Middlemarch

Dorothea has been at Freshitt Hall nearly a week. She sits each morning with Celia in the prettiest of upstairs sitting-rooms — Celia in white and lavender like a bunch of mixed violets, watching her baby's remarkable acts, which require constant oracular interpretation from the nurse. Dorothea sits beside her in widow's black, with an expression which provokes Celia as "much too sad" — for really, as Celia feels, the husband had been dull and troublesome enough while alive. Dorothea, however, is not passive for long. As the owner of Lowick Manor with the patronage of the living, she needs to appoint a new clergyman. When Brooke visits, bustling with political energy (Parliament about to dissolve), he names Mr. Tyke — "an apostolic man" — as strongly recommended for the Lowick living. Dorothea says she would like to judge for herself. Brooke reassures her there is nothing else in the will — no instructions about his researches, nothing — and hurries away. Celia decides the moment has come. She tells Dorothea about the codicil, in her neutral staccato tone — as if she were remarking on baby's robes: "He has made a codicil to his will, to say the property was all to go away from you if you married — I mean — if you married Mr. Ladislaw, not anybody else." She adds that James says it is abominable and not like a gentleman, and Mrs. Cadwallader said Dorothea might as well marry an Italian with white mice. Then Celia adds, without any change of tone, "But I must just go and look at baby." "The blood rushed to Dorothea's face and neck painfully." Then she turned cold and threw herself back helplessly in her chair. Everything was changing its aspect: her husband's conduct, her own duteous feeling towards him, every struggle between them — and yet more, her whole relation to Will Ladislaw. "It had never before entered her mind that he could, under any circumstances, be her lover: conceive the effect of the sudden revelation that another had thought of him in that light — that perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a possibility." There was a violent shock of repulsion from Casaubon — "who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did" — and then a sudden strange yearning of heart towards Will Ladislaw. Lydgate arrives, feels her marble-cold pulse, and says the best prescription is "perfect freedom." He advises Sir James to let her act as she chooses: "She wants perfect freedom, I think, more than any other prescription." The next day Sir James drives her to Lowick. She searches all her husband's places of deposit for any paper addressed especially to her — finds nothing but the Synoptical Tabulation and papers of business. "All empty of personal words for her — empty of any sign that in her husband's lonely brooding his heart had gone out to her in excuse or explanation." The codicil had been a cruelly effective means of hindering her: even with indignation in her heart, any act that seemed a triumphant eluding of Casaubon's purpose revolted her. She could not now give Will his rightful share of the property, for it would look like vindication of the very suspicion she abhorred. "The silence was unbroken." She turns to the living. Lydgate seizes the chance to advocate for Farebrother: "I never heard such good preaching as his — such plain, easy eloquence. He would have done to preach at St. Paul's Cross after old Latimer." He is honest about the flaws too: card-playing for money, hampered by poverty, perhaps in the wrong profession. But: "He has neither venom nor doubleness in him, and those often go with a more correct outside." Dorothea is drawn: "I wonder if he suffers in his conscience because of that habit." She dismisses Tyke with precision: "Such sermons would be of no use at Lowick — I mean, about imputed righteousness and the prophecies in the Apocalypse." And she says quietly: "It is surely better to pardon too much, than to condemn too much." Lydgate innocently mentions that Will Ladislaw often escorts little Miss Noble — "a sort of Daphnis in coat and waistcoat" walking with the old maid through a back street, looking like "a couple dropped out of a romantic comedy." After Lydgate is gone, Dorothea thinks of Will and the picture Lydgate has drawn, and the Italian-with-white-mice insult: "on the contrary, he was a creature who entered into every one's feelings, and could take the pressure of their thought instead of urging his own with iron resistance."