Middlemarch

On a gray November morning Dorothea drives to Lowick Manor with her uncle and Celia. The house is greenish stone, old English style, small-windowed: a house that must have children, many flowers, and open windows to seem joyous. Celia thinks immediately of Freshitt Hall — Sir James smiling above flowers like a prince from an enchanted rose-bush. Dorothea finds everything hallowed. The dark bookshelves, the faded carpets and curtains, the old maps on the corridor walls — none of it has any oppression for her. She fills up all blanks with unmanifested perfections, interpreting Casaubon as she interprets the works of Providence. When Casaubon asks which room she would like for her boudoir, she refuses to choose: "I shall be much happier to take everything as it is." He shows her the bow-windowed room upstairs — furniture all faded blue, miniatures of powdered ladies and gentlemen, a piece of tapestry with a pale stag. Among the miniatures Dorothea notices a peculiar face — deep gray eyes rather near together, a delicate irregular nose. That is Casaubon's aunt, he says: his mother's sister, who made an unfortunate marriage. He never saw her. In the garden they encounter a young man sketching the great yew tree — light-brown curls, a pouting air of discontent. It is Will Ladislaw, Casaubon's second cousin: the grandson, in fact, of the aunt Julia in the miniature. He wears the family nose. Dorothea tells him she does not understand pictures; Will, coloring, takes this for a covert judgment on his sketch. But he notices her voice: "it was like the voice of a soul that had once lived in an Aeolian harp." When the others walk on, he throws back his head and laughs — at the reception of his sketch, at the notion of his grave cousin as this girl's lover, and at Mr. Brooke's cheerful account of the career he himself had missed through indolence. Casaubon describes Will's situation to Mr. Brooke: declined to go to an English university, studied at Heidelberg, now wants to go abroad again for vague "culture," refuses to choose a profession, calls himself Pegasus and every form of prescribed work "harness." Casaubon will let him go — a year's moderate supplies, the test of freedom. Dorothea is moved: "It is noble. People may really have in them some vocation which is not quite plain to themselves." Celia remarks dryly that it must be the engagement that has made her think patience a virtue.