emphatically,--"she is like a dog--she would take
+their shoes for a pillow and sleep the better."
+
+"Mr. Ladislaw's shoes, I would," said Henrietta Noble.
+
+Dorothea made an attempt at smiling in return.  She was surprised and
+annoyed to find that her heart was palpitating violently, and that it
+was quite useless to try after a recovery of her former animation.
+Alarmed at herself--fearing some further betrayal of a change so marked
+in its occasion, she rose and said in a low voice with undisguised
+anxiety, "I must go; I have overtired myself."
+
+Mr. Farebrother, quick in perception, rose and said, "It is true; you
+must have half-exhausted yourself in talking about Lydgate.  That sort
+of work tells upon one after the excitement is over."
+
+He gave her his arm back to the Manor, but Dorothea did not attempt to
+speak, even when he said good-night.
+
+The limit of resistance was reached, and she had sunk back helpless
+within the clutch of inescapable anguish.  Dismissing Tantripp with a
+few faint words, she locked her door, and turning away from it towards
+the vacant room she pressed her hands hard on the top of her head, and
+moaned out--
+
+"Oh, I did love him!"
+
+Then came the hour in which the waves of suffering shook her too
+thoroughly to leave any power of thought.  She could only cry in loud
+whispers, between her sobs, after her lost belief which she had planted
+and kept alive from a very little seed since the days in Rome--after
+her lost joy of clinging with silent love and faith to one who,
+misprized by others, was worthy in her thought--after her lost woman's
+pride of reigning in his memory--after her sweet dim perspective of
+hope, that along some pathway they should meet with unchanged
+recognition and take up the backward years as a yesterday.
+
+In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude have
+looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles of man--she besought
+hardness and coldness and aching weariness to bring her relief from the
+mysterious incorporeal might of her anguish: she lay on the bare floor
+and let the night grow cold around her; while her grand woman's frame
+was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child.
+
+There were two images--two living forms that tore her heart in two, as
+if it had been the heart of a mother who seems to see her child divided
+by the sword, and presses one bleeding half to her breast while her
+gaze goes forth in agony towards the half which is carried away by the
+lying woman that has never known the mother's pang.
+
+Here, with the nearness of an answering smile, here within the
+vibrating bond of mutual speech, was the bright creature whom she had
+trusted--who had come to her like the spirit of morning visiting the
+dim vault where she sat as the bride of a worn-out life; and now, with
+a full consciousness which had never awakened before, she stretched out
+her arms towards him and cried with bitter cries that their nearness
+was a parting vision: she discovered her passion to herself in the
+unshrinking utterance of despair.
+
+And there, aloof, yet persistently with her, moving wherever she moved,
+was the Will Ladislaw who was a changed belief exhausted of hope, a
+detected illusion--no, a living man towards whom there could not yet
+struggle any wail of regretful pity, from the midst of scorn and
+indignation and jealous offended pride.  The fire of Dorothea's anger
+was not easily spent, and it flamed out in fitful returns of spurning
+reproach.  Why had he come obtruding his life into hers, hers that
+might have been whole enough without him?  Why had he brought his cheap
+regard and his lip-born words to her who had nothing paltry to give in
+exchange?  He knew that he was deluding her--wished, in the very moment
+of farewell, to make her believe that he gave her the whole price of
+her heart, and knew that he had spent it half before.  Why had he not
+stayed among the crowd of whom she asked nothing--but only prayed that
+they might be less contemptible?
+
+But she lost energy at last even for her loud-whispered cries and
+moans: she subsided into helpless sobs, and on the cold floor she
+sobbed herself to sleep.
+
+In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around
+her, she awoke--not with any amazed wondering where she was or what had
+happened, but with the clearest consciousness that she was looking into
+the eyes of sorrow.  She rose, and wrapped warm things around her, and
+seated herself in a great chair where she had often watched before.
+She was vigorous enough to have borne that hard night without feeling
+ill in body, beyond some aching and fatigue; but she had waked to a new
+condition: she felt as if her soul had been liberated from its terrible
+conflict; she was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit
+down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her
+thoughts.  For now the thoughts came thickly.  It was not in Dorothea's
+nature, for longer than the duration of a paroxysm, to sit in the
+narrow cell of her calamity, in the besotted misery of a consciousness
+that only sees another's lot as an accident of its own.
+
+She began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately
+again, forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible
+meaning.  Was she alone in that scene?  Was it her event only?  She
+forced herself to think of it as bound up with another woman's life--a
+woman towards whom she had set out with a longing to carry some
+clearness and comfort into her beclouded youth.  In her first outleap
+of jealous indignation and disgust, when quitting the hateful room, she
+had flung away all the mercy with which she had undertaken that visit.
+She had enveloped both Will and Rosamond in her burning scorn, and it
+seemed to her as if Rosamond were burned out of her sight forever.  But
+that base prompting which makes a women more cruel to a rival than to a
+faithless lover, could have no strength of recurrence in Dorothea when
+the dominant spirit of justice within her had once overcome the tumult
+and had once shown her the truer measure of things.  All the active
+thought with which she had before been representing to herself the
+trials of Lydgate's lot, and this young marriage union which, like her
+own, seemed to have its hidden as well as evident troubles--all this
+vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it
+asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let
+us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance.  She said to her own
+irremediable grief, that it should make her more helpful, instead of
+driving her back from effort.
+
+And what sort of crisis might not this be in three lives whose contact
+with hers laid an obligation on her as if they had been suppliants
+bearing the sacred branch?  The objects of her rescue were not to be
+sought out by her fancy: they were chosen for her.  She yearned towards
+the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her, and rule her
+errant will.  "What should I do--how should I act now, this very day,
+if I could clutch my own pain, and compel it to silence, and think of
+those three?"
+
+It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was light
+piercing into the room.  She opened her curtains, and looked out
+towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside
+the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his
+back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures
+moving--perhaps the shepherd with his dog.  Far off in the bending sky
+was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the
+manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance.  She was a part of that
+involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from
+her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish
+complaining.
+
+What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but
+something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching
+murmur which would soon gather distinctness.  She took off the clothes
+which seemed to have some of the weariness of a hard watching in them,
+and began to make her toilet.  Presently she rang for Tantripp, who
+came in her dressing-gown.
+
+"Why, madam, you've never been in bed this blessed night," burst out
+Tantripp, looking first at the bed and then at Dorothea's face, which
+in spite of bathing had the pale cheeks and pink eyelids of a mater
+dolorosa. "You'll kill yourself, you _will_.  Anybody might think now
+you had a right to give yourself a little comfort."
+
+"Don't be alarmed, Tantripp," said Dorothea, smiling.  "I have slept; I
+am not ill.  I shall be glad of a cup of coffee as soon as possible.
+And I want you to bring me my new dress; and most likely I shall want
+my new bonnet to-day."
+
+"They've lain there a month and more ready for you, madam, and most
+thankful I shall be to see you with a couple o' pounds' worth less of
+crape," said Tantripp, stooping to light the fire.  "There's a reason
+in mourning, as I've always said; and three folds at the bottom of your
+skirt and a plain quilling in your bonnet--and if ever anybody looked
+like an angel, it's you in a net quilling--is what's consistent for a
+second year.  At least, that's _my_ thinking," ended Tantripp, looking
+anxiously at the fire; "and if anybody was to marry me flattering
+himself I should wear those hijeous weepers two years for him, he'd be
+deceived by his own vanity, that's all."
+
+"The fire will do, my good Tan," said Dorothea, speaking as she used to
+do in the old Lausanne days, only with a very low voice; "get me the
+coffee."
+
+She folded herself in the large chair, and leaned her head against it
+in fatigued quiescence, while Tantripp went away wondering at this
+strange contrariness in her young mistress--that just the morning when
+she had more of a widow's face than ever, she should have asked for her
+lighter mourning which she had waived before.  Tantripp would never
+have found the clew to this mystery.  Dorothea wished to acknowledge
+that she had not the less an active life before her because she had
+buried a private joy; and the tradition that fresh garments belonged to
+all initiation, haunting her mind, made her grasp after even that
+slight outward help towards calm resolve.  For the resolve was not easy.
+
+Nevertheless at eleven o'clock she was walking towards Middlemarch,
+having made up her mind that she would make as quietly and unnoticeably
+as possible her second attempt to see and save Rosamond.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXI.
+
+    "Du Erde warst auch diese Nacht bestandig,
+     Und athmest neu erquickt zu meinen Fussen,
+     Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben,
+     Zum regst und ruhrst ein kraftiges Reschliessen
+     Zum hochsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.
+                                   --Faust: 2r Theil.
+
+
+When Dorothea was again at Lydgate's door speaking to Martha, he was in
+the room close by with the door ajar, preparing to go out.  He heard
+her voice, and immediately came to her.
+
+"Do you think that Mrs. Lydgate can receive me this morning?" she said,
+having reflected that it would be better to leave out all allusion to
+her previous visit.
+
+"I have no doubt she will," said Lydgate, suppressing his thought about
+Dorothea's looks, which were as much changed as Rosamond's, "if you
+will be kind enough to come in and let me tell her that you are here.
+She has not been very well since you were here yesterday, but she is
+better this morning, and I think it is very likely that she will be
+cheered by seeing you again."
+
+It was plain that Lydgate, as Dorothea had expected, knew nothing about
+the circumstances of her yesterday's visit; nay, he appeared to imagine
+that she had carried it out according to her intention.  She had
+prepared a little note asking Rosamond to see her, which she would have
+given to the servant if he had not been in the way, but now she was in
+much anxiety as to the result of his announcement.
+
+After leading her into the drawing-room, he paused to take a letter
+from his pocket and put it into her hands, saying, "I wrote this last
+night, and was going to carry it to Lowick in my ride.  When one is
+grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less
+unsatisfactory than speech--one does not at least _hear_ how inadequate
+the words are."
+
+Dorothea's face brightened.  "It is I who have most to thank for, since
+you have let me take that place.  You _have_ consented?" she said,
+suddenly doubting.
+
+"Yes, the check is going to Bulstrode to-day."
+
+He said no more, but went up-stairs to Rosamond, who had but lately
+finished dressing herself, and sat languidly wondering what she should
+do next, her habitual industry in small things, even in the days of her
+sadness, prompting her to begin some kind of occupation, which she
+dragged through slowly or paused in from lack of interest.  She looked
+ill, but had recovered her usual quietude of manner, and Lydgate had
+feared to disturb her by any questions.  He had told her of Dorothea's
+letter containing the check, and afterwards he had said, "Ladislaw is
+come, Rosy; he sat with me last night; I dare say he will be here again
+to-day. I thought he looked rather battered and depressed."  And
+Rosamond had made no reply.
+
+Now, when he came up, he said to her very gently, "Rosy, dear, Mrs.
+Casaubon is come to see you again; you would like to see her, would you
+not?"  That she colored and gave rather a startled movement did not
+surprise him after the agitation produced by the interview yesterday--a
+beneficent agitation, he thought, since it seemed to have made her turn
+to him again.
+
+Rosamond dared not say no.  She dared not with a tone of her voice
+touch the facts of yesterday.  Why had Mrs. Casaubon come again?  The
+answer was a blank which Rosamond could only fill up with dread, for
+Will Ladislaw's lacerating words had made every thought of Dorothea a
+fresh smart to her.  Nevertheless, in her new humiliating uncertainty
+she dared do nothing but comply.  She did not say yes, but she rose and
+let Lydgate put a light shawl over her shoulders, while he said, "I am
+going out immediately." Then something crossed her mind which prompted
+her to say, "Pray tell Martha not to bring any one else into the
+drawing-room." And Lydgate assented, thinking that he fully understood
+this wish.  He led her down to the drawing-room door, and then turned
+away, observing to himself that he was rather a blundering husband to
+be dependent for his wife's trust in him on the influence of another
+woman.
+
+Rosamond, wrapping her soft shawl around her as she walked towards
+Dorothea, was inwardly wrapping her soul in cold reserve.  Had Mrs.
+Casaubon come to say anything to her about Will?  If so, it was a
+liberty that Rosamond resented; and she prepared herself to meet every
+word with polite impassibility.  Will had bruised her pride too sorely
+for her to feel any compunction towards him and Dorothea: her own
+injury seemed much the greater.  Dorothea was not only the "preferred"
+woman, but had also a formidable advantage in being Lydgate's
+benefactor; and to poor Rosamond's pained confused vision it seemed
+that this Mrs. Casaubon--this woman who predominated in all things
+concerning her--must have come now with the sense of having the
+advantage, and with animosity prompting her to use it.  Indeed, not
+Rosamond only, but any one else, knowing the outer facts of the case,
+and not the simple inspiration on which Dorothea acted, might well have
+wondered why she came.
+
+Looking like the lovely ghost of herself, her graceful slimness wrapped
+in her soft white shawl, the rounded infantine mouth and cheek
+inevitably suggesting mildness and innocence, Rosamond paused at three
+yards' distance from her visitor and bowed.  But Dorothea, who had
+taken off her gloves, from an impulse which she could never resist when
+she wanted a sense of freedom, came forward, and with her face full of
+a sad yet sweet openness, put out her hand.  Rosamond could not avoid
+meeting her glance, could not avoid putting her small hand into
+Dorothea's, which clasped it with gentle motherliness; and immediately
+a doubt of her own prepossessions began to stir within her.  Rosamond's
+eye was quick for faces; she saw that Mrs. Casaubon's face looked pale
+and changed since yesterday, yet gentle, and like the firm softness of
+her hand.  But Dorothea had counted a little too much on her own
+strength: the clearness and intensity of her mental action this morning
+were the continuance of a nervous exaltation which made her frame as
+dangerously responsive as a bit of finest Venetian crystal; and in
+looking at Rosamond, she suddenly found her heart swelling, and was
+unable to speak--all her effort was required to keep back tears.  She
+succeeded in that, and the emotion only passed over her face like the
+spirit of a sob; but it added to Rosamond's impression that Mrs.
+Casaubon's state of mind must be something quite different from what
+she had imagined.
+
+So they sat down without a word of preface on the two chairs that
+happened to be nearest, and happened also to be close together; though
+Rosamond's notion when she first bowed was that she should stay a long
+way off from Mrs. Casaubon.  But she ceased thinking how anything would
+turn out--merely wondering what would come.  And Dorothea began to
+speak quite simply, gathering firmness as she went on.
+
+"I had an errand yesterday which I did not finish; that is why I am
+here again so soon.  You will not think me too troublesome when I tell
+you that I came to talk to you about the injustice that has been shown
+towards Mr. Lydgate.  It will cheer you--will it not?--to know a great
+deal about him, that he may not like to speak about himself just
+because it is in his own vindication and to his own honor.  You will
+like to know that your husband has warm friends, who have not left off
+believing in his high character?  You will let me speak of this without
+thinking that I take a liberty?"
+
+The cordial, pleading tones which seemed to flow with generous
+heedlessness above all the facts which had filled Rosamond's mind as
+grounds of obstruction and hatred between her and this woman, came as
+soothingly as a warm stream over her shrinking fears.  Of course Mrs.
+Casaubon had the facts in her mind, but she was not going to speak of
+anything connected with them.  That relief was too great for Rosamond
+to feel much else at the moment.  She answered prettily, in the new
+ease of her soul--
+
+"I know you have been very good.  I shall like to hear anything you
+will say to me about Tertius."
+
+"The day before yesterday," said Dorothea, "when I had asked him to
+come to Lowick to give me his opinion on the affairs of the Hospital,
+he told me everything about his conduct and feelings in this sad event
+which has made ignorant people cast suspicions on him.  The reason he
+told me was because I was very bold and asked him.  I believed that he
+had never acted dishonorably, and I begged him to tell me the history.
+He confessed to me that he had never told it before, not even to you,
+because he had a great dislike to say, 'I was not wrong,' as if that
+were proof, when there are guilty people who will say so.  The truth
+is, he knew nothing of this man Raffles, or that there were any bad
+secrets about him; and he thought that Mr. Bulstrode offered him the
+money because he repented, out of kindness, of having refused it
+before.  All his anxiety about his patient was to treat him rightly,
+and he was a little uncomfortable that the case did not end as he had
+expected; but he thought then and still thinks that there may have been
+no wrong in it on any one's part.  And I have told Mr. Farebrother, and
+Mr. Brooke, and Sir James Chettam: they all believe in your husband.
+That will cheer you, will it not?  That will give you courage?"
+
+Dorothea's face had become animated, and as it beamed on Rosamond very
+close to her, she felt something like bashful timidity before a
+superior, in the presence of this self-forgetful ardor.  She said, with
+blushing embarrassment, "Thank you: you are very kind."
+
+"And he felt that he had been so wrong not to pour out everything about
+this to you.  But you will forgive him.  It was because he feels so
+much more about your happiness than anything else--he feels his life
+bound into one with yours, and it hurts him more than anything, that
+his misfortunes must hurt you.  He could speak to me because I am an
+indifferent person.  And then I asked him if I might come to see you;
+because I felt so much for his trouble and yours.  That is why I came
+yesterday, and why I am come to-day. Trouble is so hard to bear, is it
+not?--  How can we live and think that any one has trouble--piercing
+trouble--and we could help them, and never try?"
+
+Dorothea, completely swayed by the feeling that she was uttering,
+forgot everything but that she was speaking from out the heart of her
+own trial to Rosamond's. The emotion had wrought itself more and more
+into her utterance, till the tones might have gone to one's very
+marrow, like a low cry from some suffering creature in the darkness.
+And she had unconsciously laid her hand again on the little hand that
+she had pressed before.
+
+Rosamond, with an overmastering pang, as if a wound within her had been
+probed, burst into hysterical crying as she had done the day before
+when she clung to her husband.  Poor Dorothea was feeling a great wave
+of her own sorrow returning over her--her thought being drawn to the
+possible share that Will Ladislaw might have in Rosamond's mental
+tumult.  She was beginning to fear that she should not be able to
+suppress herself enough to the end of this meeting, and while her hand
+was still resting on Rosamond's lap, though the hand underneath it was
+withdrawn, she was struggling against her own rising sobs.  She tried
+to master herself with the thought that this might be a turning-point
+in three lives--not in her own; no, there the irrevocable had
+happened, but--in those three lives which were touching hers with the
+solemn neighborhood of danger and distress.  The fragile creature who
+was crying close to her--there might still be time to rescue her from
+the misery of false incompatible bonds; and this moment was unlike any
+other: she and Rosamond could never be together again with the same
+thrilling consciousness of yesterday within them both.  She felt the
+relation between them to be peculiar enough to give her a peculiar
+influence, though she had no conception that the way in which her own
+feelings were involved was fully known to Mrs. Lydgate.
+
+It was a newer crisis in Rosamond's experience than even Dorothea could
+imagine: she was under the first great shock that had shattered her
+dream-world in which she had been easily confident of herself and
+critical of others; and this strange unexpected manifestation of
+feeling in a woman whom she had approached with a shrinking aversion
+and dread, as one who must necessarily have a jealous hatred towards
+her, made her soul totter all the more with a sense that she had been
+walking in an unknown world which had just broken in upon her.
+
+When Rosamond's convulsed throat was subsiding into calm, and she
+withdrew the handkerchief with which she had been hiding her face, her
+eyes met Dorothea's as helplessly as if they had been blue flowers.
+What was the use of thinking about behavior after this crying?  And
+Dorothea looked almost as childish, with the neglected trace of a
+silent tear.  Pride was broken down between these two.
+
+"We were talking about your husband," Dorothea said, with some
+timidity.  "I thought his looks were sadly changed with suffering the
+other day.  I had not seen him for many weeks before.  He said he had
+been feeling very lonely in his trial; but I think he would have borne
+it all better if he had been able to be quite open with you."
+
+"Tertius is so angry and impatient if I say anything," said Rosamond,
+imagining that he had been complaining of her to Dorothea.  "He ought
+not to wonder that I object to speak to him on painful subjects."
+
+"It was himself he blamed for not speaking," said Dorothea.  "What he
+said of you was, that he could not be happy in doing anything which
+made you unhappy--that his marriage was of course a bond which must
+affect his choice about everything; and for that reason he refused my
+proposal that he should keep his position at the Hospital, because that
+would bind him to stay in Middlemarch, and he would not undertake to do
+anything which would be painful to you.  He could say that to me,
+because he knows that I had much trial in my marriage, from my
+husband's illness, which hindered his plans and saddened him; and he
+knows that I have felt how hard it is to walk always in fear of hurting
+another who is tied to us."
+
+Dorothea waited a little; she had discerned a faint pleasure stealing
+over Rosamond's face.  But there was no answer, and she went on, with a
+gathering tremor, "Marriage is so unlike everything else.  There is
+something even awful in the nearness it brings.  Even if we loved some
+one else better than--than those we were married to, it would be no
+use"--poor Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her
+language brokenly--"I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving
+or getting any blessedness in that sort of love.  I know it may be very
+dear--but it murders our marriage--and then the marriage stays with us
+like a murder--and everything else is gone.  And then our husband--if
+he loved and trusted us, and we have not helped him, but made a curse
+in his life--"
+
+Her voice had sunk very low: there was a dread upon her of presuming
+too far, and of speaking as if she herself were perfection addressing
+error.  She was too much preoccupied with her own anxiety, to be aware
+that Rosamond was trembling too; and filled with the need to express
+pitying fellowship rather than rebuke, she put her hands on Rosamond's,
+and said with more agitated rapidity,--"I know, I know that the feeling
+may be very dear--it has taken hold of us unawares--it is so hard, it
+may seem like death to part with it--and we are weak--I am weak--"
+
+The waves of her own sorrow, from out of which she was struggling to
+save another, rushed over Dorothea with conquering force.  She stopped
+in speechless agitation, not crying, but feeling as if she were being
+inwardly grappled.  Her face had become of a deathlier paleness, her
+lips trembled, and she pressed her hands helplessly on the hands that
+lay under them.
+
+Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own--hurried
+along in a new movement which gave all things some new, awful,
+undefined aspect--could find no words, but involuntarily she put her
+lips to Dorothea's forehead which was very near her, and then for a
+minute the two women clasped each other as if they had been in a
+shipwreck.
+
+"You are thinking what is not true," said Rosamond, in an eager
+half-whisper, while she was still feeling Dorothea's arms round
+her--urged by a mysterious necessity to free herself from something
+that oppressed her as if it were blood guiltiness.
+
+They moved apart, looking at each other.
+
+"When you came in yesterday--it was not as you thought," said Rosamond
+in the same tone.
+
+There was a movement of surprised attention in Dorothea.  She expected
+a vindication of Rosamond herself.
+
+"He was telling me how he loved another woman, that I might know he
+could never love me," said Rosamond, getting more and more hurried as
+she went on.  "And now I think he hates me because--because you
+mistook him yesterday.  He says it is through me that you will think
+ill of him--think that he is a false person.  But it shall not be
+through me.  He has never had any love for me--I know he has not--he
+has always thought slightly of me.  He said yesterday that no other
+woman existed for him beside you.  The blame of what happened is
+entirely mine.  He said he could never explain to you--because of me.
+He said you could never think well of him again.  But now I have told
+you, and he cannot reproach me any more."
+
+Rosamond had delivered her soul under impulses which she had not known
+before.  She had begun her confession under the subduing influence of
+Dorothea's emotion; and as she went on she had gathered the sense that
+she was repelling Will's reproaches, which were still like a
+knife-wound within her.
+
+The revulsion of feeling in Dorothea was too strong to be called joy.
+It was a tumult in which the terrible strain of the night and morning
+made a resistant pain:--she could only perceive that this would be joy
+when she had recovered her power of feeling it.  Her immediate
+consciousness was one of immense sympathy without check; she cared for
+Rosamond without struggle now, and responded earnestly to her last
+words--
+
+"No, he cannot reproach you any more."
+
+With her usual tendency to over-estimate the good in others, she felt a
+great outgoing of her heart towards Rosamond, for the generous effort
+which had redeemed her from suffering, not counting that the effort was
+a reflex of her own energy.  After they had been silent a little, she
+said--
+
+"You are not sorry that I came this morning?"
+
+"No, you have been very good to me," said Rosamond.  "I did not think
+that you would be so good.  I was very unhappy.  I am not happy now.
+Everything is so sad."
+
+"But better days will come.  Your husband will be rightly valued.  And
+he depends on you for comfort.  He loves you best.  The worst loss
+would be to lose that--and you have not lost it," said Dorothea.
+
+She tried to thrust away the too overpowering thought of her own
+relief, lest she should fail to win some sign that Rosamond's affection
+was yearning back towards her husband.
+
+"Tertius did not find fault with me, then?" said Rosamond,
+understanding now that Lydgate might have said anything to Mrs.
+Casaubon, and that she certainly was different from other women.
+Perhaps there was a faint taste of jealousy in the question.  A smile
+began to play over Dorothea's face as she said--
+
+"No, indeed!  How could you imagine it?"  But here the door opened, and
+Lydgate entered.
+
+"I am come back in my quality of doctor," he said.  "After I went away,
+I was haunted by two pale faces: Mrs. Casaubon looked as much in need
+of care as you, Rosy.  And I thought that I had not done my duty in
+leaving you together; so when I had been to Coleman's I came home
+again.  I noticed that you were walking, Mrs. Casaubon, and the sky has
+changed--I think we may have rain.  May I send some one to order your
+carriage to come for you?"
+
+"Oh, no!  I am strong: I need the walk," said Dorothea, rising with
+animation in her face.  "Mrs. Lydgate and I have chatted a great deal,
+and it is time for me to go.  I have always been accused of being
+immoderate and saying too much."
+
+She put out her hand to Rosamond, and they said an earnest, quiet
+good-by without kiss or other show of effusion: there had been between
+them too much serious emotion for them to use the signs of it
+superficially.
+
+As Lydgate took her to the door she said nothing of Rosamond, but told
+him of Mr. Farebrother and the other friends who had listened with
+belief to his story.
+
+When he came back to Rosamond, she had already thrown herself on the
+sofa, in resigned fatigue.
+
+"Well, Rosy," he said, standing over her, and touching her hair, "what
+do you think of Mrs. Casaubon now you have seen so much of her?"
+
+"I think she must be better than any one," said Rosamond, "and she is
+very beautiful.  If you go to talk to her so often, you will be more
+discontented with me than ever!"
+
+Lydgate laughed at the "so often."  "But has she made you any less
+discontented with me?"
+
+"I think she has," said Rosamond, looking up in his face.  "How heavy
+your eyes are, Tertius--and do push your hair back." He lifted up his
+large white hand to obey her, and felt thankful for this little mark of
+interest in him.  Poor Rosamond's vagrant fancy had come back terribly
+scourged--meek enough to nestle under the old despised shelter.  And
+the shelter was still there: Lydgate had accepted his narrowed lot with
+sad resignation.  He had chosen this fragile creature, and had taken
+the burthen of her life upon his arms.  He must walk as he could,
+carrying that burthen pitifully.
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXII.
+
+    "My grief lies onward and my joy behind."
+                                  --SHAKESPEARE: Sonnets.
+
+
+Exiles notoriously feed much on hopes, and are unlikely to stay in
+banishment unless they are obliged.  When Will Ladislaw exiled himself
+from Middlemarch he had placed no stronger obstacle to his return than
+his own resolve, which was by no means an iron barrier, but simply a
+state of mind liable to melt into a minuet with other states of mind,
+and to find itself bowing, smiling, and giving place with polite
+facility.  As the months went on, it had seemed more and more difficult
+to him to say why he should not run down to Middlemarch--merely for the
+sake of hearing something about Dorothea; and if on such a flying visit
+he should chance by some strange coincidence to meet with her, there
+was no reason for him to be ashamed of having taken an innocent journey
+which he had beforehand supposed that he should not take.  Since he was
+hopelessly divided from her, he might surely venture into her
+neighborhood; and as to the suspicious friends who kept a dragon watch
+over her--their opinions seemed less and less important with time and
+change of air.
+
+And there had come a reason quite irrespective of Dorothea, which
+seemed to make a journey to Middlemarch a sort of philanthropic duty.
+Will had given a disinterested attention to an intended settlement on a
+new plan in the Far West, and the need for funds in order to carry out
+a good design had set him on debating with himself whether it would not
+be a laudable use to make of his claim on Bulstrode, to urge the
+application of that money which had been offered to himself as a means
+of carrying out a scheme likely to be largely beneficial.  The question
+seemed a very dubious one to Will, and his repugnance to again entering
+into any relation with the banker might have made him dismiss it
+quickly, if there had not arisen in his imagination the probability
+that his judgment might be more safely determined by a visit to
+Middlemarch.
+
+That was the object which Will stated to himself as a reason for coming
+down.  He had meant to confide in Lydgate, and discuss the money
+question with him, and he had meant to amuse himself for the few
+evenings of his stay by having a great deal of music and badinage with
+fair Rosamond, without neglecting his friends at Lowick Parsonage:--if
+the Parsonage was close to the Manor, that was no fault of his.  He had
+neglected the Farebrothers before his departure, from a proud
+resistance to the possible accusation of indirectly seeking interviews
+with Dorothea; but hunger tames us, and Will had become very hungry for
+the vision of a certain form and the sound of a certain voice.
+Nothing, had done instead--not the opera, or the converse of zealous
+politicians, or the flattering reception (in dim corners) of his new
+hand in leading articles.
+
+Thus he had come down, foreseeing with confidence how almost everything
+would be in his familiar little world; fearing, indeed, that there
+would be no surprises in his visit.  But he had found that humdrum
+world in a terribly dynamic condition, in which even badinage and
+lyrism had turned explosive; and the first day of this visit had become
+the most fatal epoch of his life.  The next morning he felt so harassed
+with the nightmare of consequences--he dreaded so much the immediate
+issues before him--that seeing while he breakfasted the arrival of the
+Riverston coach, he went out hurriedly and took his place on it, that
+he might be relieved, at least for a day, from the necessity of doing
+or saying anything in Middlemarch.  Will Ladislaw was in one of those
+tangled crises which are commoner in experience than one might imagine,
+from the shallow absoluteness of men's judgments.  He had found
+Lydgate, for whom he had the sincerest respect, under circumstances
+which claimed his thorough and frankly declared sympathy; and the
+reason why, in spite of that claim, it would have been better for Will
+to have avoided all further intimacy, or even contact, with Lydgate,
+was precisely of the kind to make such a course appear impossible.  To
+a creature of Will's susceptible temperament--without any neutral
+region of indifference in his nature, ready to turn everything that
+befell him into the collisions of a passionate drama--the revelation
+that Rosamond had made her happiness in any way dependent on him was a
+difficulty which his outburst of rage towards her had immeasurably
+increased for him.  He hated his own cruelty, and yet he dreaded to
+show the fulness of his relenting: he must go to her again; the
+friendship could not be put to a sudden end; and her unhappiness was a
+power which he dreaded.  And all the while there was no more foretaste
+of enjoyment in the life before him than if his limbs had been lopped
+off and he was making his fresh start on crutches.  In the night he had
+debated whether he should not get on the coach, not for Riverston, but
+for London, leaving a note to Lydgate which would give a makeshift
+reason for his retreat.  But there were strong cords pulling him back
+from that abrupt departure: the blight on his happiness in thinking of
+Dorothea, the crushing of that chief hope which had remained in spite
+of the acknowledged necessity for renunciation, was too fresh a misery
+for him to resign himself to it and go straightway into a distance
+which was also despair.
+
+Thus he did nothing more decided than taking the Riverston coach.  He
+came back again by it while it was still daylight, having made up his
+mind that he must go to Lydgate's that evening.  The Rubicon, we know,
+was a very insignificant stream to look at; its significance lay
+entirely in certain invisible conditions.  Will felt as if he were
+forced to cross his small boundary ditch, and what he saw beyond it was
+not empire, but discontented subjection.
+
+But it is given to us sometimes even in our every-day life to witness
+the saving influence of a noble nature, the divine efficacy of rescue
+that may lie in a self-subduing act of fellowship.  If Dorothea, after
+her night's anguish, had not taken that walk to Rosamond--why, she
+perhaps would have been a woman who gained a higher character for
+discretion, but it would certainly not have been as well for those
+three who were on one hearth in Lydgate's house at half-past seven that
+evening.
+
+Rosamond had been prepared for Will's visit, and she received him with
+a languid coldness which Lydgate accounted for by her nervous
+exhaustion, of which he could not suppose that it had any relation to
+Will.  And when she sat in silence bending over a bit of work, he
+innocently apologized for her in an indirect way by begging her to lean
+backward and rest.  Will was miserable in the necessity for playing the
+part of a friend who was making his first appearance and greeting to
+Rosamond, while his thoughts were busy about her feeling since that
+scene of yesterday, which seemed still inexorably to enclose them both,
+like the painful vision of a double madness.  It happened that nothing
+called Lydgate out of the room; but when Rosamond poured out the tea,
+and Will came near to fetch it, she placed a tiny bit of folded paper
+in his saucer.  He saw it and secured it quickly, but as he went back
+to his inn he had no eagerness to unfold the paper.  What Rosamond had
+written to him would probably deepen the painful impressions of the
+evening.  Still, he opened and read it by his bed-candle. There were
+only these few words in her neatly flowing hand:--
+
+"I have told Mrs. Casaubon.  She is not under any mistake about you.  I
+told her because she came to see me and was very kind.  You will have
+nothing to reproach me with now.  I shall not have made any difference
+to you."
+
+The effect of these words was not quite all gladness.  As Will dwelt on
+them with excited imagination, he felt his cheeks and ears burning at
+the thought of what had occurred between Dorothea and Rosamond--at the
+uncertainty how far Dorothea might still feel her dignity wounded in
+having an explanation of his conduct offered to her.  There might still
+remain in her mind a changed association with him which made an
+irremediable difference--a lasting flaw.  With active fancy he wrought
+himself into a state of doubt little more easy than that of the man who
+has escaped from wreck by night and stands on unknown ground in the
+darkness.  Until that wretched yesterday--except the moment of
+vexation long ago in the very same room and in the very same
+presence--all their vision, all their thought of each other, had been
+as in a world apart, where the sunshine fell on tall white lilies,
+where no evil lurked, and no other soul entered.  But now--would
+Dorothea meet him in that world again?
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXIII.
+
+    "And now good-morrow to our waking souls
+     Which watch not one another out of fear;
+     For love all love of other sights controls,
+     And makes one little room, an everywhere."
+                                       --DR. DONNE.
+
+
+On the second morning after Dorothea's visit to Rosamond, she had had
+two nights of sound sleep, and had not only lost all traces of fatigue,
+but felt as if she had a great deal of superfluous strength--that is
+to say, more strength than she could manage to concentrate on any
+occupation.  The day before, she had taken long walks outside the
+grounds, and had paid two visits to the Parsonage; but she never in her
+life told any one the reason why she spent her time in that fruitless
+manner, and this morning she was rather angry with herself for her
+childish restlessness.  To-day was to be spent quite differently.  What
+was there to be done in the village?  Oh dear! nothing.  Everybody was
+well and had flannel; nobody's pig had died; and it was Saturday
+morning, when there was a general scrubbing of doors and door-stones,
+and when it was useless to go into the school.  But there were various
+subjects that Dorothea was trying to get clear upon, and she resolved
+to throw herself energetically into the gravest of all.  She sat down
+in the library before her particular little heap of books on political
+economy and kindred matters, out of which she was trying to get light
+as to the best way of spending money so as not to injure one's
+neighbors, or--what comes to the same thing--so as to do them the most
+good.  Here was a weighty subject which, if she could but lay hold of
+it, would certainly keep her mind steady.  Unhappily her mind slipped
+off it for a whole hour; and at the end she found herself reading
+sentences twice over with an intense consciousness of many things, but
+not of any one thing contained in the text.  This was hopeless.  Should
+she order the carriage and drive to Tipton?  No; for some reason or
+other she preferred staying at Lowick.  But her vagrant mind must be
+reduced to order: there was an art in self-discipline; and she walked
+round and round the brown library considering by what sort of manoeuvre
+she could arrest her wandering thoughts.  Perhaps a mere task was the
+best means--something to which she must go doggedly.  Was there not the
+geography of Asia Minor, in which her slackness had often been rebuked
+by Mr. Casaubon?  She went to the cabinet of maps and unrolled one:
+this morning she might make herself finally sure that Paphlagonia was
+not on the Levantine coast, and fix her total darkness about the
+Chalybes firmly on the shores of the Euxine.  A map was a fine thing to
+study when you were disposed to think of something else, being made up
+of names that would turn into a chime if you went back upon them.
+Dorothea set earnestly to work, bending close to her map, and uttering
+the names in an audible, subdued tone, which often got into a chime.
+She looked amusingly girlish after all her deep experience--nodding
+her head and marking the names off on her fingers, with a little
+pursing of her lip, and now and then breaking off to put her hands on
+each side of her face and say, "Oh dear!  oh dear!"
+
+There was no reason why this should end any more than a merry-go-round;
+but it was at last interrupted by the opening of the door and the
+announcement of Miss Noble.
+
+The little old lady, whose bonnet hardly reached Dorothea's shoulder,
+was warmly welcomed, but while her hand was being pressed she made many
+of her beaver-like noises, as if she had something difficult to say.
+
+"Do sit down," said Dorothea, rolling a chair forward.  "Am I wanted
+for anything?  I shall be so glad if I can do anything."
+
+"I will not stay," said Miss Noble, putting her hand into her small
+basket, and holding some article inside it nervously; "I have left a
+friend in the churchyard."  She lapsed into her inarticulate sounds,
+and unconsciously drew forth the article which she was fingering.  It
+was the tortoise-shell lozenge-box, and Dorothea felt the color
+mounting to her cheeks.
+
+"Mr. Ladislaw," continued the timid little woman.  "He fears he has
+offended you, and has begged me to ask if you will see him for a few
+minutes."
+
+Dorothea did not answer on the instant: it was crossing her mind that
+she could not receive him in this library, where her husband's
+prohibition seemed to dwell.  She looked towards the window.  Could she
+go out and meet him in the grounds?  The sky was heavy, and the trees
+had begun to shiver as at a coming storm.  Besides, she shrank from
+going out to him.
+
+"Do see him, Mrs. Casaubon," said Miss Noble, pathetically; "else I
+must go back and say No, and that will hurt him."
+
+"Yes, I will see him," said Dorothea.  "Pray tell him to come."
+
+What else was there to be done?  There was nothing that she longed for
+at that moment except to see Will: the possibility of seeing him had
+thrust itself insistently between her and every other object; and yet
+she had a throbbing excitement like an alarm upon her--a sense that
+she was doing something daringly defiant for his sake.
+
+When the little lady had trotted away on her mission, Dorothea stood in
+the middle of the library with her hands falling clasped before her,
+making no attempt to compose herself in an attitude of dignified
+unconsciousness.  What she was least conscious of just then was her own
+body: she was thinking of what was likely to be in Will's mind, and of
+the hard feelings that others had had about him.  How could any duty
+bind her to hardness?  Resistance to unjust dispraise had mingled with
+her feeling for him from the very first, and now in the rebound of her
+heart after her anguish the resistance was stronger than ever.  "If I
+love him too much it is because he has been used so ill:"--there was a
+voice within her saying this to some imagined audience in the library,
+when the door was opened, and she saw Will before her.
+
+She did not move, and he came towards her with more doubt and timidity
+in his face than she had ever seen before.  He was in a state of
+uncertainty which made him afraid lest some look or word of his should
+condemn him to a new distance from her; and Dorothea was afraid of her
+_own_ emotion.  She looked as if there were a spell upon her, keeping
+her motionless and hindering her from unclasping her hands, while some
+intense, grave yearning was imprisoned within her eyes.  Seeing that
+she did not put out her hand as usual, Will paused a yard from her and
+said with embarrassment, "I am so grateful to you for seeing me."
+
+"I wanted to see you," said Dorothea, having no other words at command.
+It did not occur to her to sit down, and Will did not give a cheerful
+interpretation to this queenly way of receiving him; but he went on to
+say what he had made up his mind to say.
+
+"I fear you think me foolish and perhaps wrong for coming back so soon.
+I have been punished for my impatience.  You know--every one knows
+now--a painful story about my parentage.  I knew of it before I went
+away, and I always meant to tell you of it if--if we ever met again."
+
+There was a slight movement in Dorothea, and she unclasped her hands,
+but immediately folded them over each other.
+
+"But the affair is matter of gossip now," Will continued.  "I wished
+you to know that something connected with it--something which happened
+before I went away, helped to bring me down here again.  At least I
+thought it excused my coming.  It was the idea of getting Bulstrode to
+apply some money to a public purpose--some money which he had thought
+of giving me.  Perhaps it is rather to Bulstrode's credit that he
+privately offered me compensation for an old injury: he offered to give
+me a good income to make amends; but I suppose you know the
+disagreeable story?"
+
+Will looked doubtfully at Dorothea, but his manner was gathering some
+of the defiant courage with which he always thought of this fact in his
+destiny.  He added, "You know that it must be altogether painful to me."
+
+"Yes--yes--I know," said Dorothea, hastily.
+
+"I did not choose to accept an income from such a source.  I was sure
+that you would not think well of me if I did so," said Will.  Why
+should he mind saying anything of that sort to her now?  She knew that
+he had avowed his love for her.  "I felt that"--he broke off,
+nevertheless.
+
+"You acted as I should have expected you to act," said Dorothea, her
+face brightening and her head becoming a little more erect on its
+beautiful stem.
+
+"I did not believe that you would let any circumstance of my birth
+create a prejudice in you against me, though it was sure to do so in
+others," said Will, shaking his head backward in his old way, and
+looking with a grave appeal into her eyes.
+
+"If it were a new hardship it would be a new reason for me to cling to
+you," said Dorothea, fervidly.  "Nothing could have changed me but--"
+her heart was swelling, and it was difficult to go on; she made a great
+effort over herself to say in a low tremulous voice, "but thinking that
+you were different--not so good as I had believed you to be."
+
+"You are sure to believe me better than I am in everything but one,"
+said Will, giving way to his own feeling in the evidence of hers.  "I
+mean, in my truth to you.  When I thought you doubted of that, I didn't
+care about anything that was left.  I thought it was all over with me,
+and there was nothing to try for--only things to endure."
+
+"I don't doubt you any longer," said Dorothea, putting out her hand; a
+vague fear for him impelling her unutterable affection.
+
+He took her hand and raised it to his lips with something like a sob.
+But he stood with his hat and gloves in the other hand, and might have
+done for the portrait of a Royalist.  Still it was difficult to loose
+the hand, and Dorothea, withdrawing it in a confusion that distressed
+her, looked and moved away.
+
+"See how dark the clouds have become, and how the trees are tossed,"
+she said, walking towards the window, yet speaking and moving with only
+a dim sense of what she was doing.
+
+Will followed her at a little distance, and leaned against the tall
+back of a leather chair, on which he ventured now to lay his hat and
+gloves, and free himself from the intolerable durance of formality to
+which he had been for the first time condemned in Dorothea's presence.
+It must be confessed that he felt very happy at that moment leaning on
+the chair.  He was not much afraid of anything that she might feel now.
+
+They stood silent, not looking at each other, but looking at the
+evergreens which were being tossed, and were showing the pale underside
+of their leaves against the blackening sky.  Will never enjoyed the
+prospect of a storm so much: it delivered him from the necessity of
+going away.  Leaves and little branches were hurled about, and the
+thunder was getting nearer.  The light was more and more sombre, but
+there came a flash of lightning which made them start and look at each
+other, and then smile.  Dorothea began to say what she had been
+thinking of.
+
+"That was a wrong thing for you to say, that you would have had nothing
+to try for.  If we had lost our own chief good, other people's good
+would remain, and that is worth trying for.  Some can be happy.  I
+seemed to see that more clearly than ever, when I was the most
+wretched.  I can hardly think how I could have borne the trouble, if
+that feeling had not come to me to make strength."
+
+"You have never felt the sort of misery I felt," said Will; "the misery
+of knowing that you must despise me."
+
+"But I have felt worse--it was worse to think ill--" Dorothea had begun
+impetuously, but broke off.
+
+Will colored.  He had the sense that whatever she said was uttered in
+the vision of a fatality that kept them apart.  He was silent a moment,
+and then said passionately--
+
+"We may at least have the comfort of speaking to each other without
+disguise.  Since I must go away--since we must always be divided--you
+may think of me as one on the brink of the grave."
+
+While he was speaking there came a vivid flash of lightning which lit
+each of them up for the other--and the light seemed to be the terror of
+a hopeless love.  Dorothea darted instantaneously from the window; Will
+followed her, seizing her hand with a spasmodic movement; and so they
+stood, with their hands clasped, like two children, looking out on the
+storm, while the thunder gave a tremendous crack and roll above them,
+and the rain began to pour down.  Then they turned their faces towards
+each other, with the memory of his last words in them, and they did not
+loose each other's hands.
+
+"There is no hope for me," said Will.  "Even if you loved me as well as
+I love you--even if I were everything to you--I shall most likely
+always be very poor: on a sober calculation, one can count on nothing
+but a creeping lot.  It is impossible for us ever to belong to each
+other.  It is perhaps base of me to have asked for a word from you.  I
+meant to go away into silence, but I have not been able to do what I
+meant."
+
+"Don't be sorry," said Dorothea, in her clear tender tones.  "I would
+rather share all the trouble of our parting."
+
+Her lips trembled, and so did his.  It was never known which lips were
+the first to move towards the other lips; but they kissed tremblingly,
+and then they moved apart.
+
+The rain was dashing against the window-panes as if an angry spirit
+were within it, and behind it was the great swoop of the wind; it was
+one of those moments in which both the busy and the idle pause with a
+certain awe.
+
+Dorothea sat down on the seat nearest to her, a long low ottoman in the
+middle of the room, and with her hands folded over each other on her
+lap, looked at the drear outer world.  Will stood still an instant
+looking at her, then seated himself beside her, and laid his hand on
+hers, which turned itself upward to be clasped.  They sat in that way
+without looking at each other, until the rain abated and began to fall
+in stillness.  Each had been full of thoughts which neither of them
+could begin to utter.
+
+But when the rain was quiet, Dorothea turned to look at Will.  With
+passionate exclamation, as if some torture screw were threatening him,
+he started up and said, "It is impossible!"
+
+He went and leaned on the back of the chair again, and seemed to be
+battling with his own anger, while she looked towards him sadly.
+
+"It is as fatal as a murder or any other horror that divides people,"
+he burst out again; "it is more intolerable--to have our life maimed by
+petty accidents."
+
+"No--don't say that--your life need not be maimed," said Dorothea,
+gently.
+
+"Yes, it must," said Will, angrily.  "It is cruel of you to speak in
+that way--as if there were any comfort.  You may see beyond the misery
+of it, but I don't. It is unkind--it is throwing back my love for you
+as if it were a trifle, to speak in that way in the face of the fact.
+We can never be married."
+
+"Some time--we might," said Dorothea, in a trembling voice.
+
+"When?" said Will, bitterly.  "What is the use of counting on any
+success of mine?  It is a mere toss up whether I shall ever do more
+than keep myself decently, unless I choose to sell myself as a mere pen
+and a mouthpiece.  I can see that clearly enough.  I could not offer
+myself to any woman, even if she had no luxuries to renounce."
+
+There was silence.  Dorothea's heart was full of something that she
+wanted to say, and yet the words were too difficult.  She was wholly
+possessed by them: at that moment debate was mute within her.  And it
+was very hard that she could not say what she wanted to say.  Will was
+looking out of the window angrily.  If he would have looked at her and
+not gone away from her side, she thought everything would have been
+easier.  At last he turned, still resting against the chair, and
+stretching his hand automatically towards his hat, said with a sort of
+exasperation, "Good-by."
+
+"Oh, I cannot bear it--my heart will break," said Dorothea, starting
+from her seat, the flood of her young passion bearing down all the
+obstructions which had kept her silent--the great tears rising and
+falling in an instant: "I don't mind about poverty--I hate my wealth."
+
+In an instant Will was close to her and had his arms round her, but she
+drew her head back and held his away gently that she might go on
+speaking, her large tear-filled eyes looking at his very simply, while
+she said in a sobbing childlike way, "We could live quite well on my
+own fortune--it is too much--seven hundred a-year--I want so little--no
+new clothes--and I will learn what everything costs."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXIV.
+
+    "Though it be songe of old and yonge,
+         That I sholde be to blame,
+     Theyrs be the charge, that spoke so large
+         In hurtynge of my name."
+                           --The Not-Browne Mayde.
+
+
+It was just after the Lords had thrown out the Reform Bill: that
+explains how Mr. Cadwallader came to be walking on the slope of the
+lawn near the great conservatory at Freshitt Hall, holding the "Times"
+in his hands behind him, while he talked with a trout-fisher's
+dispassionateness about the prospects of the country to Sir James
+Chettam.  Mrs. Cadwallader, the Dowager Lady Chettam, and Celia were
+sometimes seated on garden-chairs, sometimes walking to meet little
+Arthur, who was being drawn in his chariot, and, as became the
+infantine Bouddha, was sheltered by his sacred umbrella with handsome
+silken fringe.
+
+The ladies also talked politics, though more fitfully.  Mrs.
+Cadwallader was strong on the intended creation of peers: she had it
+for certain from her cousin that Truberry had gone over to the other
+side entirely at the instigation of his wife, who had scented peerages
+in the air from the very first introduction of the Reform question, and
+would sign her soul away to take precedence of her younger sister, who
+had married a baronet.  Lady Chettam thought that such conduct was very
+reprehensible, and remembered that Mrs. Truberry's mother was a Miss
+Walsingham of Melspring.  Celia confessed it was nicer to be "Lady"
+than "Mrs.," and that Dodo never minded about precedence if she could
+have her own way.  Mrs. Cadwallader held that it was a poor
+satisfaction to take precedence when everybody about you knew that you
+had not a drop of good blood in your veins; and Celia again, stopping
+to look at Arthur, said, "It would be very nice, though, if he were a
+Viscount--and his lordship's little tooth coming through!  He might
+have been, if James had been an Earl."
+
+"My dear Celia," said the Dowager, "James's title is worth far more
+than any new earldom.  I never wished his father to be anything else
+than Sir James."
+
+"Oh, I only meant about Arthur's little tooth," said Celia,
+comfortably.  "But see, here is my uncle coming."
+
+She tripped off to meet her uncle, while Sir James and Mr. Cadwallader
+came forward to make one group with the ladies.  Celia had slipped her
+arm through her uncle's, and he patted her hand with a rather
+melancholy "Well, my dear!"  As they approached, it was evident that
+Mr. Brooke was looking dejected, but this was fully accounted for by
+the state of politics; and as he was shaking hands all round without
+more greeting than a "Well, you're all here, you know," the Rector
+said, laughingly--
+
+"Don't take the throwing out of the Bill so much to heart, Brooke;
+you've got all the riff-raff of the country on your side."
+
+"The Bill, eh? ah!" said Mr. Brooke, with a mild distractedness of
+manner.  "Thrown out, you know, eh?  The Lords are going too far,
+though.  They'll have to pull up.  Sad news, you know.  I mean, here at
+home--sad news.  But you must not blame me, Chettam."
+
+"What is the matter?" said Sir James.  "Not another gamekeeper shot, I
+hope?  It's what I should expect, when a fellow like Trapping Bass is
+let off so easily."
+
+"Gamekeeper?  No. Let us go in; I can tell you all in the house, you
+know," said Mr. Brooke, nodding at the Cadwalladers, to show that he
+included them in his confidence.  "As to poachers like Trapping Bass,
+you know, Chettam," he continued, as they were entering, "when you are
+a magistrate, you'll not find it so easy to commit.  Severity is all
+very well, but it's a great deal easier when you've got somebody to do
+it for you.  You have a soft place in your heart yourself, you
+know--you're not a Draco, a Jeffreys, that sort of thing."
+
+Mr. Brooke was evidently in a state of nervous perturbation.  When he
+had something painful to tell, it was usually his way to introduce it
+among a number of disjointed particulars, as if it were a medicine that
+would get a milder flavor by mixing.  He continued his chat with Sir
+James about the poachers until they were all seated, and Mrs.
+Cadwallader, impatient of this drivelling, said--
+
+"I'm dying to know the sad news.  The gamekeeper is not shot: that is
+settled.  What is it, then?"
+
+"Well, it's a very trying thing, you know," said Mr. Brooke.  "I'm glad
+you and the Rector are here; it's a family matter--but you will help
+us all to bear it, Cadwallader.  I've got to break it to you, my dear."
+Here Mr. Brooke looked at Celia--"You've no notion what it is, you
+know.  And, Chettam, it will annoy you uncommonly--but, you see, you
+have not been able to hinder it, any more than I have.  There's
+something singular in things: they come round, you know."
+
+"It must be about Dodo," said Celia, who had been used to think of her
+sister as the dangerous part of the family machinery.  She had seated
+herself on a low stool against her husband's knee.
+
+"For God's sake let us hear what it is!" said Sir James.
+
+"Well, you know, Chettam, I couldn't help Casaubon's will: it was a
+sort of will to make things worse."
+
+"Exactly," said Sir James, hastily.  "But _what_ is worse?"
+
+"Dorothea is going to be married again, you know," said Mr. Brooke,
+nodding towards Celia, who immediately looked up at her husband with a
+frightened glance, and put her hand on his knee.  Sir James was almost
+white with anger, but he did not speak.
+
+"Merciful heaven!" said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "Not to _young_ Ladislaw?"
+
+Mr. Brooke nodded, saying, "Yes; to Ladislaw," and then fell into a
+prudential silence.
+
+"You see, Humphrey!" said Mrs. Cadwallader, waving her arm towards her
+husband.  "Another time you will admit that I have some foresight; or
+rather you will contradict me and be just as blind as ever.  _You_
+supposed that the young gentleman was gone out of the country."
+
+"So he might be, and yet come back," said the Rector, quietly
+
+"When did you learn this?" said Sir James, not liking to hear any one
+else speak, though finding it difficult to speak himself.
+
+"Yesterday," said Mr. Brooke, meekly.  "I went to Lowick.  Dorothea
+sent for me, you know.  It had come about quite suddenly--neither of
+them had any idea two days ago--not any idea, you know.  There's
+something singular in things.  But Dorothea is quite determined--it is
+no use opposing.  I put it strongly to her.  I did my duty, Chettam.
+But she can act as she likes, you know."
+
+"It would have been better if I had called him out and shot him a year
+ago," said Sir James, not from bloody-mindedness, but because he needed
+something strong to say.
+
+"Really, James, that would have been very disagreeable," said Celia.
+
+"Be reasonable, Chettam.  Look at the affair more quietly," said Mr.
+Cadwallader, sorry to see his good-natured friend so overmastered by
+anger.
+
+"That is not so very easy for a man of any dignity--with any sense of
+right--when the affair happens to be in his own family," said Sir
+James, still in his white indignation.  "It is perfectly scandalous.
+If Ladislaw had had a spark of honor he would have gone out of the
+country at once, and never shown his face in it again.  However, I am
+not surprised.  The day after Casaubon's funeral I said what ought to
+be done.  But I was not listened to."
+
+"You wanted what was impossible, you know, Chettam," said Mr. Brooke.
+"You wanted him shipped off.  I told you Ladislaw was not to be done as
+we liked with: he had his ideas.  He was a remarkable fellow--I always
+said he was a remarkable fellow."
+
+"Yes," said Sir James, unable to repress a retort, "it is rather a pity
+you formed that high opinion of him.  We are indebted to that for his
+being lodged in this neighborhood.  We are indebted to that for seeing
+a woman like Dorothea degrading herself by marrying him." Sir James
+made little stoppages between his clauses, the words not coming easily.
+"A man so marked out by her husband's will, that delicacy ought to have
+forbidden her from seeing him again--who takes her out of her proper
+rank--into poverty--has the meanness to accept such a sacrifice--has
+always had an objectionable position--a bad origin--and, I _believe_,
+is a man of little principle and light character.  That is my opinion."
+Sir James ended emphatically, turning aside and crossing his leg.
+
+"I pointed everything out to her," said Mr. Brooke, apologetically--"I
+mean the poverty, and abandoning her position.  I said, 'My dear, you
+don't know what it is to live on seven hundred a-year, and have no
+carriage, and that kind of thing, and go amongst people who don't know
+who you are.'  I put it strongly to her.  But I advise you to talk to
+Dorothea herself.  The fact is, she has a dislike to Casaubon's
+property.  You will hear what she says, you know."
+
+"No--excuse me--I shall not," said Sir James, with more coolness.  "I
+cannot bear to see her again; it is too painful.  It hurts me too much
+that a woman like Dorothea should have done what is wrong."
+
+"Be just, Chettam," said the easy, large-lipped Rector, who objected to
+all this unnecessary discomfort.  "Mrs. Casaubon may be acting
+imprudently: she is giving up a fortune for the sake of a man, and we
+men have so poor an opinion of each other that we can hardly call a
+woman wise who does that.  But I think you should not condemn it as a
+wrong action, in the strict sense of the word."
+
+"Yes, I do," answered Sir James.  "I think that Dorothea commits a
+wrong action in marrying Ladislaw."
+
+"My dear fellow, we are rather apt to consider an act wrong because it
+is unpleasant to us," said the Rector, quietly.  Like many men who take
+life easily, he had the knack of saying a home truth occasionally to
+those who felt themselves virtuously out of temper.  Sir James took out
+his handkerchief and began to bite the corner.
+
+"It is very dreadful of Dodo, though," said Celia, wishing to justify
+her husband.  "She said she _never would_ marry again--not anybody at
+all."
+
+"I heard her say the same thing myself," said Lady Chettam,
+majestically, as if this were royal evidence.
+
+"Oh, there is usually a silent exception in such cases," said Mrs.
+Cadwallader.  "The only wonder to me is, that any of you are surprised.
+You did nothing to hinder it.  If you would have had Lord Triton down
+here to woo her with his philanthropy, he might have carried her off
+before the year was over.  There was no safety in anything else.  Mr.
+Casaubon had prepared all this as beautifully as possible.  He made
+himself disagreeable--or it pleased God to make him so--and then he
+dared her to contradict him.  It's the way to make any trumpery
+tempting, to ticket it at a high price in that way."
+
+"I don't know what you mean by wrong, Cadwallader," said Sir James,
+still feeling a little stung, and turning round in his chair towards
+the Rector.  "He's not a man we can take into the family.  At least, I
+must speak for myself," he continued, carefully keeping his eyes off
+Mr. Brooke.  "I suppose others will find his society too pleasant to
+care about the propriety of the thing."
+
+"Well, you know, Chettam," said Mr. Brooke, good-humoredly, nursing his
+leg, "I can't turn my back on Dorothea.  I must be a father to her up
+to a certain point.  I said, 'My dear, I won't refuse to give you
+away.'  I had spoken strongly before.  But I can cut off the entail,
+you know.  It will cost money and be troublesome; but I can do it, you
+know."
+
+Mr. Brooke nodded at Sir James, and felt that he was both showing his
+own force of resolution and propitiating what was just in the Baronet's
+vexation.  He had hit on a more ingenious mode of parrying than he was
+aware of.  He had touched a motive of which Sir James was ashamed.  The
+mass of his feeling about Dorothea's marriage to Ladislaw was due
+partly to excusable prejudice, or even justifiable opinion, partly to a
+jealous repugnance hardly less in Ladislaw's case than in Casaubon's.
+He was convinced that the marriage was a fatal one for Dorothea.  But
+amid that mass ran a vein of which he was too good and honorable a man
+to like the avowal even to himself: it was undeniable that the union of
+the two estates--Tipton and Freshitt--lying charmingly within a
+ring-fence, was a prospect that flattered him for his son and heir.
+Hence when Mr. Brooke noddingly appealed to that motive, Sir James felt
+a sudden embarrassment; there was a stoppage in his throat; he even
+blushed.  He had found more words than usual in the first jet of his
+anger, but Mr. Brooke's propitiation was more clogging to his tongue
+than Mr. Cadwallader's caustic hint.
+
+But Celia was glad to have room for speech after her uncle's suggestion
+of the marriage ceremony, and she said, though with as little eagerness
+of manner as if the question had turned on an invitation to dinner, "Do
+you mean that Dodo is going to be married directly, uncle?"
+
+"In three weeks, you know," said Mr. Brooke, helplessly.  "I can do
+nothing to hinder it, Cadwallader," he added, turning for a little
+countenance toward the Rector, who said--
+
+"--I--should not make any fuss about it.  If she likes to be poor, that
+is her affair.  Nobody would have said anything if she had married the
+young fellow because he was rich.  Plenty of beneficed clergy are
+poorer than they will be.  Here is Elinor," continued the provoking
+husband; "she vexed her friends by me: I had hardly a thousand
+a-year--I was a lout--nobody could see anything in me--my shoes were
+not the right cut--all the men wondered how a woman could like me.
+Upon my word, I must take Ladislaw's part until I hear more harm of
+him."
+
+"Humphrey, that is all sophistry, and you know it," said his wife.
+"Everything is all one--that is the beginning and end with you.  As if
+you had not been a Cadwallader!  Does any one suppose that I would have
+taken such a monster as you by any other name?"
+
+"And a clergyman too," observed Lady Chettam with approbation.  "Elinor
+cannot be said to have descended below her rank.  It is difficult to
+say what Mr. Ladislaw is, eh, James?"
+
+Sir James gave a small grunt, which was less respectful than his usual
+mode of answering his mother.  Celia looked up at him like a thoughtful
+kitten.
+
+"It must be admitted that his blood is a frightful mixture!" said Mrs.
+Cadwallader.  "The Casaubon cuttle-fish fluid to begin with, and then a
+rebellious Polish fiddler or dancing-master, was it?--and then an old
+clo--"
+
+"Nonsense, Elinor," said the Rector, rising.  "It is time for us to go."
+
+"After all, he is a pretty sprig," said Mrs. Cadwallader, rising too,
+and wishing to make amends.  "He is like the fine old Crichley
+portraits before the idiots came in."
+
+"I'll go with you," said Mr. Brooke, starting up with alacrity.  "You
+must all come and dine with me to-morrow, you know--eh, Celia, my dear?"
+
+"You will, James--won't you?" said Celia, taking her husband's hand.
+
+"Oh, of course, if you like," said Sir James, pulling down his
+waistcoat, but unable yet to adjust his face good-humoredly. "That is
+to say, if it is not to meet anybody else.':
+
+"No, no, no," said Mr. Brooke, understanding the condition.  "Dorothea
+would not come, you know, unless you had been to see her."
+
+When Sir James and Celia were alone, she said, "Do you mind about my
+having the carriage to go to Lowick, James?"
+
+"What, now, directly?" he answered, with some surprise.
+
+"Yes, it is very important," said Celia.
+
+"Remember, Celia, I cannot see her," said Sir James.
+
+"Not if she gave up marrying?"
+
+"What is the use of saying that?--however, I'm going to the stables.
+I'll tell Briggs to bring the carriage round."
+
+Celia thought it was of great use, if not to say that, at least to take
+a journey to Lowick in order to influence Dorothea's mind.  All through
+their girlhood she had felt that she could act on her sister by a word
+judiciously placed--by opening a little window for the daylight of her
+own understanding to enter among the strange colored lamps by which
+Dodo habitually saw.  And Celia the matron naturally felt more able to
+advise her childless sister.  How could any one understand Dodo so well
+as Celia did or love her so tenderly?
+
+Dorothea, busy in her boudoir, felt a glow of pleasure at the sight of
+her sister so soon after the revelation of her intended marriage.  She
+had prefigured to herself, even with exaggeration, the disgust of her
+friends, and she had even feared that Celia might be kept aloof from
+her.
+
+"O Kitty, I am delighted to see you!" said Dorothea, putting her hands
+on Celia's shoulders, and beaming on her.  "I almost thought you would
+not come to me."
+
+"I have not brought Arthur, because I was in a hurry," said Celia, and
+they sat down on two small chairs opposite each other, with their knees
+touching.
+
+"You know, Dodo, it is very bad," said Celia, in her placid guttural,
+looking as prettily free from humors as possible.  "You have
+disappointed us all so.  And I can't think that it ever _will_ be--you
+never can go and live in that way.  And then there are all your plans!
+You never can have thought of that.  James would have taken any trouble
+for you, and you might have gone on all your life doing what you liked."
+
+"On the contrary, dear," said Dorothea, "I never could do anything that
+I liked.  I have never carried out any plan yet."
+
+"Because you always wanted things that wouldn't do.  But other plans
+would have come.  And how can you marry Mr. Ladislaw, that we none of
+us ever thought you _could_ marry?  It shocks James so dreadfully.  And
+then it is all so different from what you have always been.  You would
+have Mr. Casaubon because he had such a great soul, and was so and
+dismal and learned; and now, to think of marrying Mr. Ladislaw, who has
+got no estate or anything.  I suppose it is because you must be making
+yourself uncomfortable in some way or other."
+
+Dorothea laughed.
+
+"Well, it is very serious, Dodo," said Celia, becoming more impressive.
+"How will you live? and you will go away among queer people.  And I
+shall never see you--and you won't mind about little Arthur--and I
+thought you always would--"
+
+Celia's rare tears had got into her eyes, and the corners of her mouth
+were agitated.
+
+"Dear Celia," said Dorothea, with tender gravity, "if you don't ever
+see me, it will not be my fault."
+
+"Yes, it will," said Celia, with the same touching distortion of her
+small features.  "How can I come to you or have you with me when James
+can't bear it?--that is because he thinks it is not right--he thinks
+you are so wrong, Dodo.  But you always were wrong: only I can't help
+loving you.  And nobody can think where you will live: where can you
+go?"
+
+"I am going to London," said Dorothea.
+
+"How can you always live in a street?  And you will be so poor.  I
+could give you half my things, only how can I, when I never see you?"
+
+"Bless you, Kitty," said Dorothea, with gentle warmth.  "Take comfort:
+perhaps James will forgive me some time."
+
+"But it would be much better if you would not be married," said Celia,
+drying her eyes, and returning to her argument; "then there would be
+nothing uncomfortable.  And you would not do what nobody thought you
+could do.  James always said you ought to be a queen; but this is not
+at all being like a queen.  You know what mistakes you have always been
+making, Dodo, and this is another.  Nobody thinks Mr. Ladislaw a proper
+husband for you.  And you _said you_ would never be married again."
+
+"It is quite true that I might be a wiser person, Celia," said
+Dorothea, "and that I might have done something better, if I had been
+better.  But this is what I am going to do.  I have promised to marry
+Mr. Ladislaw; and I am going to marry him."
+
+The tone in which Dorothea said this was a note that Celia had long
+learned to recognize.  She was silent a few moments, and then said, as
+if she had dismissed all contest, "Is he very fond of you, Dodo?"
+
+"I hope so.  I am very fond of him."
+
+"That is nice," said Celia, comfortably.  "Only I rather you had such a
+sort of husband as James is, with a place very near, that I could drive
+to."
+
+Dorothea smiled, and Celia looked rather meditative.  Presently she
+said, "I cannot think how it all came about." Celia thought it would be
+pleasant to hear the story.
+
+"I dare say not," said-Dorothea, pinching her sister's chin.  "If you
+knew how it came about, it would not seem wonderful to you."
+
+"Can't you tell me?" said Celia, settling her arms cozily.
+
+"No, dear, you would have to feel with me, else you would never know."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXV.
+
+    "Then went the jury out whose names were Mr. Blindman, Mr.
+    No-good, Mr. Malice, Mr. Love-lust, Mr. Live-loose, Mr.
+    Heady, Mr. High-mind, Mr. Enmity, Mr. Liar, Mr. Cruelty, Mr.
+    Hate-light, Mr. Implacable, who every one gave in his
+    private verdict against him among themselves, and afterwards
+    unanimously concluded to bring him in guilty before the
+    judge. And first among themselves, Mr. Blindman, the
+    foreman, said, I see clearly that this man is a heretic.
+    Then said Mr. No-good, Away with such a fellow from the
+    earth! Ay, said Mr. Malice, for I hate the very look of him.
+    Then said Mr. Love-lust, I could never endure him. Nor I,
+    said Mr. Live-loose; for he would be always condemning my
+    way. Hang him, hang him, said Mr. Heady. A sorry scrub, said
+    Mr. High-mind. My heart riseth against him, said Mr. Enmity.
+    He is a rogue, said Mr. Liar. Hanging is too good for him,
+    said Mr. Cruelty. Let us despatch him out of the way said
+    Mr. Hate-light. Then said Mr. Implacable, Might I have all
+    the world given me, I could not be reconciled to him;
+    therefore let us forthwith bring him in guilty of death."
+                                            --Pilgrim's Progress.
+
+
+When immortal Bunyan makes his picture of the persecuting passions
+bringing in their verdict of guilty, who pities Faithful?  That is a
+rare and blessed lot which some greatest men have not attained, to know
+ourselves guiltless before a condemning crowd--to be sure that what we
+are denounced for is solely the good in us.  The pitiable lot is that
+of the man who could not call himself a martyr even though he were to
+persuade himself that the men who stoned him were but ugly passions
+incarnate--who knows that he is stoned, not for professing the Right,
+but for not being the man he professed to be.
+
+This was the consciousness that Bulstrode was withering under while he
+made his preparations for departing from Middlemarch, and going to end
+his stricken life in that sad refuge, the indifference of new faces.
+The duteous merciful constancy of his wife had delivered him from one
+dread, but it could not hinder her presence from being still a tribunal
+before which he shrank from confession and desired advocacy.  His
+equivocations with himself about the death of Raffles had sustained the
+conception of an Omniscience whom he prayed to, yet he had a terror
+upon him which would not let him expose them to judgment by a full
+confession to his wife: the acts which he had washed and diluted with
+inward argument and motive, and for which it seemed comparatively easy
+to win invisible pardon--what name would she call them by?  That she
+should ever silently call his acts Murder was what he could not bear.
+He felt shrouded by her doubt: he got strength to face her from the
+sense that she could not yet feel warranted in pronouncing that worst
+condemnation on him.  Some time, perhaps--when he was dying--he would
+tell her all: in the deep shadow of that time, when she held his hand
+in the gathering darkness, she might listen without recoiling from his
+touch.  Perhaps: but concealment had been the habit of his life, and
+the impulse to confession had no power against the dread of a deeper
+humiliation.
+
+He was full of timid care for his wife, not only because he deprecated
+any harshness of judgment from her, but because he felt a deep distress
+at the sight of her suffering.  She had sent her daughters away to
+board at a school on the coast, that this crisis might be hidden from
+them as far as possible.  Set free by their absence from the
+intolerable necessity of accounting for her grief or of beholding their
+frightened wonder, she could live unconstrainedly with the sorrow that
+was every day streaking her hair with whiteness and making her eyelids
+languid.
+
+"Tell me anything that you would like to have me do, Harriet,"
+Bulstrode had said to her; "I mean with regard to arrangements of
+property.  It is my intention not to sell the land I possess in this
+neighborhood, but to leave it to you as a safe provision.  If you have
+any wish on such subjects, do not conceal it from me."
+
+A few days afterwards, when she had returned from a visit to her
+brother's, she began to speak to her husband on a subject which had for
+some time been in her mind.
+
+"I _should_ like to do something for my brother's family, Nicholas; and
+I think we are bound to make some amends to Rosamond and her husband.
+Walter says Mr. Lydgate must leave the town, and his practice is almost
+good for nothing, and they have very little left to settle anywhere
+with.  I would rather do without something for ourselves, to make some
+amends to my poor brother's family."
+
+Mrs. Bulstrode did not wish to go nearer to the facts than in the
+phrase "make some amends;" knowing that her husband must understand
+her.  He had a particular reason, which she was not aware of, for
+wincing under her suggestion.  He hesitated before he said--
+
+"It is not possible to carry out your wish in the way you propose, my
+dear.  Mr. Lydgate has virtually rejected any further service from me.
+He has returned the thousand pounds which I lent him.  Mrs. Casaubon
+advanced him the sum for that purpose.  Here is his letter."
+
+The letter seemed to cut Mrs. Bulstrode severely.  The mention of Mrs.
+Casaubon's loan seemed a reflection of that public feeling which held
+it a matter of course that every one would avoid a connection with her
+husband.  She was silent for some time; and the tears fell one after
+the other, her chin trembling as she wiped them away.  Bulstrode,
+sitting opposite to her, ached at the sight of that grief-worn face,
+which two months before had been bright and blooming.  It had aged to
+keep sad company with his own withered features.  Urged into some
+effort at comforting her, he said--
+
+"There is another means, Harriet, by which I might do a service to your
+brother's family, if you like to act in it.  And it would, I think, be
+beneficial to you: it would be an advantageous way of managing the land
+which I mean to be yours."
+
+She looked attentive.
+
+"Garth once thought of undertaking the management of Stone Court in
+order to place your nephew Fred there.  The stock was to remain as it
+is, and they were to pay a certain share of the profits instead of an
+ordinary rent.  That would be a desirable beginning for the young man,
+in conjunction with his employment under Garth.  Would it be a
+satisfaction to you?"
+
+"Yes, it would," said Mrs. Bulstrode, with some return of energy.
+"Poor Walter is so cast down; I would try anything in my power to do
+him some good before I go away.  We have always been brother and
+sister."
+
+"You must make the proposal to Garth yourself, Harriet," said Mr.
+Bulstrode, not liking what he had to say, but desiring the end he had
+in view, for other reasons besides the consolation of his wife.  "You
+must state to him that the land is virtually yours, and that he need
+have no transactions with me.  Communications can be made through
+Standish.  I mention this, because Garth gave up being my agent.  I can
+put into your hands a paper which he himself drew up, stating
+conditions; and you can propose his renewed acceptance of them.  I
+think it is not unlikely that he will accept when you propose the thing
+for the sake of your nephew."
+
+
+
+CHAPTER LXXXVI.
+
+    "Le coeur se sature d'amour comme d'un sel divin qui le
+    conserve; de la l'incorruptible adherence de ceux qui se
+    sont aimes des l'aube de la vie, et la fraicheur des vielles
+    amours prolonges. Il existe un embaumement d'amour. C'est de
+    Daphnis et Chloe que sont faits Philemon et Baucis. Cette
+    vieillesse la, ressemblance du soir avec l'aurore."
+                    --VICTOR HUGO: L'homme qui rit.
+
+
+Mrs. Garth, hearing Caleb enter the passage about tea-time, opened the
+parlor-door and said, "There you are, Caleb.  Have you had your
+dinner?"  (Mr. Garth's meals were much subordinated to "business.")
+
+"Oh yes, a good dinner--cold mutton and I don't know what.  Where is
+Mary?"
+
+"In the garden with Letty, I think."
+
+"Fred is not come yet?"
+
+"No. Are you going out again without taking tea, Caleb?" said Mrs.
+Garth, seeing that her absent-minded husband was putting on again the
+hat which he had just taken off.
+
+"No, no; I'm only going to Mary a minute."
+
+Mary was in a grassy corner of the garden, where there was a swing
+loftily hung between two pear-trees. She had a pink kerchief tied over
+her head, making a little poke to shade her eyes from the level
+sunbeams, while she was giving a glorious swing to Letty, who laughed
+and screamed wildly.
+
+Seeing her father, Mary left the swing and went to meet him, pushing
+back the pink kerchief and smiling afar off at him with the involuntary
+smile of loving pleasure.
+
+"I came to look for you, Mary," said Mr. Garth.  "Let us walk about a
+bit."
+
+Mary knew quite well that her father had something particular to say:
+his eyebrows made their pathetic angle, and there was a tender gravity
+in his voice: these things had been signs to her when she was Letty's
+age.  She put her arm within his, and they turned by the row of
+nut-trees.
+
+"It will be a sad while before you can be married, Mary," said her
+father, not looking at her, but at the end of the stick which he held
+in his other hand.
+
+"Not a sad while, father--I mean to be merry," said Mary, laughingly.
+"I have been single and merry for four-and-twenty years and more: I
+suppose it will not be quite as long again as that."  Then, after a
+little pause, she said, more gravely, bending her face before her
+father's, "If you are contented with Fred?"
+
+Caleb screwed up his mouth and turned his head aside wisely.
+
+"Now, father, you did praise him last Wednesday.  You said he had an
+uncommon notion of stock, and a good eye for things."
+
+"Did I?" said Caleb, rather slyly.
+
+"Yes, I put it all down, and the date, anno Domini, and everything,"
+said Mary.  "You like things to be neatly booked.  And then his
+behavior to you, father, is really good; he has a deep respect for you;
+and it is impossible to have a better temper than Fred has."
+
+"Ay, ay; you want to coax me into thinking him a fine match."
+
+"No, indeed, father.  I don't love him because he is a fine match."
+
+"What for, then?"
+
+"Oh, dear, because I have always loved him.  I should never like
+scolding any one else so well; and that is a point to be thought of in
+a husband."
+
+"Your mind is quite settled, then, Mary?" said Caleb, returning to his
+first tone.  "There's no other wish come into it since things have been
+going on as they have been of late?"  (Caleb meant a great deal in that
+vague phrase;) "because, better late than never.  A woman must not
+force her heart--she'll do a man no good by that."
+
+"My feelings have not changed, father," said Mary, calmly.  "I shall be
+constant to Fred as long as he is constant to me.  I don't think either
+of us could spare the other, or like any one else better, however much
+we might admire them.  It would make too great a difference to us--like
+seeing all the old places altered, and changing the name for
+everything.  We must wait for each other a long while; but Fred knows
+that."
+
+Instead of speaking immediately, Caleb stood still and screwed his
+stick on the grassy walk.  Then he said, with emotion in his voice,
+"Well, I've got a bit of news.  What do you think of Fred going to live
+at Stone Court, and managing the land there?"
+
+"How can that ever be, father?" said Mary, wonderingly.
+
+"He would manage it for his aunt Bulstrode.  The poor woman has been to
+me begging and praying.  She wants to do the lad good, and it might be
+a fine thing for him.  With saving, he might gradually buy the stock,
+and he has a turn for farming."
+
+"Oh, Fred would be so happy!  It is too good to believe."
+
+"Ah, but mind you," said Caleb, turning his head warningly, "I must
+take it on _my_ shoulders, and be responsible, and see after
+everything; and that will grieve your mother a bit, though she mayn't
+say so.  Fred had need be careful."
+
+"Perhaps it is too much, father," said Mary, checked in her joy.
+"There would be no happiness in bringing you any fresh trouble."
+
+"Nay, nay; work is my delight, child, when it doesn't vex your mother.
+And then, if you and Fred get married," here Caleb's voice shook just
+perceptibly, "he'll be steady and saving; and you've got your mother's
+cleverness, and mine too, in a woman's sort of way; and you'll keep him
+in order.  He'll be coming by-and-by, so I wanted to tell you first,
+because I think you'd like to tell _him_ by yourselves.  After that, I
+could talk it well over with him, and we could go into business and the
+nature of things."
+
+"Oh, you dear good father!" cried Mary, putting her hands round her
+father's neck, while he bent his head placidly, willing to be caressed.
+"I wonder if any other girl thinks her father the best man in the
+world!"
+
+"Nonsense, child; you'll think your husband better."
+
+"Impossible," said Mary, relapsing into her usual tone; "husbands are
+an inferior class of men, who require keeping in order."
+
+When they were entering the house with Letty, who had run to join them,
+Mary saw Fred at the orchard-gate, and went to meet him.
+
+"What fine clothes you wear, you extravagant youth!" said Mary, as Fred
+stood still and raised his hat to her with playful formality.  "You are
+not learning economy."
+
+"Now that is too bad, Mary," said Fred.  "Just look at the edges of
+these coat-cuffs! It is only by dint of good brushing that I look
+respectable.  I am saving up three suits--one for a wedding-suit."
+
+"How very droll you will look!--like a gentleman in an old
+fashion-book."
+
+"Oh no, they will keep two years."
+
+"Two years! be reasonable, Fred," said Mary, turning to walk.  "Don't
+encourage flattering expectations."
+
+"Why not?  One lives on them better than on unflattering ones.  If we
+can't be married in two years, the truth will be quite bad enough when
+it comes."
+
+"I have heard a story of a young gentleman who once encouraged
+flattering expectations, and they did him harm."
+
+"Mary, if you've got something discouraging to tell me, I shall bolt; I
+shall go into the house to Mr. Garth.  I am out of spirits.  My father
+is so cut up--home is not like itself.  I can't bear any more bad news."
+
+"Should you call it bad news to be told that you were to live at Stone
+Court, and manage the farm, and be remarkably prudent, and save money
+every year till all the stock and furniture were your own, and you were
+a distinguished agricultural character, as Mr. Borthrop Trumbull
+says--rather stout, I fear, and with the Greek and Latin sadly
+weather-worn?"
+
+"You don't mean anything except nonsense, Mary?" said Fred, coloring
+slightly nevertheless.
+
+"That is what my father has just told me of as what may happen, and he
+never talks nonsense," said Mary, looking up at Fred now, while he
+grasped her hand as they walked, till it rather hurt her; but she would
+not complain.
+
+"Oh, I could be a tremendously good fellow then, Mary, and we could be
+married directly."
+
+"Not so fast, sir; how do you know that I would not rather defer our
+marriage for some years?  That would leave you time to misbehave, and
+then if I liked some one else better, I should have an excuse for
+jilting you."
+
+"Pray don't joke, Mary," said Fred, with strong feeling.  "Tell me
+seriously that all this is true, and that you are happy because of
+it--because you love me best."
+
+"It is all true, Fred, and I am happy because of it--because I love you
+best," said Mary, in a tone of obedient recitation.
+
+They lingered on the door-step under the steep-roofed porch, and Fred
+almost in a whisper said--
+
+"When we were first engaged, with the umbrella-ring, Mary, you used
+to--"
+
+The spirit of joy began to laugh more decidedly in Mary's eyes, but the
+fatal Ben came running to the door with Brownie yapping behind him,
+and, bouncing against them, said--
+
+"Fred and Mary! are you ever coming in?--or may I eat your cake?"
+
+
+FINALE.
+
+
+Every limit is a beginning as well as an ending.  Who can quit young
+lives after being long in company with them, and not desire to know
+what befell them in their after-years? For the fragment of a life,
+however typical, is not the sample of an even web: promises may not be
+kept, and an ardent outset may be followed by declension; latent powers
+may find their long-waited opportunity; a past error may urge a grand
+retrieval.
+
+Marriage, which has been the bourne of so many narratives, is still a
+great beginning, as it was to Adam and Eve, who kept their honeymoon in
+Eden, but had their first little one among the thorns and thistles of
+the wilderness.  It is still the beginning of the home epic--the
+gradual conquest or irremediable loss of that complete union which
+makes the advancing years a climax, and age the harvest of sweet
+memories in common.
+
+Some set out, like Crusaders of old, with a glorious equipment of hope
+and enthusiasm and get broken by the way, wanting patience with each
+other and the world.
+
+All who have cared for Fred Vincy and Mary Garth will like to know that
+these two made no such failure, but achieved a solid mutual happiness.
+Fred surprised his neighbors in various ways.  He became rather
+distinguished in his side of the county as a theoretic and practical
+farmer, and produced a work on the "Cultivation of Green Crops and the
+Economy of Cattle-Feeding" which won him high congratulations at
+agricultural meetings.  In Middlemarch admiration was more reserved:
+most persons there were inclined to believe that the merit of Fred's
+authorship was due to his wife, since they had never expected Fred
+Vincy to write on turnips and mangel-wurzel.
+
+But when Mary wrote a little book for her boys, called "Stories of
+Great Men, taken from Plutarch," and had it printed and published by
+Gripp & Co., Middlemarch, every one in the town was willing to give the
+credit of this work to Fred, observing that he had been to the
+University, "where the ancients were studied," and might have been a
+clergyman if he had chosen.
+
+In this way it was made clear that Middlemarch had never been deceived,
+and that there was no need to praise anybody for writing a book, since
+it was always done by somebody else.
+
+Moreover, Fred remained unswervingly steady.  Some years after his
+marriage he told Mary that his happiness was half owing to Farebrother,
+who gave him a strong pull-up at the right moment.  I cannot say that
+he was never again misled by his hopefulness: the yield of crops or the
+profits of a cattle sale usually fell below his estimate; and he was
+always prone to believe that he could make money by the purchase of a
+horse which turned out badly--though this, Mary observed, was of
+course the fault of the horse, not of Fred's judgment.  He kept his
+love of horsemanship, but he rarely allowed himself a day's hunting;
+and when he did so, it was remarkable that he submitted to be laughed
+at for cowardliness at the fences, seeming to see Mary and the boys
+sitting on the five-barred gate, or showing their curly heads between
+hedge and ditch.
+
+There were three boys: Mary was not discontented that she brought forth
+men-children only; and when Fred wished to have a girl like her, she
+said, laughingly, "that would be too great a trial to your mother."
+Mrs. Vincy in her declining years, and in the diminished lustre of her
+housekeeping, was much comforted by her perception that two at least of
+Fred's boys were real Vincys, and did not "feature the Garths." But
+Mary secretly rejoiced that the youngest of the three was very much
+what her father must have been when he wore a round jacket, and showed
+a marvellous nicety of aim in playing at marbles, or in throwing stones
+to bring down the mellow pears.
+
+Ben and Letty Garth, who were uncle and aunt before they were well in
+their teens, disputed much as to whether nephews or nieces were more
+desirable; Ben contending that it was clear girls were good for less
+than boys, else they would not be always in petticoats, which showed
+how little they were meant for; whereupon Letty, who argued much from
+books, got angry in replying that God made coats of skins for both Adam
+and Eve alike--also it occurred to her that in the East the men too
+wore petticoats.  But this latter argument, obscuring the majesty of
+the former, was one too many, for Ben answered contemptuously, "The
+more spooneys they!" and immediately appealed to his mother whether
+boys were not better than girls.  Mrs. Garth pronounced that both were
+alike naughty, but that boys were undoubtedly stronger, could run
+faster, and throw with more precision to a greater distance.  With this
+oracular sentence Ben was well satisfied, not minding the naughtiness;
+but Letty took it ill, her feeling of superiority being stronger than
+her muscles.
+
+Fred never became rich--his hopefulness had not led him to expect that;
+but he gradually saved enough to become owner of the stock and
+furniture at Stone Court, and the work which Mr. Garth put into his
+hands carried him in plenty through those "bad times" which are always
+present with farmers.  Mary, in her matronly days, became as solid in
+figure as her mother; but, unlike her, gave the boys little formal
+teaching, so that Mrs. Garth was alarmed lest they should never be well
+grounded in grammar and geography.  Nevertheless, they were found quite
+forward enough when they went to school; perhaps, because they had
+liked nothing so well as being with their mother.  When Fred was riding
+home on winter evenings he had a pleasant vision beforehand of the
+bright hearth in the wainscoted parlor, and was sorry for other men who
+could not have Mary for their wife; especially for Mr. Farebrother.
+"He was ten times worthier of you than I was," Fred could now say to
+her, magnanimously.  "To be sure he was," Mary answered; "and for that
+reason he could do better without me.  But you--I shudder to think what
+you would have been--a curate in debt for horse-hire and cambric
+pocket-handkerchiefs!"
+
+On inquiry it might possibly be found that Fred and Mary still inhabit
+Stone Court--that the creeping plants still cast the foam of their
+blossoms over the fine stone-wall into the field where the walnut-trees
+stand in stately row--and that on sunny days the two lovers who were
+first engaged with the umbrella-ring may be seen in white-haired
+placidity at the open window from which Mary Garth, in the days of old
+Peter Featherstone, had often been ordered to look out for Mr. Lydgate.
+
+Lydgate's hair never became white.  He died when he was only fifty,
+leaving his wife and children provided for by a heavy insurance on his
+life.  He had gained an excellent practice, alternating, according to
+the season, between London and a Continental bathing-place; having
+written a treatise on Gout, a disease which has a good deal of wealth
+on its side.  His skill was relied on by many paying patients, but he
+always regarded himself as a failure: he had not done what he once
+meant to do.  His acquaintances thought him enviable to have so
+charming a wife, and nothing happened to shake their opinion.  Rosamond
+never committed a second compromising indiscretion.  She simply
+continued to be mild in her temper, inflexible in her judgment,
+disposed to admonish her husband, and able to frustrate him by
+stratagem.  As the years went on he opposed her less and less, whence
+Rosamond concluded that he had learned the value of her opinion; on the
+other hand, she had a more thorough conviction of his talents now that
+he gained a good income, and instead of the threatened cage in Bride
+Street provided one all flowers and gilding, fit for the bird of
+paradise that she resembled.  In brief, Lydgate was what is called a
+successful man.  But he died prematurely of diphtheria, and Rosamond
+afterwards married an elderly and wealthy physician, who took kindly to
+her four children.  She made a very pretty show with her daughters,
+driving out in her carriage, and often spoke of her happiness as "a
+reward"--she did not say for what, but probably she meant that it was a
+reward for her patience with Tertius, whose temper never became
+faultless, and to the last occasionally let slip a bitter speech which
+was more memorable than the signs he made of his repentance.  He once
+called her his basil plant; and when she asked for an explanation, said
+that basil was a plant which had flourished wonderfully on a murdered
+man's brains.  Rosamond had a placid but strong answer to such
+speeches.  Why then had he chosen her?  It was a pity he had not had
+Mrs. Ladislaw, whom he was always praising and placing above her.  And
+thus the conversation ended with the advantage on Rosamond's side.  But
+it would be unjust not to tell, that she never uttered a word in
+depreciation of Dorothea, keeping in religious remembrance the
+generosity which had come to her aid in the sharpest crisis of her life.
+
+Dorothea herself had no dreams of being praised above other women,
+feeling that there was always something better which she might have
+done, if she had only been better and known better.  Still, she never
+repented that she had given up position and fortune to marry Will
+Ladislaw, and he would have held it the greatest shame as well as
+sorrow to him if she had repented.  They were bound to each other by a
+love stronger than any impulses which could have marred it.  No life
+would have been possible to Dorothea which was not filled with emotion,
+and she had now a life filled also with a beneficent activity which she
+had not the doubtful pains of discovering and marking out for herself.
+Will became an ardent public man, working well in those times when
+reforms were begun with a young hopefulness of immediate good which has
+been much checked in our days, and getting at last returned to
+Parliament by a constituency who paid his expenses.  Dorothea could
+have liked nothing better, since wrongs existed, than that her husband
+should be in the thick of a struggle against them, and that she should
+give him wifely help.  Many who knew her, thought it a pity that so
+substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life
+of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother.
+But no one stated exactly what else that was in her power she ought
+rather to have done--not even Sir James Chettam, who went no further
+than the negative prescription that she ought not to have married Will
+Ladislaw.
+
+But this opinion of his did not cause a lasting alienation; and the way
+in which the family was made whole again was characteristic of all
+concerned.  Mr. Brooke could not resist the pleasure of corresponding
+with Will and Dorothea; and one morning when his pen had been
+remarkably fluent on the prospects of Municipal Reform, it ran off into
+an invitation to the Grange, which, once written, could not be done
+away with at less cost than the sacrifice (hardly to be conceived) of
+the whole valuable letter.  During the months of this correspondence
+Mr. Brooke had continually, in his talk with Sir James Chettam, been
+presupposing or hinting that the intention of cutting off the entail
+was still maintained; and the day on which his pen gave the daring
+invitation, he went to Freshitt expressly to intimate that he had a
+stronger sense than ever of the reasons for taking that energetic step
+as a precaution against any mixture of low blood in the heir of the
+Brookes.
+
+But that morning something exciting had happened at the Hall.  A letter
+had come to Celia which made her cry silently as she read it; and when
+Sir James, unused to see her in tears, asked anxiously what was the
+matter, she burst out in a wail such as he had never heard from her
+before.
+
+"Dorothea has a little boy.  And you will not let me go and see her.
+And I am sure she wants to see me.  And she will not know what to do
+with the baby--she will do wrong things with it.  And they thought she
+would die.  It is very dreadful!  Suppose it had been me and little
+Arthur, and Dodo had been hindered from coming to see me!  I wish you
+would be less unkind, James!"
+
+"Good heavens, Celia!" said Sir James, much wrought upon, "what do you
+wish?  I will do anything you like.  I will take you to town to-morrow
+if you wish it."  And Celia did wish it.
+
+It was after this that Mr. Brooke came, and meeting the Baronet in the
+grounds, began to chat with him in ignorance of the news, which Sir
+James for some reason did not care to tell him immediately.  But when
+the entail was touched on in the usual way, he said, "My dear sir, it
+is not for me to dictate to you, but for my part I would let that
+alone.  I would let things remain as they are."
+
+Mr. Brooke felt so much surprised that he did not at once find out how
+much he was relieved by the sense that he was not expected to do
+anything in particular.
+
+Such being the bent of Celia's heart, it was inevitable that Sir James
+should consent to a reconciliation with Dorothea and her husband.
+Where women love each other, men learn to smother their mutual dislike.
+Sir James never liked Ladislaw, and Will always preferred to have Sir
+James's company mixed with another kind: they were on a footing of
+reciprocal tolerance which was made quite easy only when Dorothea and
+Celia were present.
+
+It became an understood thing that Mr. and Mrs. Ladislaw should pay at
+least two visits during the year to the Grange, and there came
+gradually a small row of cousins at Freshitt who enjoyed playing with
+the two cousins visiting Tipton as much as if the blood of these
+cousins had been less dubiously mixed.
+
+Mr. Brooke lived to a good old age, and his estate was inherited by
+Dorothea's son, who might have represented Middlemarch, but declined,
+thinking that his opinions had less chance of being stifled if he
+remained out of doors.
+
+Sir James never ceased to regard Dorothea's second marriage as a
+mistake; and indeed this remained the tradition concerning it in
+Middlemarch, where she was spoken of to a younger generation as a fine
+girl who married a sickly clergyman, old enough to be her father, and
+in little more than a year after his death gave up her estate to marry
+his cousin--young enough to have been his son, with no property, and
+not well-born. Those who had not seen anything of Dorothea usually
+observed that she could not have been "a nice woman," else she would
+not have married either the one or the other.
+
+Certainly those determining acts of her life were not ideally
+beautiful.  They were the mixed result of young and noble impulse
+struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state, in which
+great feelings will often take the aspect of error, and great faith the
+aspect of illusion.  For there is no creature whose inward being is so
+strong that it is not greatly determined by what lies outside it.  A
+new Theresa will hardly have the opportunity of reforming a conventual
+life, any more than a new Antigone will spend her heroic piety in
+daring all for the sake of a brother's burial: the medium in which
+their ardent deeds took shape is forever gone.  But we insignificant
+people with our daily words and acts are preparing the lives of many
+Dorotheas, some of which may present a far sadder sacrifice than that
+of the Dorothea whose story we know.
+
+Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were
+not widely visible.  Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus
+broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on
+the earth.  But the effect of her being on those around her was
+incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly
+dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you
+and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived
+faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.