Middlemarch

Sir James's plan: use Celia's supposed indisposition as a pretext to bring Dorothea alone to the Grange, after making her fully aware of the estate situation. Will, when Dorothea is announced, starts up as from an electric shock: "every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch." Her entrance was like "the freshness of morning." Dorothea, however, is preoccupied with the estate. She tells her uncle directly that Sir James is confident he is going to have the farms valued, repairs made, cottages improved — and that he is going to engage Mr. Garth. Brooke, caught, says Chettam is a little hasty. Dorothea goes on in a voice "as clear and unhesitating as that of a young chorister chanting a credo" — naming specific tenants: Kit Downes, a wife and seven children in a house with one sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than the library table; the Dagleys in their tumble-down farmhouse, living in the back kitchen and leaving the other rooms to the rats. She speaks of coming from the village with "all that dirt and coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in what is false." "We have no right to come forward and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils which lie under our own hands." Will is simultaneously moved and chilled: "A man is seldom ashamed of feeling that he cannot love a woman so well when he sees a certain greatness in her: nature having intended greatness for men." Brooke, whose masculine consciousness is "in rather a stammering condition," is rescued by the arrival of a footman — one of Dagley's boys has been caught with a dead leveret. He shuffles away. Alone with Will, Dorothea asks him to feel how right the proposed changes are. Will says he does — and then tells her the thing that has been pressing on him: that Casaubon has forbidden him to come to Lowick. She does not know it. She is evidently much moved — but Will sees that her sorrow is not all for him personally, that she does not suspect that Casaubon's dislike turns upon herself. He feels an odd mixture of delight and vexation: "of delight that he could dwell and be cherished in her thought as in a pure home, without suspicion and without stint — of vexation because he was of too little account with her." Will says he intends to stay and make the position useful and honorable. Dorothea asks what her belief is, that helps her most. She says: "That by desiring what is perfectly good, even when we don't quite know what it is and cannot do what we would, we are part of the divine power against evil — widening the skirts of light and making the struggle with darkness narrower." Will says his religion is "To love what is good and beautiful when I see it." They part. Brooke stops at Dagley's farm on the way home. Dagley, back from market and well lubricated with ale and rum-and-water, is in a decidedly quarrelsome state. When Brooke asks him to give the boy a reprimand, Dagley erupts: he has lived on that ground from his father and grandfather before him; and he has heard in Middlemarch what the "Rinform" is, and what it means for landlords who never done the right thing by their tenants — "they'll hev to scuttle off." Brooke escapes as quickly as he can. He had never before been insulted on his own land, and had been inclined to regard himself as a general favourite.