Chapter: Was never true love loved in vain,
    For truest love is highest gain.
    No art can make it: it must spring
    Where elements are fostering.
        So in heaven's spot and hour
        Springs the little native flower,
        Downward root and upward eye,
        Shapen by the earth and sky.


It happened to be on a Saturday evening that Will Ladislaw had that
little discussion with Lydgate.  Its effect when he went to his own
rooms was to make him sit up half the night, thinking over again, under
a new irritation, all that he had before thought of his having settled
in Middlemarch and harnessed himself with Mr. Brooke.  Hesitations
before he had taken the step had since turned into susceptibility to
every hint that he would have been wiser not to take it; and hence came
his heat towards Lydgate--a heat which still kept him restless.  Was he
not making a fool of himself?--and at a time when he was more than
ever conscious of being something better than a fool?  And for what end?

Well, for no definite end.  True, he had dreamy visions of
possibilities: there is no human being who having both passions and
thoughts does not think in consequence of his passions--does not find
images rising in his mind which soothe the passion with hope or sting
it with dread.  But this, which happens to us all, happens to some with
a wide difference; and Will was not one of those whose wit "keeps the
roadway:" he had his bypaths where there were little joys of his own
choosing, such as gentlemen cantering on the highroad might have
thought rather idiotic.  The way in which he made a sort of happiness
for himself out of his feeling for Dorothea was an example of this.  It
may seem strange, but it is the fact, that the ordinary vulgar vision
of which Mr. Casaubon suspected him--namely, that Dorothea might become
a widow, and that the interest he had established in her mind might
turn into acceptance of him as a husband--had no tempting, arresting
power over him; he did not live in the scenery of such an event, and
follow it out, as we all do with that imagined "otherwise" which is our
practical heaven.  It was not only that he was unwilling to entertain
thoughts which could be accused of baseness, and was already uneasy in
the sense that he had to justify himself from the charge of
ingratitude--the latent consciousness of many other barriers between
himself and Dorothea besides the existence of her husband, had helped
to turn away his imagination from speculating on what might befall Mr.
Casaubon.  And there were yet other reasons.  Will, we know, could not
bear the thought of any flaw appearing in his crystal: he was at once
exasperated and delighted by the calm freedom with which Dorothea
looked at him and spoke to him, and there was something so exquisite in
thinking of her just as she was, that he could not long for a change
which must somehow change her.  Do we not shun the street version of a
fine melody?--or shrink from the news that the rarity--some bit of
chiselling or engraving perhaps--which we have dwelt on even with
exultation in the trouble it has cost us to snatch glimpses of it, is
really not an uncommon thing, and may be obtained as an every-day
possession?  Our good depends on the quality and breadth of our
emotion; and to Will, a creature who cared little for what are called
the solid things of life and greatly for its subtler influences, to
have within him such a feeling as he had towards Dorothea, was like the
inheritance of a fortune.  What others might have called the futility
of his passion, made an additional delight for his imagination: he was
conscious of a generous movement, and of verifying in his own
experience that higher love-poetry which had charmed his fancy.
Dorothea, he said to himself, was forever enthroned in his soul: no
other woman could sit higher than her footstool; and if he could have
written out in immortal syllables the effect she wrought within him, he
might have boasted after the example of old Drayton, that,--

        "Queens hereafter might be glad to live
         Upon the alms of her superfluous praise."

But this result was questionable.  And what else could he do for
Dorothea?  What was his devotion worth to her?  It was impossible to
tell.  He would not go out of her reach.  He saw no creature among her
friends to whom he could believe that she spoke with the same simple
confidence as to him.  She had once said that she would like him to
stay; and stay he would, whatever fire-breathing dragons might hiss
around her.

This had always been the conclusion of Will's hesitations.  But he was
not without contradictoriness and rebellion even towards his own
resolve.  He had often got irritated, as he was on this particular
night, by some outside demonstration that his public exertions with Mr.
Brooke as a chief could not seem as heroic as he would like them to be,
and this was always associated with the other ground of
irritation--that notwithstanding his sacrifice of dignity for
Dorothea's sake, he could hardly ever see her.  Whereupon, not being
able to contradict these unpleasant facts, he contradicted his own
strongest bias and said, "I am a fool."

Nevertheless, since the inward debate necessarily turned on Dorothea,
he ended, as he had done before, only by getting a livelier sense of
what her presence would be to him; and suddenly reflecting that the
morrow would be Sunday, he determined to go to Lowick Church and see
her.  He slept upon that idea, but when he was dressing in the rational
morning light, Objection said--

"That will be a virtual defiance of Mr. Casaubon's prohibition to visit
Lowick, and Dorothea will be displeased."

"Nonsense!" argued Inclination, "it would be too monstrous for him to
hinder me from going out to a pretty country church on a spring
morning.  And Dorothea will be glad."

"It will be clear to Mr. Casaubon that you have come either to annoy
him or to see Dorothea."

"It is not true that I go to annoy him, and why should I not go to see
Dorothea?  Is he to have everything to himself and be always
comfortable?  Let him smart a little, as other people are obliged to
do.  I have always liked the quaintness of the church and congregation;
besides, I know the Tuckers: I shall go into their pew."

Having silenced Objection by force of unreason, Will walked to Lowick
as if he had been on the way to Paradise, crossing Halsell Common and
skirting the wood, where the sunlight fell broadly under the budding
boughs, bringing out the beauties of moss and lichen, and fresh green
growths piercing the brown.  Everything seemed to know that it was
Sunday, and to approve of his going to Lowick Church.  Will easily felt
happy when nothing crossed his humor, and by this time the thought of
vexing Mr. Casaubon had become rather amusing to him, making his face
break into its merry smile, pleasant to see as the breaking of sunshine
on the water--though the occasion was not exemplary.  But most of us
are apt to settle within ourselves that the man who blocks our way is
odious, and not to mind causing him a little of the disgust which his
personality excites in ourselves.  Will went along with a small book
under his arm and a hand in each side-pocket, never reading, but
chanting a little, as he made scenes of what would happen in church and
coming out.  He was experimenting in tunes to suit some words of his
own, sometimes trying a ready-made melody, sometimes improvising.  The
words were not exactly a hymn, but they certainly fitted his Sunday
experience:--

        "O me, O me, what frugal cheer
           My love doth feed upon!
         A touch, a ray, that is not here,
           A shadow that is gone:

        "A dream of breath that might be near,
           An inly-echoed tone,
         The thought that one may think me dear,
           The place where one was known,

        "The tremor of a banished fear,
           An ill that was not done--
         O me, O me, what frugal cheer
           My love doth feed upon!"

Sometimes, when he took off his hat, shaking his head backward, and
showing his delicate throat as he sang, he looked like an incarnation
of the spring whose spirit filled the air--a bright creature, abundant
in uncertain promises.

The bells were still ringing when he got to Lowick, and he went into
the curate's pew before any one else arrived there.  But he was still
left alone in it when the congregation had assembled.  The curate's pew
was opposite the rector's at the entrance of the small chancel, and
Will had time to fear that Dorothea might not come while he looked
round at the group of rural faces which made the congregation from year
to year within the white-washed walls and dark old pews, hardly with
more change than we see in the boughs of a tree which breaks here and
there with age, but yet has young shoots.  Mr. Rigg's frog-face was
something alien and unaccountable, but notwithstanding this shock to
the order of things, there were still the Waules and the rural stock of
the Powderells in their pews side by side; brother Samuel's cheek had
the same purple round as ever, and the three generations of decent
cottagers came as of old with a sense of duty to their betters
generally--the smaller children regarding Mr. Casaubon, who wore the
black gown and mounted to the highest box, as probably the chief of all
betters, and the one most awful if offended.  Even in 1831 Lowick was
at peace, not more agitated by Reform than by the solemn tenor of the
Sunday sermon.  The congregation had been used to seeing Will at church
in former days, and no one took much note of him except the choir, who
expected him to make a figure in the singing.

Dorothea did at last appear on this quaint background, walking up the
short aisle in her white beaver bonnet and gray cloak--the same she had
worn in the Vatican.  Her face being, from her entrance, towards the
chancel, even her shortsighted eyes soon discerned Will, but there was
no outward show of her feeling except a slight paleness and a grave bow
as she passed him.  To his own surprise Will felt suddenly
uncomfortable, and dared not look at her after they had bowed to each
other.  Two minutes later, when Mr. Casaubon came out of the vestry,
and, entering the pew, seated himself in face of Dorothea, Will felt
his paralysis more complete.  He could look nowhere except at the choir
in the little gallery over the vestry-door: Dorothea was perhaps
pained, and he had made a wretched blunder.  It was no longer amusing
to vex Mr. Casaubon, who had the advantage probably of watching him and
seeing that he dared not turn his head.  Why had he not imagined this
beforehand?--but he could not expect that he should sit in that square
pew alone, unrelieved by any Tuckers, who had apparently departed from
Lowick altogether, for a new clergyman was in the desk.  Still he
called himself stupid now for not foreseeing that it would be
impossible for him to look towards Dorothea--nay, that she might feel
his coming an impertinence.  There was no delivering himself from his
cage, however; and Will found his places and looked at his book as if
he had been a school-mistress, feeling that the morning service had
never been so immeasurably long before, that he was utterly ridiculous,
out of temper, and miserable.  This was what a man got by worshipping
the sight of a woman!  The clerk observed with surprise that Mr.
Ladislaw did not join in the tune of Hanover, and reflected that he
might have a cold.

Mr. Casaubon did not preach that morning, and there was no change in
Will's situation until the blessing had been pronounced and every one
rose.  It was the fashion at Lowick for "the betters" to go out first.
With a sudden determination to break the spell that was upon him, Will
looked straight at Mr. Casaubon.  But that gentleman's eyes were on the
button of the pew-door, which he opened, allowing Dorothea to pass, and
following her immediately without raising his eyelids.  Will's glance
had caught Dorothea's as she turned out of the pew, and again she
bowed, but this time with a look of agitation, as if she were
repressing tears.  Will walked out after them, but they went on towards
the little gate leading out of the churchyard into the shrubbery, never
looking round.

It was impossible for him to follow them, and he could only walk back
sadly at mid-day along the same road which he had trodden hopefully in
the morning.  The lights were all changed for him both without and
within.

 Will has trouble falling asleep after his argument with Lydgate - he's thinking about whether he's made a mistake in settling in Middlemarch as a newspaper editor. He doesn't want Dorothea to think he's making a fool of himself. And speaking of Dorothea, Eliot reassures us that Will has no fantasies about marrying her after Casaubon dies. He has her on a pedestal. She's like a saint to him, and who can imagine marrying a saint? That would be sacrilege. The next day is Sunday, and he decides to go to church at Lowick. Why shouldn't he? The church is open to anyone who wants to go, and he knows other people in the neighborhood besides the Casaubons. He tries to convince himself that he's not doing it out of spite for Mr. Casaubon. Really, he's not. He's going to catch a glimpse of Dorothea, but it'll annoy the heck out of Casaubon to see him there. When he arrives at the church and takes his seat, he looks for Dorothea. She comes in by herself . But she sits off to the side, and looks uncomfortable when she sees him, and hardly gives him a head-nod. And then Will is forced to sit and watch Mr. Casaubon during the service, and can't turn his head to stare at Dorothea without Casaubon seeing him. Will's miserable. He thinks that he's seriously annoyed Dorothea. He watches the Casaubons leave together after church is over.

