Middlemarch | Page 9

you are such a perfect horsewoman."
"Excuse me; I have had very little practice, and I should be easily
thrown."
"Then that is a reason for more practice. Every lady ought to be a
perfect horsewoman, that she may accompany her husband."
"You see how widely we differ, Sir James. I have made up my mind
that I ought not to be a perfect horsewoman, and so I should never
correspond to your pattern of a lady." Dorothea looked straight before
her, and spoke with cold brusquerie, very much with the air of a
handsome boy, in amusing contrast with the solicitous amiability of her
admirer.
"I should like to know your reasons for this cruel resolution. It is not
possible that you should think horsemanship wrong."
"It is quite possible that I should think it wrong for me."
"Oh, why?" said Sir James, in a tender tone of remonstrance.

Mr. Casaubon had come up to the table, teacup in hand, and was
listening.
"We must not inquire too curiously into motives," he interposed, in his
measured way. "Miss Brooke knows that they are apt to become feeble
in the utterance: the aroma is mixed with the grosser air. We must keep
the germinating grain away from the light."
Dorothea colored with pleasure, and looked up gratefully to the speaker.
Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life, and with
whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could
illuminate principle with the widest knowledge a man whose learning
almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!
Dorothea's inferences may seem large; but really life could never have
gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusions,
which has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization. Has
any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of
pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?
"Certainly," said good Sir James. "Miss Brooke shall not be urged to
tell reasons she would rather be silent upon. I am sure her reasons
would do her honor."
He was not in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea had
looked up at Mr. Casaubon: it never occurred to him that a girl to
whom he was meditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried
bookworm towards fifty, except, indeed, in a religious sort of way, as
for a clergyman of some distinction.
However, since Miss Brooke had become engaged in a conversation
with Mr. Casaubon about the Vaudois clergy, Sir James betook himself
to Celia, and talked to her about her sister; spoke of a house in town,
and asked whether Miss Brooke disliked London. Away from her sister,
Celia talked quite easily, and Sir James said to himself that the second
Miss Brooke was certainly very agreeable as well as pretty, though not,
as some people pretended, more clever and sensible than the elder sister.
He felt that he had chosen the one who was in all respects the superior;

and a man naturally likes to look forward to having the best. He would
be the very Mawworm of bachelors who pretended not to expect it.
CHAPTER III.
"Say, goddess, what ensued, when Raphael, The affable archangel . . .
Eve The story heard attentive, and was filled With admiration, and deep
muse, to hear Of things so high and strange." --Paradise Lost, B. vii.
If it had really occurred to Mr. Casaubon to think of Miss Brooke as a
suitable wife for him, the reasons that might induce her to accept him
were already planted in her mind, and by the evening of the next day
the reasons had budded and bloomed. For they had had a long
conversation in the morning, while Celia, who did not like the company
of Mr. Casaubon's moles and sallowness, had escaped to the vicarage to
play with the curate's ill-shod but merry children.
Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of
Mr. Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine
extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her
own experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his
great work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent. For he had been as
instructive as Milton's "affable archangel;" and with something of the
archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what
indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness,
justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr.
Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical
fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally
revealed. Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm
footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became
intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of correspondences.
But to gather in this great harvest of