For to Dorothea, after that toy-box history of the world adapted to

young ladies which had made the chief part of her education, Mr.

Casaubon's talk about his great book was full of new vistas; and this

sense of revelation, this surprise of a nearer introduction to Stoics

and Alexandrians, as people who had ideas not totally unlike her own,

kept in abeyance for the time her usual eagerness for a binding theory

which could bring her own life and doctrine into strict connection with

that amazing past, and give the remotest sources of knowledge some

bearing on her actions. That more complete teaching would come--Mr.

Casaubon would tell her all that: she was looking forward to higher

initiation in ideas, as she was looking forward to marriage, and

blending her dim conceptions of both. It would be a great mistake to

suppose that Dorothea would have cared about any share in Mr.

Casaubon's learning as mere accomplishment; for though opinion in the

neighborhood of Freshitt and Tipton had pronounced her clever, that

epithet would not have described her to circles in whose more precise

vocabulary cleverness implies mere aptitude for knowing and doing,

apart from character. All her eagerness for acquirement lay within

that full current of sympathetic motive in which her ideas and impulses

were habitually swept along. She did not want to deck herself with

knowledge--to wear it loose from the nerves and blood that fed her

action; and if she had written a book she must have done it as Saint

Theresa did, under the command of an authority that constrained her

conscience. But something she yearned for by which her life might be

filled with action at once rational and ardent; and since the time was

gone by for guiding visions and spiritual directors, since prayer

heightened yearning but not instruction, what lamp was there but

knowledge? Surely learned men kept the only oil; and who more learned

than Mr. Casaubon?

Thus in these brief weeks Dorothea's joyous grateful expectation was

unbroken, and however her lover might occasionally be conscious of

flatness, he could never refer it to any slackening of her affectionate

interest.

The season was mild enough to encourage the project of extending the

wedding journey as far as Rome, and Mr. Casaubon was anxious for this

because he wished to inspect some manuscripts in the Vatican.

"I still regret that your sister is not to accompany us," he said one

morning, some time after it had been ascertained that Celia objected to

go, and that Dorothea did not wish for her companionship. "You will

have many lonely hours, Dorotheas, for I shall be constrained to make

the utmost use of my time during our stay in Rome, and I should feel

more at liberty if you had a companion."




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