“DEAR MR. CASAUBON,—­I have given all due consideration to your letter of yesterday, but I am unable to take precisely your view of our mutual position.  With the fullest acknowledgment of your generous conduct to me in the past, I must still maintain that an obligation of this kind cannot fairly fetter me as you appear to expect that it should.  Granted that a benefactor’s wishes may constitute a claim; there must always be a reservation as to the quality of those wishes.  They may possibly clash with more imperative considerations.  Or a benefactor’s veto might impose such a negation on a man’s life that the consequent blank might be more cruel than the benefaction was generous.  I am merely using strong illustrations.  In the present case I am unable to take your view of the bearing which my acceptance of occupation—­not enriching certainly, but not dishonorable—­ will have on your own position which seems to me too substantial to be affected in that shadowy manner.  And though I do not believe that any change in our relations will occur (certainly none has yet occurred) which can nullify the obligations imposed on me by the past, pardon me for not seeing that those obligations should restrain me from using the ordinary freedom of living where I choose, and maintaining myself by any lawful occupation I may choose.  Regretting that there exists this difference between us as to a relation in which the conferring of benefits has been entirely on your side—­
                I remain, yours with persistent obligation,
                        WILL LADISLAW.”

Poor Mr. Casaubon felt (and must not we, being impartial, feel with him a little?) that no man had juster cause for disgust and suspicion than he.  Young Ladislaw, he was sure, meant to defy and annoy him, meant to win Dorothea’s confidence and sow her mind with disrespect, and perhaps aversion, towards her husband.  Some motive beneath the surface had been needed to account for Will’s sudden change of in rejecting Mr. Casaubon’s aid and quitting his travels; and this defiant determination to fix himself in the neighborhood by taking up something so much at variance with his former choice as Mr. Brooke’s Middlemarch projects, revealed clearly enough that the undeclared motive had relation to Dorothea.  Not for one moment did Mr. Casaubon suspect Dorothea of any doubleness:  he had no suspicions of her, but he had (what was little less uncomfortable) the positive knowledge that her tendency to form opinions about her husband’s conduct was accompanied with a disposition to regard Will Ladislaw favorably and be influenced by what he said.  His own proud reticence had prevented him from ever being undeceived in the supposition that Dorothea had originally asked her uncle to invite Will to his house.

And now, on receiving Will’s letter, Mr. Casaubon had to consider his duty.  He would never have been easy to call his action anything else than duty; but in this case, contending motives thrust him back into negations.