"I hope I have not presumed too much in calling," said Will; "I could
not bear to leave the neighborhood and begin a new life without seeing
you to say good-by."
"Presumed? Surely not. I should have thought it unkind if you had not
wished to see me," said Dorothea, her habit of speaking with perfect
genuineness asserting itself through all her uncertainty and agitation.
"Are you going away immediately?"
"Very soon, I think. I intend to go to town and eat my dinners as a
barrister, since, they say, that is the preparation for all public
business. There will be a great deal of political work to be done
by-and-by, and I mean to try and do some of it. Other men have managed
to win an honorable position for themselves without family or money."
"And that will make it all the more honorable," said Dorothea,
ardently. "Besides, you have so many talents. I have heard from my
uncle how well you speak in public, so that every one is sorry when you
leave off, and how clearly you can explain things. And you care that
justice should be done to every one. I am so glad. When we were in
Rome, I thought you only cared for poetry and art, and the things that
adorn life for us who are well off. But now I know you think about the
rest of the world."
While she was speaking Dorothea had lost her personal embarrassment,
and had become like her former self. She looked at Will with a direct
glance, full of delighted confidence.
"You approve of my going away for years, then, and never coming here
again till I have made myself of some mark in the world?" said Will,
trying hard to reconcile the utmost pride with the utmost effort to get
an expression of strong feeling from Dorothea.
She was not aware how long it was before she answered. She had turned
her head and was looking out of the window on the rose-bushes, which
seemed to have in them the summers of all the years when Will would be
away. This was not judicious behavior. But Dorothea never thought of
studying her manners: she thought only of bowing to a sad necessity
which divided her from Will. Those first words of his about his
intentions had seemed to make everything clear to her: he knew, she
supposed, all about Mr. Casaubon's final conduct in relation to him,
and it had come to him with the same sort of shock as to herself. He
had never felt more than friendship for her--had never had anything in
his mind to justify what she felt to be her husband's outrage on the
feelings of both: and that friendship he still felt. Something which
may be called an inward silent sob had gone on in Dorothea before she
said with a pure voice, just trembling in the last words as if only
from its liquid flexibility--