Middlemarch

"I protest against all our interest, all our effort at understanding being given to the young skins that look blooming in spite of trouble; for these too will get faded, and will know the older and more eating griefs which we are helping to neglect." Eliot turns the narrative to Casaubon's inner life. He had married by the same social logic as any other man of good position: chosen a blooming young lady of religious principles and good understanding, planned to make her handsome settlements, and expected in return family pleasures and a copy of himself. He had also believed she might serve as a helpmate in his work — enabling him to dispense with a hired secretary, which he had a suspicious dread of. When Dorothea accepted him "with effusion, that was only natural; and Mr. Casaubon believed that his happiness was going to begin." But his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic — too languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight, going on "fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking of its wings and never flying." The Key to All Mythologies weighed like lead: he suspected the Archdeacon of not having read his pamphlets; he was convinced that his old acquaintance Carp had written the depreciatory review locked in his desk; even his religious faith wavered with his wavering trust in his own authorship, and "the consolations of the Christian hope in immortality seemed to lean on the immortality of the still unwritten Key to all Mythologies." His current project: a new Parergon on the Egyptian mysteries to correct certain assertions of Warburton's. The Latin dedication alone caused difficulty; it was a "poisonous regret" that he had once addressed a dedication to Carp — now an enemy — numbering him among those "who would never perish in any age." Dorothea had succeeded, by her own insistence, in being given work in the library — reading aloud or copying quotations. One morning there, Casaubon hands her a letter in a distant tone: it is Will Ladislaw's, enclosed in one addressed to Casaubon. Before she has even opened it, Casaubon announces that he must decline the proposal it contains — a visit — as he desires freedom from "guests whose desultory vivacity makes their presence a fatigue." Dorothea, stung by this preemptive defense against a complaint she has not made, responds with rare anger: "Why do you attribute to me a wish for anything that would annoy you? You speak to me as if I were something you had to contend against." Casaubon says she is hasty. She says it was he who was first hasty in his false suppositions about her feelings. He closes the discussion: "We will, if you please, say no more on this subject. I have neither leisure nor energy for this kind of debate." Dorothea leaves the letters unread and returns to her own desk. For half an hour there is apparent quiet. Then she hears a loud bang — a book on the floor — and turns to see Mr. Casaubon clinging forward on the library steps, gasping for breath. She jumps on a stool and reaches his elbow: "Can you lean on me, dear?" He cannot speak or move for two or three minutes. Sir James Chettam arrives. It is he who recommends Lydgate. The messenger meets Lydgate on the Lowick road, giving his arm to Miss Vincy. Celia, in the drawing-room, hears the news from Sir James and says: "I think he is not half fond enough of Dorothea; and he ought to be, for I am sure no one else would have had him." Sir James, who had "always thought it a horrible sacrifice," paces the room feeling that the marriage might have been hindered if only everyone had felt as he did.