"Of course there is always a great deal of poor work: the rarer things
want that soil to grow in."
"Oh dear," said Dorothea, taking up that thought into the chief current
of her anxiety; "I see it must be very difficult to do anything good.
I have often felt since I have been in Rome that most of our lives
would look much uglier and more bungling than the pictures, if they
could be put on the wall."
Dorothea parted her lips again as if she were going to say more, but
changed her mind and paused.
"You are too young--it is an anachronism for you to have such
thoughts," said Will, energetically, with a quick shake of the head
habitual to him. "You talk as if you had never known any youth. It is
monstrous--as if you had had a vision of Hades in your childhood, like
the boy in the legend. You have been brought up in some of those
horrible notions that choose the sweetest women to devour--like
Minotaurs. And now you will go and be shut up in that stone prison at
Lowick: you will be buried alive. It makes me savage to think of it!
I would rather never have seen you than think of you with such a
prospect."
Will again feared that he had gone too far; but the meaning we attach
to words depends on our feeling, and his tone of angry regret had so
much kindness in it for Dorothea's heart, which had always been giving
out ardor and had never been fed with much from the living beings
around her, that she felt a new sense of gratitude and answered with a
gentle smile--
"It is very good of you to be anxious about me. It is because you did
not like Lowick yourself: you had set your heart on another kind of
life. But Lowick is my chosen home."
The last sentence was spoken with an almost solemn cadence, and Will
did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him to
embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her: it was
clear that she required nothing of the sort; and they were both silent
for a moment or two, when Dorothea began again with an air of saying at
last what had been in her mind beforehand.
"I wanted to ask you again about something you said the other day.
Perhaps it was half of it your lively way of speaking: I notice that
you like to put things strongly; I myself often exaggerate when I speak
hastily."