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.

 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.

