prompt:
Chapter: "Say, goddess, what ensued, when Raphael,
     The affable archangel . . .
                                           Eve
     The story heard attentive, and was filled
     With admiration, and deep muse, to hear
     Of things so high and strange."
                               --Paradise Lost, B. vii.

If it had really occurred to Mr. Casaubon to think of Miss Brooke as a
suitable wife for him, the reasons that might induce her to accept him
were already planted in her mind, and by the evening of the next day
the reasons had budded and bloomed.  For they had had a long
conversation in the morning, while Celia, who did not like the company
of Mr. Casaubon's moles and sallowness, had escaped to the vicarage to
play with the curate's ill-shod but merry children.

Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of
Mr. Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine
extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own
experience to him, and had understood from him the scope of his great
work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent.  For he had been as
instructive as Milton's "affable archangel;" and with something of the
archangelic manner he told her how he had undertaken to show (what
indeed had been attempted before, but not with that thoroughness,
justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which Mr.
Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical
fragments in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally
revealed.  Having once mastered the true position and taken a firm
footing there, the vast field of mythical constructions became
intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected light of
correspondences.  But to gather in this great harvest of truth was no
light or speedy work.  His notes already made a formidable range of
volumes, but the crowning task would be to condense these voluminous
still-accumulating results and bring them, like the earlier vintage of
Hippocratic books, to fit a little shelf.  In explaining this to
Dorothea, Mr. Casaubon expressed himself nearly as he would have done
to a fellow-student, for he had not two styles of talking at command:
it is true that when he used a Greek or Latin phrase he always gave the
English with scrupulous care, but he would probably have done this in
any case.  A learned provincial clergyman is accustomed to think of his
acquaintances as of "lords, knyghtes, and other noble and worthi men,
that conne Latyn but lytille."

Dorothea was altogether captivated by the wide embrace of this
conception.  Here was something beyond the shallows of ladies' school
literature: here was a living Bossuet, whose work would reconcile
complete knowledge with devoted piety; here was a modern Augustine who
united the glories of doctor and saint.

The sanctity seemed no less clearly marked than the learning, for when
Dorothea was impelled to open her mind on certain themes which she
could speak of to no one whom she had before seen at Tipton, especially
on the secondary importance of ecclesiastical forms and articles of
belief compared with that spiritual religion, that submergence of self
in communion with Divine perfection which seemed to her to be expressed
in the best Christian books of widely distant ages, she found in Mr.
Casaubon a listener who understood her at once, who could assure her of
his own agreement with that view when duly tempered with wise
conformity, and could mention historical examples before unknown to her.

"He thinks with me," said Dorothea to herself, "or rather, he thinks a
whole world of which my thought is but a poor twopenny mirror.  And his
feelings too, his whole experience--what a lake compared with my little
pool!"

Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly
than other young ladies of her age.  Signs are small measurable things,
but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent
nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a
sky, and colored by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of
knowledge.  They are not always too grossly deceived; for Sinbad
himself may have fallen by good-luck on a true description, and wrong
reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a
long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we
now and then arrive just where we ought to be.  Because Miss Brooke was
hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was
unworthy of it.

He stayed a little longer than he had intended, on a slight pressure of
invitation from Mr. Brooke, who offered no bait except his own
documents on machine-breaking and rick-burning. Mr. Casaubon was called
into the library to look at these in a heap, while his host picked up
first one and then the other to read aloud from in a skipping and
uncertain way, passing from one unfinished passage to another with a
"Yes, now, but here!" and finally pushing them all aside to open the
journal of his youthful Continental travels.

"Look here--here is all about Greece.  Rhamnus, the ruins of
Rhamnus--you are a great Grecian, now.  I don't know whether you have
given much study to the topography.  I spent no end of time in making
out these things--Helicon, now.  Here, now!--'We started the next
morning for Parnassus, the double-peaked Parnassus.' All this volume is
about Greece, you know," Mr. Brooke wound up, rubbing his thumb
transversely along the edges of the leaves as he held the book forward.

Mr. Casaubon made a dignified though somewhat sad audience; bowed in
the right place, and avoided looking at anything documentary as far as
possible, without showing disregard or impatience; mindful that this
desultoriness was associated with the institutions of the country, and
that the man who took him on this severe mental scamper was not only an
amiable host, but a landholder and custos rotulorum. Was his endurance
aided also by the reflection that Mr. Brooke was the uncle of Dorothea?

Certainly he seemed more and more bent on making her talk to him, on
drawing her out, as Celia remarked to herself; and in looking at her
his face was often lit up by a smile like pale wintry sunshine.  Before
he left the next morning, while taking a pleasant walk with Miss Brooke
along the gravelled terrace, he had mentioned to her that he felt the
disadvantage of loneliness, the need of that cheerful companionship
with which the presence of youth can lighten or vary the serious toils
of maturity.  And he delivered this statement with as much careful
precision as if he had been a diplomatic envoy whose words would be
attended with results.  Indeed, Mr. Casaubon was not used to expect
that he should have to repeat or revise his communications of a
practical or personal kind.  The inclinations which he had deliberately
stated on the 2d of October he would think it enough to refer to by the
mention of that date; judging by the standard of his own memory, which
was a volume where a vide supra could serve instead of repetitions, and
not the ordinary long-used blotting-book which only tells of forgotten
writing.  But in this case Mr. Casaubon's confidence was not likely to
be falsified, for Dorothea heard and retained what he said with the
eager interest of a fresh young nature to which every variety in
experience is an epoch.

It was three o'clock in the beautiful breezy autumn day when Mr.
Casaubon drove off to his Rectory at Lowick, only five miles from
Tipton; and Dorothea, who had on her bonnet and shawl, hurried along
the shrubbery and across the park that she might wander through the
bordering wood with no other visible companionship than that of Monk,
the Great St. Bernard dog, who always took care of the young ladies in
their walks.  There had risen before her the girl's vision of a
possible future for herself to which she looked forward with trembling
hope, and she wanted to wander on in that visionary future without
interruption.  She walked briskly in the brisk air, the color rose in
her cheeks, and her straw bonnet (which our contemporaries might look
at with conjectural curiosity as at an obsolete form of basket) fell a
little backward.  She would perhaps be hardly characterized enough if
it were omitted that she wore her brown hair flatly braided and coiled
behind so as to expose the outline of her head in a daring manner at a
time when public feeling required the meagreness of nature to be
dissimulated by tall barricades of frizzed curls and bows, never
surpassed by any great race except the Feejeean.  This was a trait of
Miss Brooke's asceticism.  But there was nothing of an ascetic's
expression in her bright full eyes, as she looked before her, not
consciously seeing, but absorbing into the intensity of her mood, the
solemn glory of the afternoon with its long swathes of light between
the far-off rows of limes, whose shadows touched each other.

All people, young or old (that is, all people in those ante-reform
times), would have thought her an interesting object if they had
referred the glow in her eyes and cheeks to the newly awakened ordinary
images of young love: the illusions of Chloe about Strephon have been
sufficiently consecrated in poetry, as the pathetic loveliness of all
spontaneous trust ought to be.  Miss Pippin adoring young Pumpkin, and
dreaming along endless vistas of unwearying companionship, was a little
drama which never tired our fathers and mothers, and had been put into
all costumes.  Let but Pumpkin have a figure which would sustain the
disadvantages of the shortwaisted swallow-tail, and everybody felt it
not only natural but necessary to the perfection of womanhood, that a
sweet girl should be at once convinced of his virtue, his exceptional
ability, and above all, his perfect sincerity.  But perhaps no persons
then living--certainly none in the neighborhood of Tipton--would have
had a sympathetic understanding for the dreams of a girl whose notions
about marriage took their color entirely from an exalted enthusiasm
about the ends of life, an enthusiasm which was lit chiefly by its own
fire, and included neither the niceties of the trousseau, the pattern
of plate, nor even the honors and sweet joys of the blooming matron.

It had now entered Dorothea's mind that Mr. Casaubon might wish to make
her his wife, and the idea that he would do so touched her with a sort
of reverential gratitude.  How good of him--nay, it would be almost as
if a winged messenger had suddenly stood beside her path and held out
his hand towards her!  For a long while she had been oppressed by the
indefiniteness which hung in her mind, like a thick summer haze, over
all her desire to make her life greatly effective.  What could she do,
what ought she to do?--she, hardly more than a budding woman, but yet
with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to be satisfied
by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments of a
discursive mouse.  With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she
might have thought that a Christian young lady of fortune should find
her ideal of life in village charities, patronage of the humbler
clergy, the perusal of "Female Scripture Characters," unfolding the
private experience of Sara under the Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under
the New, and the care of her soul over her embroidery in her own
boudoir--with a background of prospective marriage to a man who, if
less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously
inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted.  From such
contentment poor Dorothea was shut out.  The intensity of her religious
disposition, the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one
aspect of a nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually
consequent: and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow
teaching, hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a
labyrinth of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led no
whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once exaggeration
and inconsistency.  The thing which seemed to her best, she wanted to
justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live in a pretended
admission of rules which were never acted on.  Into this soul-hunger as
yet all her youthful passion was poured; the union which attracted her
was one that would deliver her from her girlish subjection to her own
ignorance, and give her the freedom of voluntary submission to a guide
who would take her along the grandest path.

"I should learn everything then," she said to herself, still walking
quickly along the bridle road through the wood.  "It would be my duty
to study that I might help him the better in his great works.  There
would be nothing trivial about our lives.  Every-day things with us
would mean the greatest things.  It would be like marrying Pascal.  I
should learn to see the truth by the same light as great men have seen
it by.  And then I should know what to do, when I got older: I should
see how it was possible to lead a grand life here--now--in England.  I
don't feel sure about doing good in any way now: everything seems like
going on a mission to a people whose language I don't know;--unless it
were building good cottages--there can be no doubt about that.  Oh, I
hope I should be able to get the people well housed in Lowick!  I will
draw plenty of plans while I have time."

Dorothea checked herself suddenly with self-rebuke for the presumptuous
way in which she was reckoning on uncertain events, but she was spared
any inward effort to change the direction of her thoughts by the
appearance of a cantering horseman round a turning of the road.  The
well-groomed chestnut horse and two beautiful setters could leave no
doubt that the rider was Sir James Chettam.  He discerned Dorothea,
jumped off his horse at once, and, having delivered it to his groom,
advanced towards her with something white on his arm, at which the two
setters were barking in an excited manner.

"How delightful to meet you, Miss Brooke," he said, raising his hat and
showing his sleekly waving blond hair.  "It has hastened the pleasure I
was looking forward to."

Miss Brooke was annoyed at the interruption.  This amiable baronet,
really a suitable husband for Celia, exaggerated the necessity of
making himself agreeable to the elder sister.  Even a prospective
brother-in-law may be an oppression if he will always be presupposing
too good an understanding with you, and agreeing with you even when you
contradict him.  The thought that he had made the mistake of paying his
addresses to herself could not take shape: all her mental activity was
used up in persuasions of another kind.  But he was positively
obtrusive at this moment, and his dimpled hands were quite
disagreeable.  Her roused temper made her color deeply, as she returned
his greeting with some haughtiness.

Sir James interpreted the heightened color in the way most gratifying
to himself, and thought he never saw Miss Brooke looking so handsome.

"I have brought a little petitioner," he said, "or rather, I have
brought him to see if he will be approved before his petition is
offered." He showed the white object under his arm, which was a tiny
Maltese puppy, one of nature's most naive toys.

"It is painful to me to see these creatures that are bred merely as
pets," said Dorothea, whose opinion was forming itself that very moment
(as opinions will) under the heat of irritation.

"Oh, why?" said Sir James, as they walked forward.

"I believe all the petting that is given them does not make them happy.
They are too helpless: their lives are too frail.  A weasel or a mouse
that gets its own living is more interesting.  I like to think that the
animals about us have souls something like our own, and either carry on
their own little affairs or can be companions to us, like Monk here.
Those creatures are parasitic."

"I am so glad I know that you do not like them," said good Sir James.
"I should never keep them for myself, but ladies usually are fond of
these Maltese dogs.  Here, John, take this dog, will you?"

The objectionable puppy, whose nose and eyes were equally black and
expressive, was thus got rid of, since Miss Brooke decided that it had
better not have been born.  But she felt it necessary to explain.

"You must not judge of Celia's feeling from mine.  I think she likes
these small pets.  She had a tiny terrier once, which she was very fond
of.  It made me unhappy, because I was afraid of treading on it.  I am
rather short-sighted."

"You have your own opinion about everything, Miss Brooke, and it is
always a good opinion."

What answer was possible to such stupid complimenting?

"Do you know, I envy you that," Sir James said, as they continued
walking at the rather brisk pace set by Dorothea.

"I don't quite understand what you mean."

"Your power of forming an opinion.  I can form an opinion of persons.
I know when I like people.  But about other matters, do you know, I
have often a difficulty in deciding.  One hears very sensible things
said on opposite sides."

"Or that seem sensible.  Perhaps we don't always discriminate between
sense and nonsense."

Dorothea felt that she was rather rude.

"Exactly," said Sir James.  "But you seem to have the power of
discrimination."

"On the contrary, I am often unable to decide.  But that is from
ignorance.  The right conclusion is there all the same, though I am
unable to see it."

"I think there are few who would see it more readily.  Do you know,
Lovegood was telling me yesterday that you had the best notion in the
world of a plan for cottages--quite wonderful for a young lady, he
thought.  You had a real _genus_, to use his expression.  He said you
wanted Mr. Brooke to build a new set of cottages, but he seemed to
think it hardly probable that your uncle would consent.  Do you know,
that is one of the things I wish to do--I mean, on my own estate.  I
should be so glad to carry out that plan of yours, if you would let me
see it.  Of course, it is sinking money; that is why people object to
it.  Laborers can never pay rent to make it answer.  But, after all, it
is worth doing."

"Worth doing! yes, indeed," said Dorothea, energetically, forgetting
her previous small vexations.  "I think we deserve to be beaten out of
our beautiful houses with a scourge of small cords--all of us who let
tenants live in such sties as we see round us.  Life in cottages might
be happier than ours, if they were real houses fit for human beings
from whom we expect duties and affections."

"Will you show me your plan?"

"Yes, certainly.  I dare say it is very faulty.  But I have been
examining all the plans for cottages in Loudon's book, and picked out
what seem the best things.  Oh what a happiness it would be to set the
pattern about here!  I think instead of Lazarus at the gate, we should
put the pigsty cottages outside the park-gate."

Dorothea was in the best temper now.  Sir James, as brother in-law,
building model cottages on his estate, and then, perhaps, others being
built at Lowick, and more and more elsewhere in imitation--it would be
as if the spirit of Oberlin had passed over the parishes to make the
life of poverty beautiful!

Sir James saw all the plans, and took one away to consult upon with
Lovegood.  He also took away a complacent sense that he was making
great progress in Miss Brooke's good opinion.  The Maltese puppy was
not offered to Celia; an omission which Dorothea afterwards thought of
with surprise; but she blamed herself for it.  She had been engrossing
Sir James.  After all, it was a relief that there was no puppy to tread
upon.

Celia was present while the plans were being examined, and observed Sir
James's illusion.  "He thinks that Dodo cares about him, and she only
cares about her plans.  Yet I am not certain that she would refuse him
if she thought he would let her manage everything and carry out all her
notions.  And how very uncomfortable Sir James would be!  I cannot bear
notions."

It was Celia's private luxury to indulge in this dislike.  She dared
not confess it to her sister in any direct statement, for that would be
laying herself open to a demonstration that she was somehow or other at
war with all goodness.  But on safe opportunities, she had an indirect
mode of making her negative wisdom tell upon Dorothea, and calling her
down from her rhapsodic mood by reminding her that people were staring,
not listening.  Celia was not impulsive: what she had to say could
wait, and came from her always with the same quiet staccato evenness.
When people talked with energy and emphasis she watched their faces and
features merely.  She never could understand how well-bred persons
consented to sing and open their mouths in the ridiculous manner
requisite for that vocal exercise.

It was not many days before Mr. Casaubon paid a morning visit, on which
he was invited again for the following week to dine and stay the night.
Thus Dorothea had three more conversations with him, and was convinced
that her first impressions had been just.  He was all she had at first
imagined him to be: almost everything he had said seemed like a
specimen from a mine, or the inscription on the door of a museum which
might open on the treasures of past ages; and this trust in his mental
wealth was all the deeper and more effective on her inclination because
it was now obvious that his visits were made for her sake.  This
accomplished man condescended to think of a young girl, and take the
pains to talk to her, not with absurd compliment, but with an appeal to
her understanding, and sometimes with instructive correction.  What
delightful companionship!  Mr. Casaubon seemed even unconscious that
trivialities existed, and never handed round that small-talk of heavy
men which is as acceptable as stale bride-cake brought forth with an
odor of cupboard.  He talked of what he was interested in, or else he
was silent and bowed with sad civility.  To Dorothea this was adorable
genuineness, and religious abstinence from that artificiality which
uses up the soul in the efforts of pretence.  For she looked as
reverently at Mr. Casaubon's religious elevation above herself as she
did at his intellect and learning.  He assented to her expressions of
devout feeling, and usually with an appropriate quotation; he allowed
himself to say that he had gone through some spiritual conflicts in his
youth; in short, Dorothea saw that here she might reckon on
understanding, sympathy, and guidance.  On one--only one--of her
favorite themes she was disappointed.  Mr. Casaubon apparently did not
care about building cottages, and diverted the talk to the extremely
narrow accommodation which was to be had in the dwellings of the
ancient Egyptians, as if to check a too high standard.  After he was
gone, Dorothea dwelt with some agitation on this indifference of his;
and her mind was much exercised with arguments drawn from the varying
conditions of climate which modify human needs, and from the admitted
wickedness of pagan despots.  Should she not urge these arguments on
Mr. Casaubon when he came again?  But further reflection told her that
she was presumptuous in demanding his attention to such a subject; he
would not disapprove of her occupying herself with it in leisure
moments, as other women expected to occupy themselves with their dress
and embroidery--would not forbid it when--Dorothea felt rather ashamed
as she detected herself in these speculations.  But her uncle had been
invited to go to Lowick to stay a couple of days: was it reasonable to
suppose that Mr. Casaubon delighted in Mr. Brooke's society for its own
sake, either with or without documents?

Meanwhile that little disappointment made her delight the more in Sir
James Chettam's readiness to set on foot the desired improvements.  He
came much oftener than Mr. Casaubon, and Dorothea ceased to find him
disagreeable since he showed himself so entirely in earnest; for he had
already entered with much practical ability into Lovegood's estimates,
and was charmingly docile.  She proposed to build a couple of cottages,
and transfer two families from their old cabins, which could then be
pulled down, so that new ones could be built on the old sites.  Sir
James said "Exactly," and she bore the word remarkably well.

Certainly these men who had so few spontaneous ideas might be very
useful members of society under good feminine direction, if they were
fortunate in choosing their sisters-in-law!  It is difficult to say
whether there was or was not a little wilfulness in her continuing
blind to the possibility that another sort of choice was in question in
relation to her.  But her life was just now full of hope and action:
she was not only thinking of her plans, but getting down learned books
from the library and reading many things hastily (that she might be a
little less ignorant in talking to Mr. Casaubon), all the while being
visited with conscientious questionings whether she were not exalting
these poor doings above measure and contemplating them with that
self-satisfaction which was the last doom of ignorance and folly.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: By the next day, Dorothea's already decided that Mr. Casaubon's the man for her, moles and all. She feels that she'll be able to learn from him. Dorothea has a sense that there's a whole world of knowledge out there that she hasn't been able to access, and she thinks that Mr. Casaubon will give her the key to the world's knowledge. She's pretty sure that he's considering the idea of proposing to her, and she's grateful to him for even thinking of it - she feels so unworthy next to his great knowledge and vast wisdom. Dorothea's wandering around, thinking of how great Mr. Casaubon is, when Sir James Chettam shows up on horseback. Dorothea still thinks he's interested in Celia , and is irritable with him for interrupting her thoughts. When he asks to see her plan for improving the cottages of the tenants in the village, she warms up to him. Celia knows that Sir James is interested in Dorothea, and feels sorry for him - she knows Dorothea will reject him. Several days later, Mr. Casaubon comes for another visit. Dorothea finds new reasons to like him: she loves that he doesn't engage in small talk or idle chitchat like everyone else. He only talks about important subjects, or else keeps his mouth shut. Unfortunately, he doesn't seem to care about building better cottages for the villagers . He's more interested in the houses the ancient Egyptians lived in. Sir James visits more often than Mr. Casaubon, and he's so interested in Dorothea's cottage plans that she begins almost to like him - of course, she only likes him as a future brother-in-law. She still doesn't realize that he's there to court her, and not Celia.


prompt:
Chapter: 1st Gent. Our deeds are fetters that we forge ourselves.
    2d Gent.  Ay, truly: but I think it is the world
                 That brings the iron.

"Sir James seems determined to do everything you wish," said Celia, as
they were driving home from an inspection of the new building-site.

"He is a good creature, and more sensible than any one would imagine,"
said Dorothea, inconsiderately.

"You mean that he appears silly."

"No, no," said Dorothea, recollecting herself, and laying her hand on
her sister's a moment, "but he does not talk equally well on all
subjects."

"I should think none but disagreeable people do," said Celia, in her
usual purring way.  "They must be very dreadful to live with.  Only
think! at breakfast, and always."

Dorothea laughed.  "O Kitty, you are a wonderful creature!" She pinched
Celia's chin, being in the mood now to think her very winning and
lovely--fit hereafter to be an eternal cherub, and if it were not
doctrinally wrong to say so, hardly more in need of salvation than a
squirrel.  "Of course people need not be always talking well.  Only one
tells the quality of their minds when they try to talk well."

"You mean that Sir James tries and fails."

"I was speaking generally.  Why do you catechise me about Sir James?
It is not the object of his life to please me."

"Now, Dodo, can you really believe that?"

"Certainly. He thinks of me as a future sister--that is all." Dorothea
had never hinted this before, waiting, from a certain shyness on such
subjects which was mutual between the sisters, until it should be
introduced by some decisive event.  Celia blushed, but said at once--

"Pray do not make that mistake any longer, Dodo.  When Tantripp was
brushing my hair the other day, she said that Sir James's man knew from
Mrs. Cadwallader's maid that Sir James was to marry the eldest Miss
Brooke."

"How can you let Tantripp talk such gossip to you, Celia?" said
Dorothea, indignantly, not the less angry because details asleep in her
memory were now awakened to confirm the unwelcome revelation.  "You
must have asked her questions.  It is degrading."

"I see no harm at all in Tantripp's talking to me.  It is better to
hear what people say.  You see what mistakes you make by taking up
notions.  I am quite sure that Sir James means to make you an offer;
and he believes that you will accept him, especially since you have
been so pleased with him about the plans.  And uncle too--I know he
expects it.  Every one can see that Sir James is very much in love with
you."

The revulsion was so strong and painful in Dorothea's mind that the
tears welled up and flowed abundantly.  All her dear plans were
embittered, and she thought with disgust of Sir James's conceiving that
she recognized him as her lover.  There was vexation too on account of
Celia.

"How could he expect it?" she burst forth in her most impetuous manner.
"I have never agreed with him about anything but the cottages: I was
barely polite to him before."

"But you have been so pleased with him since then; he has begun to feel
quite sure that you are fond of him."

"Fond of him, Celia!  How can you choose such odious expressions?" said
Dorothea, passionately.

"Dear me, Dorothea, I suppose it would be right for you to be fond of a
man whom you accepted for a husband."

"It is offensive to me to say that Sir James could think I was fond of
him.  Besides, it is not the right word for the feeling I must have
towards the man I would accept as a husband."

"Well, I am sorry for Sir James.  I thought it right to tell you,
because you went on as you always do, never looking just where you are,
and treading in the wrong place.  You always see what nobody else sees;
it is impossible to satisfy you; yet you never see what is quite plain.
That's your way, Dodo." Something certainly gave Celia unusual courage;
and she was not sparing the sister of whom she was occasionally in awe.
Who can tell what just criticisms Murr the Cat may be passing on us
beings of wider speculation?

"It is very painful," said Dorothea, feeling scourged.  "I can have no
more to do with the cottages.  I must be uncivil to him.  I must tell
him I will have nothing to do with them.  It is very painful." Her eyes
filled again with tears.

"Wait a little.  Think about it.  You know he is going away for a day
or two to see his sister.  There will be nobody besides Lovegood."
Celia could not help relenting.  "Poor Dodo," she went on, in an
amiable staccato.  "It is very hard: it is your favorite _fad_ to draw
plans."

"_Fad_ to draw plans!  Do you think I only care about my
fellow-creatures' houses in that childish way?  I may well make
mistakes.  How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among
people with such petty thoughts?"

No more was said; Dorothea was too much jarred to recover her temper
and behave so as to show that she admitted any error in herself.  She
was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the
purblind conscience of the society around her: and Celia was no longer
the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white
nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the "Pilgrim's
Progress." The _fad_ of drawing plans!  What was life worth--what great
faith was possible when the whole effect of one's actions could be
withered up into such parched rubbish as that?  When she got out of the
carriage, her cheeks were pale and her eyelids red.  She was an image
of sorrow, and her uncle who met her in the hall would have been
alarmed, if Celia had not been close to her looking so pretty and
composed, that he at once concluded Dorothea's tears to have their
origin in her excessive religiousness.  He had returned, during their
absence, from a journey to the county town, about a petition for the
pardon of some criminal.

"Well, my dears," he said, kindly, as they went up to kiss him, "I hope
nothing disagreeable has happened while I have been away."

"No, uncle," said Celia, "we have been to Freshitt to look at the
cottages.  We thought you would have been at home to lunch."

"I came by Lowick to lunch--you didn't know I came by Lowick.  And I
have brought a couple of pamphlets for you, Dorothea--in the library,
you know; they lie on the table in the library."

It seemed as if an electric stream went through Dorothea, thrilling her
from despair into expectation.  They were pamphlets about the early
Church.  The oppression of Celia, Tantripp, and Sir James was shaken
off, and she walked straight to the library.  Celia went up-stairs. Mr.
Brooke was detained by a message, but when he re-entered the library,
he found Dorothea seated and already deep in one of the pamphlets which
had some marginal manuscript of Mr. Casaubon's,--taking it in as
eagerly as she might have taken in the scent of a fresh bouquet after a
dry, hot, dreary walk.

She was getting away from Tipton and Freshitt, and her own sad
liability to tread in the wrong places on her way to the New Jerusalem.

Mr. Brooke sat down in his arm-chair, stretched his legs towards the
wood-fire, which had fallen into a wondrous mass of glowing dice
between the dogs, and rubbed his hands gently, looking very mildly
towards Dorothea, but with a neutral leisurely air, as if he had
nothing particular to say.  Dorothea closed her pamphlet, as soon as
she was aware of her uncle's presence, and rose as if to go.  Usually
she would have been interested about her uncle's merciful errand on
behalf of the criminal, but her late agitation had made her
absent-minded.

"I came back by Lowick, you know," said Mr. Brooke, not as if with any
intention to arrest her departure, but apparently from his usual
tendency to say what he had said before.  This fundamental principle of
human speech was markedly exhibited in Mr. Brooke.  "I lunched there
and saw Casaubon's library, and that kind of thing.  There's a sharp
air, driving.  Won't you sit down, my dear?  You look cold."

Dorothea felt quite inclined to accept the invitation.  Some times,
when her uncle's easy way of taking things did not happen to be
exasperating, it was rather soothing.  She threw off her mantle and
bonnet, and sat down opposite to him, enjoying the glow, but lifting up
her beautiful hands for a screen.  They were not thin hands, or small
hands; but powerful, feminine, maternal hands.  She seemed to be
holding them up in propitiation for her passionate desire to know and
to think, which in the unfriendly mediums of Tipton and Freshitt had
issued in crying and red eyelids.

She bethought herself now of the condemned criminal.  "What news have
you brought about the sheep-stealer, uncle?"

"What, poor Bunch?--well, it seems we can't get him off--he is to be
hanged."

Dorothea's brow took an expression of reprobation and pity.

"Hanged, you know," said Mr. Brooke, with a quiet nod.  "Poor Romilly!
he would have helped us.  I knew Romilly.  Casaubon didn't know
Romilly.  He is a little buried in books, you know, Casaubon is."

"When a man has great studies and is writing a great work, he must of
course give up seeing much of the world.  How can he go about making
acquaintances?"

"That's true.  But a man mopes, you know.  I have always been a
bachelor too, but I have that sort of disposition that I never moped;
it was my way to go about everywhere and take in everything.  I never
moped: but I can see that Casaubon does, you know.  He wants a
companion--a companion, you know."

"It would be a great honor to any one to be his companion," said
Dorothea, energetically.

"You like him, eh?" said Mr. Brooke, without showing any surprise, or
other emotion.  "Well, now, I've known Casaubon ten years, ever since
he came to Lowick.  But I never got anything out of him--any ideas, you
know.  However, he is a tiptop man and may be a bishop--that kind of
thing, you know, if Peel stays in.  And he has a very high opinion of
you, my dear."

Dorothea could not speak.

"The fact is, he has a very high opinion indeed of you.  And he speaks
uncommonly well--does Casaubon.  He has deferred to me, you not being
of age.  In short, I have promised to speak to you, though I told him I
thought there was not much chance.  I was bound to tell him that.  I
said, my niece is very young, and that kind of thing.  But I didn't
think it necessary to go into everything.  However, the long and the
short of it is, that he has asked my permission to make you an offer of
marriage--of marriage, you know," said Mr. Brooke, with his explanatory
nod.  "I thought it better to tell you, my dear."

No one could have detected any anxiety in Mr. Brooke's manner, but he
did really wish to know something of his niece's mind, that, if there
were any need for advice, he might give it in time.  What feeling he,
as a magistrate who had taken in so many ideas, could make room for,
was unmixedly kind.  Since Dorothea did not speak immediately, he
repeated, "I thought it better to tell you, my dear."

"Thank you, uncle," said Dorothea, in a clear unwavering tone.  "I am
very grateful to Mr. Casaubon.  If he makes me an offer, I shall accept
him.  I admire and honor him more than any man I ever saw."

Mr. Brooke paused a little, and then said in a lingering low tone, "Ah?
. . .  Well!  He is a good match in some respects.  But now, Chettam is
a good match.  And our land lies together.  I shall never interfere
against your wishes, my dear.  People should have their own way in
marriage, and that sort of thing--up to a certain point, you know.  I
have always said that, up to a certain point.  I wish you to marry
well; and I have good reason to believe that Chettam wishes to marry
you.  I mention it, you know."

"It is impossible that I should ever marry Sir James Chettam," said
Dorothea.  "If he thinks of marrying me, he has made a great mistake."

"That is it, you see.  One never knows.  I should have thought Chettam
was just the sort of man a woman would like, now."

"Pray do not mention him in that light again, uncle," said Dorothea,
feeling some of her late irritation revive.

Mr. Brooke wondered, and felt that women were an inexhaustible subject
of study, since even he at his age was not in a perfect state of
scientific prediction about them.  Here was a fellow like Chettam with
no chance at all.

"Well, but Casaubon, now.  There is no hurry--I mean for you.  It's
true, every year will tell upon him.  He is over five-and-forty, you
know.  I should say a good seven-and-twenty years older than you.  To
be sure,--if you like learning and standing, and that sort of thing, we
can't have everything.  And his income is good--he has a handsome
property independent of the Church--his income is good.  Still he is
not young, and I must not conceal from you, my dear, that I think his
health is not over-strong. I know nothing else against him."

"I should not wish to have a husband very near my own age," said
Dorothea, with grave decision.  "I should wish to have a husband who
was above me in judgment and in all knowledge."

Mr. Brooke repeated his subdued, "Ah?--I thought you had more of your
own opinion than most girls.  I thought you liked your own
opinion--liked it, you know."

"I cannot imagine myself living without some opinions, but I should
wish to have good reasons for them, and a wise man could help me to see
which opinions had the best foundation, and would help me to live
according to them."

"Very true.  You couldn't put the thing better--couldn't put it better,
beforehand, you know.  But there are oddities in things," continued Mr.
Brooke, whose conscience was really roused to do the best he could for
his niece on this occasion.  "Life isn't cast in a mould--not cut out
by rule and line, and that sort of thing.  I never married myself, and
it will be the better for you and yours.  The fact is, I never loved
any one well enough to put myself into a noose for them.  It _is_ a
noose, you know.  Temper, now.  There is temper.  And a husband likes
to be master."

"I know that I must expect trials, uncle.  Marriage is a state of
higher duties.  I never thought of it as mere personal ease," said poor
Dorothea.

"Well, you are not fond of show, a great establishment, balls, dinners,
that kind of thing.  I can see that Casaubon's ways might suit you
better than Chettam's. And you shall do as you like, my dear.  I would
not hinder Casaubon; I said so at once; for there is no knowing how
anything may turn out.  You have not the same tastes as every young
lady; and a clergyman and scholar--who may be a bishop--that kind of
thing--may suit you better than Chettam.  Chettam is a good fellow, a
good sound-hearted fellow, you know; but he doesn't go much into ideas.
I did, when I was his age.  But Casaubon's eyes, now.  I think he has
hurt them a little with too much reading."

"I should be all the happier, uncle, the more room there was for me to
help him," said Dorothea, ardently.

"You have quite made up your mind, I see.  Well, my dear, the fact is,
I have a letter for you in my pocket." Mr. Brooke handed the letter to
Dorothea, but as she rose to go away, he added, "There is not too much
hurry, my dear.  Think about it, you know."

When Dorothea had left him, he reflected that he had certainly spoken
strongly: he had put the risks of marriage before her in a striking
manner.  It was his duty to do so.  But as to pretending to be wise for
young people,--no uncle, however much he had travelled in his youth,
absorbed the new ideas, and dined with celebrities now deceased, could
pretend to judge what sort of marriage would turn out well for a young
girl who preferred Casaubon to Chettam.  In short, woman was a problem
which, since Mr. Brooke's mind felt blank before it, could be hardly
less complicated than the revolutions of an irregular solid.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Celia finally sets Dorothea straight: Sir James is intending to propose to "the eldest Miss Brooke." Dorothea is very irritated by the news - she'll have to give up discussing her cottage plans with him. Mr. Brooke comes home and asks to speak with Dorothea in his library. He says that he'd had lunch with Mr. Casaubon on his way home, and that Mr. Casaubon had asked his permission to propose to Dorothea. Dorothea tells her uncle that, when and if Mr. Casaubon proposes to her, she'll accept him. Mr. Brooke is totally blown away by the news, and rambles on about how maybe Mr. Casaubon will suit her better than a younger man, after all, since she's so interested in books and ideas and stuff. Dorothea leaves Mr. Brooke bewildered about women. He really doesn't get Dorothea at all.


prompt:
Chapter: "Hard students are commonly troubled with gowts, catarrhs,
    rheums, cachexia, bradypepsia, bad eyes, stone, and collick,
    crudities, oppilations, vertigo, winds, consumptions, and
    all such diseases as come by over-much sitting: they are
    most part lean, dry, ill-colored . . . and all through
    immoderate pains and extraordinary studies. If you will not
    believe the truth of this, look upon great Tostatus and
    Thomas Aquainas' works; and tell me whether those men took
    pains."--BURTON'S Anatomy of Melancholy, P. I, s. 2.

This was Mr. Casaubon's letter.

MY DEAR MISS BROOKE,--I have your guardian's permission to address you
on a subject than which I have none more at heart.  I am not, I trust,
mistaken in the recognition of some deeper correspondence than that of
date in the fact that a consciousness of need in my own life had arisen
contemporaneously with the possibility of my becoming acquainted with
you.  For in the first hour of meeting you, I had an impression of your
eminent and perhaps exclusive fitness to supply that need (connected, I
may say, with such activity of the affections as even the
preoccupations of a work too special to be abdicated could not
uninterruptedly dissimulate); and each succeeding opportunity for
observation has given the impression an added depth by convincing me
more emphatically of that fitness which I had preconceived, and thus
evoking more decisively those affections to which I have but now
referred.  Our conversations have, I think, made sufficiently clear to
you the tenor of my life and purposes: a tenor unsuited, I am aware, to
the commoner order of minds.  But I have discerned in you an elevation
of thought and a capability of devotedness, which I had hitherto not
conceived to be compatible either with the early bloom of youth or with
those graces of sex that may be said at once to win and to confer
distinction when combined, as they notably are in you, with the mental
qualities above indicated.  It was, I confess, beyond my hope to meet
with this rare combination of elements both solid and attractive,
adapted to supply aid in graver labors and to cast a charm over vacant
hours; and but for the event of my introduction to you (which, let me
again say, I trust not to be superficially coincident with
foreshadowing needs, but providentially related thereto as stages
towards the completion of a life's plan), I should presumably have gone
on to the last without any attempt to lighten my solitariness by a
matrimonial union.

Such, my dear Miss Brooke, is the accurate statement of my feelings;
and I rely on your kind indulgence in venturing now to ask you how far
your own are of a nature to confirm my happy presentiment.  To be
accepted by you as your husband and the earthly guardian of your
welfare, I should regard as the highest of providential gifts.  In
return I can at least offer you an affection hitherto unwasted, and the
faithful consecration of a life which, however short in the sequel, has
no backward pages whereon, if you choose to turn them, you will find
records such as might justly cause you either bitterness or shame.  I
await the expression of your sentiments with an anxiety which it would
be the part of wisdom (were it possible) to divert by a more arduous
labor than usual.  But in this order of experience I am still young,
and in looking forward to an unfavorable possibility I cannot but feel
that resignation to solitude will be more difficult after the temporary
illumination of hope.

        In any case, I shall remain,
                Yours with sincere devotion,
                        EDWARD CASAUBON.

Dorothea trembled while she read this letter; then she fell on her
knees, buried her face, and sobbed.  She could not pray: under the rush
of solemn emotion in which thoughts became vague and images floated
uncertainly, she could but cast herself, with a childlike sense of
reclining, in the lap of a divine consciousness which sustained her
own.  She remained in that attitude till it was time to dress for
dinner.

How could it occur to her to examine the letter, to look at it
critically as a profession of love?  Her whole soul was possessed by
the fact that a fuller life was opening before her: she was a neophyte
about to enter on a higher grade of initiation.  She was going to have
room for the energies which stirred uneasily under the dimness and
pressure of her own ignorance and the petty peremptoriness of the
world's habits.

Now she would be able to devote herself to large yet definite duties;
now she would be allowed to live continually in the light of a mind
that she could reverence.  This hope was not unmixed with the glow of
proud delight--the joyous maiden surprise that she was chosen by the
man whom her admiration had chosen.  All Dorothea's passion was
transfused through a mind struggling towards an ideal life; the
radiance of her transfigured girlhood fell on the first object that
came within its level.  The impetus with which inclination became
resolution was heightened by those little events of the day which had
roused her discontent with the actual conditions of her life.

After dinner, when Celia was playing an "air, with variations," a small
kind of tinkling which symbolized the aesthetic part of the young
ladies' education, Dorothea went up to her room to answer Mr.
Casaubon's letter.  Why should she defer the answer?  She wrote it over
three times, not because she wished to change the wording, but because
her hand was unusually uncertain, and she could not bear that Mr.
Casaubon should think her handwriting bad and illegible.  She piqued
herself on writing a hand in which each letter was distinguishable
without any large range of conjecture, and she meant to make much use
of this accomplishment, to save Mr. Casaubon's eyes.  Three times she
wrote.

MY DEAR MR. CASAUBON,--I am very grateful to you for loving me, and
thinking me worthy to be your wife.  I can look forward to no better
happiness than that which would be one with yours.  If I said more, it
would only be the same thing written out at greater length, for I
cannot now dwell on any other thought than that I may be through life

                Yours devotedly,
                        DOROTHEA BROOKE.

Later in the evening she followed her uncle into the library to give
him the letter, that he might send it in the morning.  He was
surprised, but his surprise only issued in a few moments' silence,
during which he pushed about various objects on his writing-table, and
finally stood with his back to the fire, his glasses on his nose,
looking at the address of Dorothea's letter.

"Have you thought enough about this, my dear?" he said at last.

"There was no need to think long, uncle.  I know of nothing to make me
vacillate.  If I changed my mind, it must be because of something
important and entirely new to me."

"Ah!--then you have accepted him?  Then Chettam has no chance?  Has
Chettam offended you--offended you, you know?  What is it you don't
like in Chettam?"

"There is nothing that I like in him," said Dorothea, rather
impetuously.

Mr. Brooke threw his head and shoulders backward as if some one had
thrown a light missile at him.  Dorothea immediately felt some
self-rebuke, and said--

"I mean in the light of a husband.  He is very kind, I think--really
very good about the cottages.  A well-meaning man."

"But you must have a scholar, and that sort of thing?  Well, it lies a
little in our family.  I had it myself--that love of knowledge, and
going into everything--a little too much--it took me too far; though
that sort of thing doesn't often run in the female-line; or it runs
underground like the rivers in Greece, you know--it comes out in the
sons.  Clever sons, clever mothers.  I went a good deal into that, at
one time.  However, my dear, I have always said that people should do
as they like in these things, up to a certain point.  I couldn't, as
your guardian, have consented to a bad match.  But Casaubon stands
well: his position is good.  I am afraid Chettam will be hurt, though,
and Mrs. Cadwallader will blame me."

That evening, of course, Celia knew nothing of what had happened.  She
attributed Dorothea's abstracted manner, and the evidence of further
crying since they had got home, to the temper she had been in about Sir
James Chettam and the buildings, and was careful not to give further
offence: having once said what she wanted to say, Celia had no
disposition to recur to disagreeable subjects.  It had been her nature
when a child never to quarrel with any one--only to observe with wonder
that they quarrelled with her, and looked like turkey-cocks; whereupon
she was ready to play at cat's cradle with them whenever they recovered
themselves.  And as to Dorothea, it had always been her way to find
something wrong in her sister's words, though Celia inwardly protested
that she always said just how things were, and nothing else: she never
did and never could put words together out of her own head.  But the
best of Dodo was, that she did not keep angry for long together.  Now,
though they had hardly spoken to each other all the evening, yet when
Celia put by her work, intending to go to bed, a proceeding in which
she was always much the earlier, Dorothea, who was seated on a low
stool, unable to occupy herself except in meditation, said, with the
musical intonation which in moments of deep but quiet feeling made her
speech like a fine bit of recitative--

"Celia, dear, come and kiss me," holding her arms open as she spoke.

Celia knelt down to get the right level and gave her little butterfly
kiss, while Dorothea encircled her with gentle arms and pressed her
lips gravely on each cheek in turn.

"Don't sit up, Dodo, you are so pale to-night: go to bed soon," said
Celia, in a comfortable way, without any touch of pathos.

"No, dear, I am very, very happy," said Dorothea, fervently.

"So much the better," thought Celia.  "But how strangely Dodo goes from
one extreme to the other."

The next day, at luncheon, the butler, handing something to Mr. Brooke,
said, "Jonas is come back, sir, and has brought this letter."

Mr. Brooke read the letter, and then, nodding toward Dorothea, said,
"Casaubon, my dear: he will be here to dinner; he didn't wait to write
more--didn't wait, you know."

It could not seem remarkable to Celia that a dinner guest should be
announced to her sister beforehand, but, her eyes following the same
direction as her uncle's, she was struck with the peculiar effect of
the announcement on Dorothea.  It seemed as if something like the
reflection of a white sunlit wing had passed across her features,
ending in one of her rare blushes.  For the first time it entered into
Celia's mind that there might be something more between Mr. Casaubon
and her sister than his delight in bookish talk and her delight in
listening.  Hitherto she had classed the admiration for this "ugly" and
learned acquaintance with the admiration for Monsieur Liret at
Lausanne, also ugly and learned.  Dorothea had never been tired of
listening to old Monsieur Liret when Celia's feet were as cold as
possible, and when it had really become dreadful to see the skin of his
bald head moving about.  Why then should her enthusiasm not extend to
Mr. Casaubon simply in the same way as to Monsieur Liret?  And it
seemed probable that all learned men had a sort of schoolmaster's view
of young people.

But now Celia was really startled at the suspicion which had darted
into her mind.  She was seldom taken by surprise in this way, her
marvellous quickness in observing a certain order of signs generally
preparing her to expect such outward events as she had an interest in.
Not that she now imagined Mr. Casaubon to be already an accepted lover:
she had only begun to feel disgust at the possibility that anything in
Dorothea's mind could tend towards such an issue.  Here was something
really to vex her about Dodo: it was all very well not to accept Sir
James Chettam, but the idea of marrying Mr. Casaubon!  Celia felt a
sort of shame mingled with a sense of the ludicrous.  But perhaps Dodo,
if she were really bordering on such an extravagance, might be turned
away from it: experience had often shown that her impressibility might
be calculated on.  The day was damp, and they were not going to walk
out, so they both went up to their sitting-room; and there Celia
observed that Dorothea, instead of settling down with her usual
diligent interest to some occupation, simply leaned her elbow on an
open book and looked out of the window at the great cedar silvered with
the damp.  She herself had taken up the making of a toy for the
curate's children, and was not going to enter on any subject too
precipitately.

Dorothea was in fact thinking that it was desirable for Celia to know
of the momentous change in Mr. Casaubon's position since he had last
been in the house: it did not seem fair to leave her in ignorance of
what would necessarily affect her attitude towards him; but it was
impossible not to shrink from telling her.  Dorothea accused herself of
some meanness in this timidity: it was always odious to her to have any
small fears or contrivances about her actions, but at this moment she
was seeking the highest aid possible that she might not dread the
corrosiveness of Celia's pretty carnally minded prose.  Her reverie was
broken, and the difficulty of decision banished, by Celia's small and
rather guttural voice speaking in its usual tone, of a remark aside or
a "by the bye."

"Is any one else coming to dine besides Mr. Casaubon?"

"Not that I know of."

"I hope there is some one else.  Then I shall not hear him eat his soup
so."

"What is there remarkable about his soup-eating?"

"Really, Dodo, can't you hear how he scrapes his spoon?  And he always
blinks before he speaks.  I don't know whether Locke blinked, but I'm
sure I am sorry for those who sat opposite to him if he did."

"Celia," said Dorothea, with emphatic gravity, "pray don't make any
more observations of that kind."

"Why not?  They are quite true," returned Celia, who had her reasons
for persevering, though she was beginning to be a little afraid.

"Many things are true which only the commonest minds observe."

"Then I think the commonest minds must be rather useful.  I think it is
a pity Mr. Casaubon's mother had not a commoner mind: she might have
taught him better." Celia was inwardly frightened, and ready to run
away, now she had hurled this light javelin.

Dorothea's feelings had gathered to an avalanche, and there could be no
further preparation.

"It is right to tell you, Celia, that I am engaged to marry Mr.
Casaubon."

Perhaps Celia had never turned so pale before.  The paper man she was
making would have had his leg injured, but for her habitual care of
whatever she held in her hands.  She laid the fragile figure down at
once, and sat perfectly still for a few moments.  When she spoke there
was a tear gathering.

"Oh, Dodo, I hope you will be happy." Her sisterly tenderness could not
but surmount other feelings at this moment, and her fears were the
fears of affection.

Dorothea was still hurt and agitated.

"It is quite decided, then?" said Celia, in an awed under tone.  "And
uncle knows?"

"I have accepted Mr. Casaubon's offer.  My uncle brought me the letter
that contained it; he knew about it beforehand."

"I beg your pardon, if I have said anything to hurt you, Dodo," said
Celia, with a slight sob.  She never could have thought that she should
feel as she did.  There was something funereal in the whole affair, and
Mr. Casaubon seemed to be the officiating clergyman, about whom it
would be indecent to make remarks.

"Never mind, Kitty, do not grieve.  We should never admire the same
people.  I often offend in something of the same way; I am apt to speak
too strongly of those who don't please me."

In spite of this magnanimity Dorothea was still smarting: perhaps as
much from Celia's subdued astonishment as from her small criticisms.
Of course all the world round Tipton would be out of sympathy with this
marriage.  Dorothea knew of no one who thought as she did about life
and its best objects.

Nevertheless before the evening was at an end she was very happy.  In
an hour's tete-a-tete with Mr. Casaubon she talked to him with more
freedom than she had ever felt before, even pouring out her joy at the
thought of devoting herself to him, and of learning how she might best
share and further all his great ends.  Mr. Casaubon was touched with an
unknown delight (what man would not have been?) at this childlike
unrestrained ardor: he was not surprised (what lover would have been?)
that he should be the object of it.

"My dear young lady--Miss Brooke--Dorothea!" he said, pressing her hand
between his hands, "this is a happiness greater than I had ever
imagined to be in reserve for me.  That I should ever meet with a mind
and person so rich in the mingled graces which could render marriage
desirable, was far indeed from my conception.  You have all--nay, more
than all--those qualities which I have ever regarded as the
characteristic excellences of womanhood.  The great charm of your sex
is its capability of an ardent self-sacrificing affection, and herein
we see its fitness to round and complete the existence of our own.
Hitherto I have known few pleasures save of the severer kind: my
satisfactions have been those of the solitary student.  I have been
little disposed to gather flowers that would wither in my hand, but now
I shall pluck them with eagerness, to place them in your bosom."

No speech could have been more thoroughly honest in its intention: the
frigid rhetoric at the end was as sincere as the bark of a dog, or the
cawing of an amorous rook.  Would it not be rash to conclude that there
was no passion behind those sonnets to Delia which strike us as the
thin music of a mandolin?

Dorothea's faith supplied all that Mr. Casaubon's words seemed to leave
unsaid: what believer sees a disturbing omission or infelicity?  The
text, whether of prophet or of poet, expands for whatever we can put
into it, and even his bad grammar is sublime.

"I am very ignorant--you will quite wonder at my ignorance," said
Dorothea.  "I have so many thoughts that may be quite mistaken; and now
I shall be able to tell them all to you, and ask you about them.  But,"
she added, with rapid imagination of Mr. Casaubon's probable feeling,
"I will not trouble you too much; only when you are inclined to listen
to me.  You must often be weary with the pursuit of subjects in your
own track.  I shall gain enough if you will take me with you there."

"How should I be able now to persevere in any path without your
companionship?" said Mr. Casaubon, kissing her candid brow, and feeling
that heaven had vouchsafed him a blessing in every way suited to his
peculiar wants.  He was being unconsciously wrought upon by the charms
of a nature which was entirely without hidden calculations either for
immediate effects or for remoter ends.  It was this which made Dorothea
so childlike, and, according to some judges, so stupid, with all her
reputed cleverness; as, for example, in the present case of throwing
herself, metaphorically speaking, at Mr. Casaubon's feet, and kissing
his unfashionable shoe-ties as if he were a Protestant Pope.  She was
not in the least teaching Mr. Casaubon to ask if he were good enough
for her, but merely asking herself anxiously how she could be good
enough for Mr. Casaubon.  Before he left the next day it had been
decided that the marriage should take place within six weeks.  Why not?
Mr. Casaubon's house was ready.  It was not a parsonage, but a
considerable mansion, with much land attached to it.  The parsonage was
inhabited by the curate, who did all the duty except preaching the
morning sermon.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: The chapter opens with Mr. Casaubon's letter to Dorothea, proposing marriage. It sounds very formal and official. No compliments, no flattery, and nothing lovey-dovey. Dorothea likes it, though, and she's ecstatic at the idea of being able to love and serve someone who needs her help . A whole new world of knowledge seems to be opening before her! Hurray, helping a crusty old scholar organize his notes! Dorothea writes back almost immediately, accepting his offer in a few lines. She gives her letter to her uncle to mail for her, and he expresses some surprise and concern - especially on Sir James' account. Celia guesses what must have happened when she sees Dorothea blush at the mention of Mr. Casaubon's name at breakfast, but she can't believe it. She decides to test her theory, and makes a few lightly insulting remarks on the way Mr. Casaubon eats his soup. Dorothea cuts Celia off, and says that she's engaged to marry him. Celia is appalled at the thought of her sister marrying that old man with the moles who eats his soup so noisily, but she keeps her horror to herself. Mr. Casaubon comes to dinner and afterwards has a talk with Dorothea about their upcoming marriage. Their wedding will be in six weeks.


prompt:
Chapter: My lady's tongue is like the meadow blades,
    That cut you stroking them with idle hand.
    Nice cutting is her function: she divides
    With spiritual edge the millet-seed,
    And makes intangible savings.

As Mr. Casaubon's carriage was passing out of the gateway, it arrested
the entrance of a pony phaeton driven by a lady with a servant seated
behind.  It was doubtful whether the recognition had been mutual, for
Mr. Casaubon was looking absently before him; but the lady was
quick-eyed, and threw a nod and a "How do you do?" in the nick of time.
In spite of her shabby bonnet and very old Indian shawl, it was plain
that the lodge-keeper regarded her as an important personage, from the
low curtsy which was dropped on the entrance of the small phaeton.

"Well, Mrs. Fitchett, how are your fowls laying now?" said the
high-colored, dark-eyed lady, with the clearest chiselled utterance.

"Pretty well for laying, madam, but they've ta'en to eating their eggs:
I've no peace o' mind with 'em at all."

"Oh, the cannibals!  Better sell them cheap at once.  What will you
sell them a couple?  One can't eat fowls of a bad character at a high
price."

"Well, madam, half-a-crown: I couldn't let 'em go, not under."

"Half-a-crown, these times!  Come now--for the Rector's chicken-broth
on a Sunday.  He has consumed all ours that I can spare.  You are half
paid with the sermon, Mrs. Fitchett, remember that.  Take a pair of
tumbler-pigeons for them--little beauties.  You must come and see them.
You have no tumblers among your pigeons."

"Well, madam, Master Fitchett shall go and see 'em after work.  He's
very hot on new sorts; to oblige you."

"Oblige me!  It will be the best bargain he ever made.  A pair of
church pigeons for a couple of wicked Spanish fowls that eat their own
eggs!  Don't you and Fitchett boast too much, that is all!"

The phaeton was driven onwards with the last words, leaving Mrs.
Fitchett laughing and shaking her head slowly, with an interjectional
"Sure_ly_, sure_ly_!"--from which it might be inferred that she would
have found the country-side somewhat duller if the Rector's lady had
been less free-spoken and less of a skinflint.  Indeed, both the
farmers and laborers in the parishes of Freshitt and Tipton would have
felt a sad lack of conversation but for the stories about what Mrs.
Cadwallader said and did: a lady of immeasurably high birth, descended,
as it were, from unknown earls, dim as the crowd of heroic shades--who
pleaded poverty, pared down prices, and cut jokes in the most
companionable manner, though with a turn of tongue that let you know
who she was.  Such a lady gave a neighborliness to both rank and
religion, and mitigated the bitterness of uncommuted tithe.  A much
more exemplary character with an infusion of sour dignity would not
have furthered their comprehension of the Thirty-nine Articles, and
would have been less socially uniting.

Mr. Brooke, seeing Mrs. Cadwallader's merits from a different point of
view, winced a little when her name was announced in the library, where
he was sitting alone.

"I see you have had our Lowick Cicero here," she said, seating herself
comfortably, throwing back her wraps, and showing a thin but well-built
figure.  "I suspect you and he are brewing some bad polities, else you
would not be seeing so much of the lively man.  I shall inform against
you: remember you are both suspicious characters since you took Peel's
side about the Catholic Bill.  I shall tell everybody that you are
going to put up for Middlemarch on the Whig side when old Pinkerton
resigns, and that Casaubon is going to help you in an underhand manner:
going to bribe the voters with pamphlets, and throw open the
public-houses to distribute them.  Come, confess!"

"Nothing of the sort," said Mr. Brooke, smiling and rubbing his
eye-glasses, but really blushing a little at the impeachment.
"Casaubon and I don't talk politics much.  He doesn't care much about
the philanthropic side of things; punishments, and that kind of thing.
He only cares about Church questions.  That is not my line of action,
you know."

"Ra-a-ther too much, my friend.  I have heard of your doings.  Who was
it that sold his bit of land to the Papists at Middlemarch?  I believe
you bought it on purpose.  You are a perfect Guy Faux.  See if you are
not burnt in effigy this 5th of November coming.  Humphrey would not
come to quarrel with you about it, so I am come."

"Very good.  I was prepared to be persecuted for not persecuting--not
persecuting, you know."

"There you go!  That is a piece of clap-trap you have got ready for the
hustings.  Now, _do not_ let them lure you to the hustings, my dear Mr.
Brooke.  A man always makes a fool of himself, speechifying: there's no
excuse but being on the right side, so that you can ask a blessing on
your humming and hawing.  You will lose yourself, I forewarn you.  You
will make a Saturday pie of all parties' opinions, and be pelted by
everybody."

"That is what I expect, you know," said Mr. Brooke, not wishing to
betray how little he enjoyed this prophetic sketch--"what I expect as
an independent man.  As to the Whigs, a man who goes with the thinkers
is not likely to be hooked on by any party.  He may go with them up to
a certain point--up to a certain point, you know.  But that is what you
ladies never understand."

"Where your certain point is?  No. I should like to be told how a man
can have any certain point when he belongs to no party--leading a
roving life, and never letting his friends know his address.  'Nobody
knows where Brooke will be--there's no counting on Brooke'--that is
what people say of you, to be quite frank.  Now, do turn respectable.
How will you like going to Sessions with everybody looking shy on you,
and you with a bad conscience and an empty pocket?"

"I don't pretend to argue with a lady on politics," said Mr. Brooke,
with an air of smiling indifference, but feeling rather unpleasantly
conscious that this attack of Mrs. Cadwallader's had opened the
defensive campaign to which certain rash steps had exposed him.  "Your
sex are not thinkers, you know--varium et mutabile semper--that kind of
thing.  You don't know Virgil.  I knew"--Mr. Brooke reflected in time
that he had not had the personal acquaintance of the Augustan poet--"I
was going to say, poor Stoddart, you know.  That was what _he_ said.
You ladies are always against an independent attitude--a man's caring
for nothing but truth, and that sort of thing.  And there is no part of
the county where opinion is narrower than it is here--I don't mean to
throw stones, you know, but somebody is wanted to take the independent
line; and if I don't take it, who will?"

"Who?  Why, any upstart who has got neither blood nor position.  People
of standing should consume their independent nonsense at home, not hawk
it about.  And you! who are going to marry your niece, as good as your
daughter, to one of our best men.  Sir James would be cruelly annoyed:
it will be too hard on him if you turn round now and make yourself a
Whig sign-board."

Mr. Brooke again winced inwardly, for Dorothea's engagement had no
sooner been decided, than he had thought of Mrs. Cadwallader's
prospective taunts.  It might have been easy for ignorant observers to
say, "Quarrel with Mrs. Cadwallader;" but where is a country gentleman
to go who quarrels with his oldest neighbors?  Who could taste the fine
flavor in the name of Brooke if it were delivered casually, like wine
without a seal?  Certainly a man can only be cosmopolitan up to a
certain point.

"I hope Chettam and I shall always be good friends; but I am sorry to
say there is no prospect of his marrying my niece," said Mr. Brooke,
much relieved to see through the window that Celia was coming in.

"Why not?" said Mrs. Cadwallader, with a sharp note of surprise.  "It
is hardly a fortnight since you and I were talking about it."

"My niece has chosen another suitor--has chosen him, you know.  I have
had nothing to do with it.  I should have preferred Chettam; and I
should have said Chettam was the man any girl would have chosen.  But
there is no accounting for these things.  Your sex is capricious, you
know."

"Why, whom do you mean to say that you are going to let her marry?"
Mrs. Cadwallader's mind was rapidly surveying the possibilities of
choice for Dorothea.

But here Celia entered, blooming from a walk in the garden, and the
greeting with her delivered Mr. Brooke from the necessity of answering
immediately.  He got up hastily, and saying, "By the way, I must speak
to Wright about the horses," shuffled quickly out of the room.

"My dear child, what is this?--this about your sister's engagement?"
said Mrs. Cadwallader.

"She is engaged to marry Mr. Casaubon," said Celia, resorting, as
usual, to the simplest statement of fact, and enjoying this opportunity
of speaking to the Rector's wife alone.

"This is frightful.  How long has it been going on?"

"I only knew of it yesterday.  They are to be married in six weeks."

"Well, my dear, I wish you joy of your brother-in-law."

"I am so sorry for Dorothea."

"Sorry!  It is her doing, I suppose."

"Yes; she says Mr. Casaubon has a great soul."

"With all my heart."

"Oh, Mrs. Cadwallader, I don't think it can be nice to marry a man with
a great soul."

"Well, my dear, take warning.  You know the look of one now; when the
next comes and wants to marry you, don't you accept him."

"I'm sure I never should."

"No; one such in a family is enough.  So your sister never cared about
Sir James Chettam?  What would you have said to _him_ for a
brother-in-law?"

"I should have liked that very much.  I am sure he would have been a
good husband.  Only," Celia added, with a slight blush (she sometimes
seemed to blush as she breathed), "I don't think he would have suited
Dorothea."

"Not high-flown enough?"

"Dodo is very strict.  She thinks so much about everything, and is so
particular about what one says.  Sir James never seemed to please her."

"She must have encouraged him, I am sure.  That is not very creditable."

"Please don't be angry with Dodo; she does not see things.  She thought
so much about the cottages, and she was rude to Sir James sometimes;
but he is so kind, he never noticed it."

"Well," said Mrs. Cadwallader, putting on her shawl, and rising, as if
in haste, "I must go straight to Sir James and break this to him.  He
will have brought his mother back by this time, and I must call.  Your
uncle will never tell him.  We are all disappointed, my dear.  Young
people should think of their families in marrying.  I set a bad
example--married a poor clergyman, and made myself a pitiable object
among the De Bracys--obliged to get my coals by stratagem, and pray to
heaven for my salad oil.  However, Casaubon has money enough; I must do
him that justice.  As to his blood, I suppose the family quarterings
are three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant.  By the bye,
before I go, my dear, I must speak to your Mrs. Carter about pastry.  I
want to send my young cook to learn of her.  Poor people with four
children, like us, you know, can't afford to keep a good cook.  I have
no doubt Mrs. Carter will oblige me.  Sir James's cook is a perfect
dragon."

In less than an hour, Mrs. Cadwallader had circumvented Mrs. Carter and
driven to Freshitt Hall, which was not far from her own parsonage, her
husband being resident in Freshitt and keeping a curate in Tipton.

Sir James Chettam had returned from the short journey which had kept
him absent for a couple of days, and had changed his dress, intending
to ride over to Tipton Grange.  His horse was standing at the door when
Mrs. Cadwallader drove up, and he immediately appeared there himself,
whip in hand.  Lady Chettam had not yet returned, but Mrs.
Cadwallader's errand could not be despatched in the presence of grooms,
so she asked to be taken into the conservatory close by, to look at the
new plants; and on coming to a contemplative stand, she said--

"I have a great shock for you; I hope you are not so far gone in love
as you pretended to be."

It was of no use protesting, against Mrs. Cadwallader's way of putting
things.  But Sir James's countenance changed a little.  He felt a vague
alarm.

"I do believe Brooke is going to expose himself after all.  I accused
him of meaning to stand for Middlemarch on the Liberal side, and he
looked silly and never denied it--talked about the independent line,
and the usual nonsense."

"Is that all?" said Sir James, much relieved.

"Why," rejoined Mrs. Cadwallader, with a sharper note, "you don't mean
to say that you would like him to turn public man in that way--making a
sort of political Cheap Jack of himself?"

"He might be dissuaded, I should think.  He would not like the expense."

"That is what I told him.  He is vulnerable to reason there--always a
few grains of common-sense in an ounce of miserliness.  Miserliness is
a capital quality to run in families; it's the safe side for madness to
dip on.  And there must be a little crack in the Brooke family, else we
should not see what we are to see."

"What?  Brooke standing for Middlemarch?"

"Worse than that.  I really feel a little responsible.  I always told
you Miss Brooke would be such a fine match.  I knew there was a great
deal of nonsense in her--a flighty sort of Methodistical stuff.  But
these things wear out of girls.  However, I am taken by surprise for
once."

"What do you mean, Mrs. Cadwallader?" said Sir James.  His fear lest
Miss Brooke should have run away to join the Moravian Brethren, or some
preposterous sect unknown to good society, was a little allayed by the
knowledge that Mrs. Cadwallader always made the worst of things.  "What
has happened to Miss Brooke?  Pray speak out."

"Very well.  She is engaged to be married." Mrs. Cadwallader paused a
few moments, observing the deeply hurt expression in her friend's face,
which he was trying to conceal by a nervous smile, while he whipped his
boot; but she soon added, "Engaged to Casaubon."

Sir James let his whip fall and stooped to pick it up.  Perhaps his
face had never before gathered so much concentrated disgust as when he
turned to Mrs. Cadwallader and repeated, "Casaubon?"

"Even so.  You know my errand now."

"Good God!  It is horrible!  He is no better than a mummy!" (The point
of view has to be allowed for, as that of a blooming and disappointed
rival.)

"She says, he is a great soul.--A great bladder for dried peas to
rattle in!" said Mrs. Cadwallader.

"What business has an old bachelor like that to marry?" said Sir James.
"He has one foot in the grave."

"He means to draw it out again, I suppose."

"Brooke ought not to allow it: he should insist on its being put off
till she is of age.  She would think better of it then.  What is a
guardian for?"

"As if you could ever squeeze a resolution out of Brooke!"

"Cadwallader might talk to him."

"Not he!  Humphrey finds everybody charming. I never can get him to
abuse Casaubon.  He will even speak well of the bishop, though I tell
him it is unnatural in a beneficed clergyman; what can one do with a
husband who attends so little to the decencies?  I hide it as well as I
can by abusing everybody myself.  Come, come, cheer up!  you are well
rid of Miss Brooke, a girl who would have been requiring you to see the
stars by daylight.  Between ourselves, little Celia is worth two of
her, and likely after all to be the better match.  For this marriage to
Casaubon is as good as going to a nunnery."

"Oh, on my own account--it is for Miss Brooke's sake I think her
friends should try to use their influence."

"Well, Humphrey doesn't know yet.  But when I tell him, you may depend
on it he will say, 'Why not?  Casaubon is a good fellow--and
young--young enough.' These charitable people never know vinegar from
wine till they have swallowed it and got the colic.  However, if I were
a man I should prefer Celia, especially when Dorothea was gone.  The
truth is, you have been courting one and have won the other.  I can see
that she admires you almost as much as a man expects to be admired.  If
it were any one but me who said so, you might think it exaggeration.
Good-by!"

Sir James handed Mrs. Cadwallader to the phaeton, and then jumped on
his horse.  He was not going to renounce his ride because of his
friend's unpleasant news--only to ride the faster in some other
direction than that of Tipton Grange.

Now, why on earth should Mrs. Cadwallader have been at all busy about
Miss Brooke's marriage; and why, when one match that she liked to think
she had a hand in was frustrated, should she have straightway contrived
the preliminaries of another?  Was there any ingenious plot, any
hide-and-seek course of action, which might be detected by a careful
telescopic watch?  Not at all: a telescope might have swept the
parishes of Tipton and Freshitt, the whole area visited by Mrs.
Cadwallader in her phaeton, without witnessing any interview that could
excite suspicion, or any scene from which she did not return with the
same unperturbed keenness of eye and the same high natural color.  In
fact, if that convenient vehicle had existed in the days of the Seven
Sages, one of them would doubtless have remarked, that you can know
little of women by following them about in their pony-phaetons. Even
with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making
interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas under a
weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity
into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so
many animated tax-pennies, a stronger lens reveals to you certain
tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the
swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom.  In this way,
metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs. Cadwallader's
match-making will show a play of minute causes producing what may be
called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she
needed.  Her life was rurally simple, quite free from secrets either
foul, dangerous, or otherwise important, and not consciously affected
by the great affairs of the world.  All the more did the affairs of the
great world interest her, when communicated in the letters of high-born
relations: the way in which fascinating younger sons had gone to the
dogs by marrying their mistresses; the fine old-blooded idiocy of young
Lord Tapir, and the furious gouty humors of old Lord Megatherium; the
exact crossing of genealogies which had brought a coronet into a new
branch and widened the relations of scandal,--these were topics of
which she retained details with the utmost accuracy, and reproduced
them in an excellent pickle of epigrams, which she herself enjoyed the
more because she believed as unquestionably in birth and no-birth as
she did in game and vermin.  She would never have disowned any one on
the ground of poverty: a De Bracy reduced to take his dinner in a basin
would have seemed to her an example of pathos worth exaggerating, and I
fear his aristocratic vices would not have horrified her.  But her
feeling towards the vulgar rich was a sort of religious hatred: they
had probably made all their money out of high retail prices, and Mrs.
Cadwallader detested high prices for everything that was not paid in
kind at the Rectory: such people were no part of God's design in making
the world; and their accent was an affliction to the ears.  A town
where such monsters abounded was hardly more than a sort of low comedy,
which could not be taken account of in a well-bred scheme of the
universe.  Let any lady who is inclined to be hard on Mrs. Cadwallader
inquire into the comprehensiveness of her own beautiful views, and be
quite sure that they afford accommodation for all the lives which have
the honor to coexist with hers.

With such a mind, active as phosphorus, biting everything that came
near into the form that suited it, how could Mrs. Cadwallader feel that
the Miss Brookes and their matrimonial prospects were alien to her?
especially as it had been the habit of years for her to scold Mr.
Brooke with the friendliest frankness, and let him know in confidence
that she thought him a poor creature.  From the first arrival of the
young ladies in Tipton she had prearranged Dorothea's marriage with Sir
James, and if it had taken place would have been quite sure that it was
her doing: that it should not take place after she had preconceived it,
caused her an irritation which every thinker will sympathize with.  She
was the diplomatist of Tipton and Freshitt, and for anything to happen
in spite of her was an offensive irregularity.  As to freaks like this
of Miss Brooke's, Mrs. Cadwallader had no patience with them, and now
saw that her opinion of this girl had been infected with some of her
husband's weak charitableness: those Methodistical whims, that air of
being more religious than the rector and curate together, came from a
deeper and more constitutional disease than she had been willing to
believe.

"However," said Mrs. Cadwallader, first to herself and afterwards to
her husband, "I throw her over: there was a chance, if she had married
Sir James, of her becoming a sane, sensible woman.  He would never have
contradicted her, and when a woman is not contradicted, she has no
motive for obstinacy in her absurdities.  But now I wish her joy of her
hair shirt."

It followed that Mrs. Cadwallader must decide on another match for Sir
James, and having made up her mind that it was to be the younger Miss
Brooke, there could not have been a more skilful move towards the
success of her plan than her hint to the baronet that he had made an
impression on Celia's heart.  For he was not one of those gentlemen who
languish after the unattainable Sappho's apple that laughs from the
topmost bough--the charms which

        "Smile like the knot of cowslips on the cliff,
         Not to be come at by the willing hand."

He had no sonnets to write, and it could not strike him agreeably that
he was not an object of preference to the woman whom he had preferred.
Already the knowledge that Dorothea had chosen Mr. Casaubon had bruised
his attachment and relaxed its hold.  Although Sir James was a
sportsman, he had some other feelings towards women than towards grouse
and foxes, and did not regard his future wife in the light of prey,
valuable chiefly for the excitements of the chase.  Neither was he so
well acquainted with the habits of primitive races as to feel that an
ideal combat for her, tomahawk in hand, so to speak, was necessary to
the historical continuity of the marriage-tie. On the contrary, having
the amiable vanity which knits us to those who are fond of us, and
disinclines us to those who are indifferent, and also a good grateful
nature, the mere idea that a woman had a kindness towards him spun
little threads of tenderness from out his heart towards hers.

Thus it happened, that after Sir James had ridden rather fast for half
an hour in a direction away from Tipton Grange, he slackened his pace,
and at last turned into a road which would lead him back by a shorter
cut.  Various feelings wrought in him the determination after all to go
to the Grange to-day as if nothing new had happened.  He could not help
rejoicing that he had never made the offer and been rejected; mere
friendly politeness required that he should call to see Dorothea about
the cottages, and now happily Mrs. Cadwallader had prepared him to
offer his congratulations, if necessary, without showing too much
awkwardness.  He really did not like it: giving up Dorothea was very
painful to him; but there was something in the resolve to make this
visit forthwith and conquer all show of feeling, which was a sort of
file-biting and counter-irritant. And without his distinctly
recognizing the impulse, there certainly was present in him the sense
that Celia would be there, and that he should pay her more attention
than he had done before.

We mortals, men and women, devour many a disappointment between
breakfast and dinner-time; keep back the tears and look a little pale
about the lips, and in answer to inquiries say, "Oh, nothing!" Pride
helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide
our own hurts--not to hurt others.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: On his way out the gate of Mr. Brooke's estate in his carriage, Mr. Casaubon passes another lady in a smaller carriage on her way in. The lady isn't dressed very well, but she's clearly important socially - the lodge-keeper's wife curtseys to her as she opens the gate. It's Mrs. Cadwallader, the wife of the vicar. They aren't very well off , but Mrs. Cadwallader is the descendent of earls and dukes. She's also very opinionated and stubborn, and more than willing to give a piece of her mind to anyone who disagrees with her. Mr. Brooke isn't too happy when he sees Mrs. Cadwallader arrive - he knows she's going to scold him about allowing Dorothea to marry Mr. Casaubon. Mrs. Cadwallader begins by scolding Mr. Brooke on political questions, but quickly reverts to the question of Dorothea's marriage. She assumes that she'll marry Sir James. Mr. Brooke sets her straight, but doesn't mention who the preferred suitor is. Celia comes into the room, and Mr. Brooke takes the opportunity of escaping. Celia tells Mrs. Cadwallader that Dorothea's engaged to Mr. Casaubon. Mrs. Cadwallader is disappointed for Sir James' sake - she was partly responsible for setting them up. Mrs. Cadwallader excuses herself to go break the news to Sir James. He doesn't take it well, partly because he's disappointed , and partly because Casaubon is such an old "mummy." Mrs. Cadwallader hints that Sir James would be better off with Celia, anyway. Eliot's narrator then goes off on one of her famous tangents, philosophizing about how difficult it is to judge people and the reasons they do the things they do. She uses the metaphor of the microscope to illustrate her point - see the "Science" theme under "Quotes and Thoughts" for more on that. The chapter closes with a description of Sir James' disappointment when he next goes to lunch at Tipton Grange . Sir James, however, hides his disappointment, and resolves to pay more attention to Celia.