When Social Causes Meet Personal Feelings — Middlemarch

Sir James, unable to devise much himself, acts on his faith in Dorothea's influence. He uses Celia's indisposition as a pretext to bring Dorothea alone to the Grange, leaving her there with the carriage while she knows the estate situation. Will, bored with Brooke's documents on hanging sheep-stealers, starts up as from an electric shock when Mrs. Casaubon is announced. Her entrance is the freshness of morning; yet she is preoccupied with reform, not with him, and he is ridiculously disappointed.

Dorothea tells Brooke Sir James expects valuations, repairs, cottages improved, and Mr. Garth engaged. She speaks in a voice clear as a chorister's credo, naming Kit Downes with seven children in one sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than the library table, and the Dagleys living in the back kitchen while rats take the rest. She says they have no right to urge wider changes until they alter evils under their own hands and make Tipton and Freshitt fit dwellings before preaching Reform to the nation and before Will learns Casaubon has banned him from Lowick.

Will admires her and feels chilled remoteness: a man is seldom ashamed of feeling he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her. Brooke stammers, cites fine art and emollit mores, and escapes to deal with a boy caught with a leveret. Alone, Will tells Dorothea Casaubon has forbidden him to come to Lowick; she is moved but does not guess the jealousy turned on herself.

He will stay and make his position honorable; she asks what belief comforts her most and answers that desiring what is perfectly good, even without fully knowing it, makes one part of the divine power against evil. They speak like fond children about religion until she must go. Brooke stops at Dagley's on the way home; Dagley, drunk after market and political talk, refuses to reprimand his boy and turns on Brooke for rotten premises and the coming Rinform that will make bad landlords scuttle off. Brooke, never insulted on his own land before, retreats in amazement as the Trumpet's words echo in a tenant's mouth.