The Honeymoon's End — Middlemarch

Mr. and Mrs. Casaubon return to Lowick in mid-January through falling snow. In the blue-green boudoir Dorothea finds the furniture shrunk, the tapestry stag ghostly, the polite literature on the shelves like immovable imitations of books. She enters glowing with youth, carrying cameos for Celia, incongruous against the white landscape and her own narrowing dread. Casaubon is already in the library with his curate, complaining of palpitation. Wedding visits will follow, keeping up busy ineffectiveness like a dream the dreamer begins to suspect.

The duties of married life, once so grand in prospect, shrink with the room. Marriage was to bring guidance into worthy occupation; it has not freed her from the gentlewoman's oppressive liberty, nor filled her leisure with unchecked tenderness. Her wandering gaze reaches the miniatures and fixes on Julia, Casaubon's aunt, who made the unfortunate marriage, Will Ladislaw's grandmother. Dorothea fancies the delicate face alive, then sees it deepen, grow masculine, and beam with a gaze that makes her too interesting for an eyelid's movement to pass unnoticed. She smiles, then cries aloud that it was cruel to speak so.

She hurries toward the library but meets Celia on the stairs and Mr. Brooke below, congratulating Casaubon while noting he looks pale. In the boudoir Celia blushes through her news: she and Sir James are engaged. It happened because Dorothea went away and left nobody else for him to talk to. Dorothea takes her sister's face between her hands and says she could not marry better. Celia does not want to marry too soon, because it is nice to be engaged, and they shall be married all their lives after.