"Nous causames longtemps; elle etait simple et bonne.

Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien;

Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l'aumone,

Et tout en ecoutant comme le coeur se donne,

Sans oser y penser je lui donnai le mien;

Elle emporta ma vie, et n'en sut jamais rien."

--ALFRED DE MUSSET.

Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day, and

gave no opportunity for Mr. Casaubon to show disapprobation. On the

contrary it seemed to Dorothea that Will had a happier way of drawing

her husband into conversation and of deferentially listening to him

than she had ever observed in any one before. To be sure, the

listeners about Tipton were not highly gifted! Will talked a good deal

himself, but what he said was thrown in with such rapidity, and with

such an unimportant air of saying something by the way, that it seemed

a gay little chime after the great bell. If Will was not always

perfect, this was certainly one of his good days. He described touches

of incident among the poor people in Rome, only to be seen by one who

could move about freely; he found himself in agreement with Mr.

Casaubon as to the unsound opinions of Middleton concerning the

relations of Judaism and Catholicism; and passed easily to a

half-enthusiastic half-playful picture of the enjoyment he got out of

the very miscellaneousness of Rome, which made the mind flexible with

constant comparison, and saved you from seeing the world's ages as a

set of box-like partitions without vital connection. Mr. Casaubon's

studies, Will observed, had always been of too broad a kind for that,

and he had perhaps never felt any such sudden effect, but for himself

he confessed that Rome had given him quite a new sense of history as a

whole: the fragments stimulated his imagination and made him

constructive. Then occasionally, but not too often, he appealed to

Dorothea, and discussed what she said, as if her sentiment were an item

to be considered in the final judgment even of the Madonna di Foligno

or the Laocoon. A sense of contributing to form the world's opinion

makes conversation particularly cheerful; and Mr. Casaubon too was not

without his pride in his young wife, who spoke better than most women,

as indeed he had perceived in choosing her.

Since things were going on so pleasantly, Mr. Casaubon's statement that

his labors in the Library would be suspended for a couple of days, and

that after a brief renewal he should have no further reason for staying

in Rome, encouraged Will to urge that Mrs. Casaubon should not go away

without seeing a studio or two. Would not Mr. Casaubon take her? That

sort of thing ought not to be missed: it was quite special: it was a

form of life that grew like a small fresh vegetation with its

population of insects on huge fossils. Will would be happy to conduct

them--not to anything wearisome, only to a few examples.




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