Middlemarch - Page 385/561

Party is Nature too, and you shall see

By force of Logic how they both agree:

The Many in the One, the One in Many;

All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any:

Genus holds species, both are great or small;

One genus highest, one not high at all;

Each species has its differentia too,

This is not That, and He was never You,

Though this and that are AYES, and you and he

Are like as one to one, or three to three.

No gossip about Mr. Casaubon's will had yet reached Ladislaw: the air

seemed to be filled with the dissolution of Parliament and the coming

election, as the old wakes and fairs were filled with the rival clatter

of itinerant shows; and more private noises were taken little notice

of. The famous "dry election" was at hand, in which the depths of

public feeling might be measured by the low flood-mark of drink. Will

Ladislaw was one of the busiest at this time; and though Dorothea's

widowhood was continually in his thought, he was so far from wishing to

be spoken to on the subject, that when Lydgate sought him out to tell

him what had passed about the Lowick living, he answered rather

waspishly--

"Why should you bring me into the matter? I never see Mrs. Casaubon,

and am not likely to see her, since she is at Freshitt. I never go

there. It is Tory ground, where I and the 'Pioneer' are no more

welcome than a poacher and his gun."

The fact was that Will had been made the more susceptible by observing

that Mr. Brooke, instead of wishing him, as before, to come to the

Grange oftener than was quite agreeable to himself, seemed now to

contrive that he should go there as little as possible. This was a

shuffling concession of Mr. Brooke's to Sir James Chettam's indignant

remonstrance; and Will, awake to the slightest hint in this direction,

concluded that he was to be kept away from the Grange on Dorothea's

account. Her friends, then, regarded him with some suspicion? Their

fears were quite superfluous: they were very much mistaken if they

imagined that he would put himself forward as a needy adventurer trying

to win the favor of a rich woman.

Until now Will had never fully seen the chasm between himself and

Dorothea--until now that he was come to the brink of it, and saw her on

the other side. He began, not without some inward rage, to think of

going away from the neighborhood: it would be impossible for him to

show any further interest in Dorothea without subjecting himself to

disagreeable imputations--perhaps even in her mind, which others might

try to poison.