Middlemarch

The chapter begins where Chapter 20 left off: Dorothea is still in the Via Sistina apartment, red-eyed, when Tantripp brings a card. A relation of Mr. Casaubon is waiting. It is Will Ladislaw, who had seen her in the Vatican that morning and tracked down the address. He comes in and flushes with shyness — entirely unlike the easy indifference he shows with Naumann. Dorothea, calmer, receives him with her open good-will, and there are just enough signs of weeping on her face to make her look more youthful and appealing than usual. When she explains that Casaubon spends every day from breakfast till dinner in the Vatican Library, Will is struck mute. The picture of "this dried-up pedant... having first got this adorable young creature to marry him, and then passing his honeymoon away from her, groping after his mouldy futilities" strikes him with a sort of comic disgust. He barely resolves it into a merry smile. Dorothea wonders; the smile is irresistible and shines back from her face too. Their conversation touches his career — he has ruled out painting, finds it too one-sided, will not be a drudge. Dorothea gently cites Casaubon's regret about his want of patience. Will replies with a slight streak of contempt, which stings her into defending her husband. He then delivers his annihilating observation: if Mr. Casaubon read German, he would save himself a great deal of trouble; the Germans have made good roads where English scholars are still groping with a pocket-compass. Will only meant to pinch, but Dorothea receives the information as a blow: "How I wish I had learned German when I was at Lausanne! But now I can be of no use." Casaubon returns and stands rayless beside Will's sunny brightness. He accepts Will's presence with correct politeness and invites him to dinner the next day, then sinks wearily on the sofa. Dorothea sits beside him and apologizes for the morning's quarrel. Casaubon accepts the apology formally. He had intended to tell her she ought not to have received Will in his absence, but abstained — partly from courtesy, partly because he was too proud to betray the jealousy of disposition which was "not so exhausted on his scholarly compeers that there was none to spare in other directions." Dorothea remembered the day to the last: "she had begun to see that she had been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own." It had been easier to imagine devoting herself to him than to conceive — with real feeling rather than mere thought — "that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference."