Middlemarch quotes

Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than anyone 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 heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.

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 heartbeats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.

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;

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 snuffbox, concerning which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch.

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 snuffbox, concerning which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch.

In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly in abeyance;

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!

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.

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.

“No, dear, no,” said Dorothea, stroking her sister’s cheek. “

Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another.

”

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 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?

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.”

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.”

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?

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 anyone ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?

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 anyone 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.”

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.

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 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.

”

“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 anyone 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.”

“

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.

“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.”

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?

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.

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.

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.

“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.

”

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.

“Yes; she says Mr. Casaubon has a great soul.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

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?

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.

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.

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.

“Confound you handsome young fellows! you think of having it all your own way in the world. You don’t understand 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.

”

“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 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.

“

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.”

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.

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.

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 notebooks, and small taper of learned theory exploring the tossed ruins of the world, seemed to enforce a …

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.

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;

“The bridegroom—Casaubon.

He has certainly been drying up faster since the engagement: the flame of passion, I suppose.

”

“

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!”

“

The truth? he is as bad as the wrong physic⁠—nasty to take, and sure to disagree.

”

But anyone 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:

“

Only the wrong sort. All choice of words is slang. It marks a class.

”

“

Dear me, how amusing it is to hear young people talk!

” said Mrs. Vincy, with cheerful admiration.

“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.

”

“Yes, mother, the opinions they are paid for.

But a prig is a fellow who is always making you a present of his opinions.

”

… 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.

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.

Goodbye, 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.

“

Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating.

There is the bell—I think we must go down.”

“Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarrelled.

If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?

”

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:

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.

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 wineglass 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.

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.

“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.

“Not of the least use in the world for him to say he could be better.

Might, could, would⁠—they are contemptible auxiliaries.

”

“

Perhaps not. But if they love them, they never think them bad.

”

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

… 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.

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.

… 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 …

… 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;

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.

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.

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.

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:

But the doorsill 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;

… 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.

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. 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.

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 …

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 …

… 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.

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.

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 Laocoön.

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.

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.

Everyone 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.

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 goodwill, 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:

“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.

”

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.

“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.

“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.

”

“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.

”

“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.

“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 “Goodbye.”

… 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;

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.

… 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 steeplechase; and he only liked it the better because he wanted money and hoped to win.

… 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.

“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—

… 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.

… 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 farmhouse, 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.

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 …

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.

“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.

“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.”

… 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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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 tomorrow, now, don’t you keep him chattering:

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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 someone worth captivating, and she did not distinguish flirtation from love, either in herself or in another.

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;

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 jellyfish 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.

“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.

“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

“Yes. We are not going to be married yet. Because everything 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.

”

“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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 “newborn 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.

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 …

“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.”

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.”

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.

“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.”

“

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—”

“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.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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 warmhearted and rash. He did not know where the chain went;

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:

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.

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.

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 maidservants when they came about the hearth, but seemed to consider Miss Garth a suspicious character, and followed her with cold eyes.

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.

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.

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 tonight 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:

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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.

“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.”

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 dreamlike 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:

“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 anyone should die and leave no love behind.

”

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.

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.

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 downstairs, and had sat alone with him for several hours.

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.

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 meanwhile 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 lovemaking 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 lovemaking—that gossamer web!

The accepted lover spent most of his evenings in Lowick Gate, and a lovemaking 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 lovemaking⁠—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.

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:

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.

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.”

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.

… 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.

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;

Casaubon does not like anyone 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.

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.

”

“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.

”

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.”

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.

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.”

“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—”

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;

“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.

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.

”

… 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;

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 anyone 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?

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.”

“

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.

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.

”

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?

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.

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:

… 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 upstairs.

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.

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.

“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?

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.

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.

… 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;

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.

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;

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

”

… 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.”

“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.

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.

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.

”

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.

“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.

”

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.

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.

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;

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.

“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.”

Surely for the gaze which had found her, and which she would know again.

Life would be no better than candlelight 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 …

“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.

”

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.

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.

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.

“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.

”

“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.

”

“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.

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 …

“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 hayfield, where the muster of working hands gave opportunities for talk such as were rarely had through the rural year.

“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.

”

But where Caleb’s feeling and judgment strongly pronounced, he was a ruler; and in spite of his mildness and timidity in reproving, everyone about him knew that on the exceptional occasions when he chose, he was absolute.

He never, indeed, chose to be absolute except on someone 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.

and in spite of his mildness and timidity in reproving, everyone about him knew that on the exceptional occasions when he chose, he was absolute. He never, indeed, chose to be absolute except on someone 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.

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.

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.

“Yes, I do,” said Mary. “

I don’t like the other clergymen’s neckcloths, because it is they who wear them.

”

“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.

”

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.

… 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 buttonhole 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;

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.

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.

When he opened the door the two singers went on towards the keynote, 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.

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;

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—

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.

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.

Some saturnine, sour-blooded persons might object to be constantly insisting on the merits of all articles from bootjacks 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.

“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.

… 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.

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.

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;

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:

His belief in these moments of dread was, that if he spontaneously did something right, God would save him from the consequences of wrongdoing.

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.

If I had any fortune of my own, I would willingly pay it to anyone 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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.

”

… 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.

”

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:

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;

“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.”

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.”

“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 dullness 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:

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—

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.

“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 anyone’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—

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.

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.

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 …

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!

”

… 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 …

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;

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.

“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.”

“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.

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.

Early in the morning—about six—Mr. Bulstrode rose and spent some time in prayer. Does anyone 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.

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.

”

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.

“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.

“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.”

“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.

”

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.

“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.

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?

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.”

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.

… 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.

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 …

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;

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;

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.

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.

”

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.”

“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?”

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.

“

Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth,

” said Dorothea, lifting her arms to the back of her head.

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.

“

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.

“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.

”

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 goodwill:

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;