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