1st Gent. An ancient land in ancient oracles
Is called "law-thirsty": all the struggle there
Was after order and a perfect rule.
Pray, where lie such lands now? . . .
2d Gent. Why, where they lay of old--in human souls.
Mr. Casaubon's behavior about settlements was highly satisfactory to
Mr. Brooke, and the preliminaries of marriage rolled smoothly along,
shortening the weeks of courtship. The betrothed bride must see her
future home, and dictate any changes that she would like to have made
there. A woman dictates before marriage in order that she may have an
appetite for submission afterwards. And certainly, the mistakes that
we male and female mortals make when we have our own way might fairly
raise some wonder that we are so fond of it.
On a gray but dry November morning Dorothea drove to Lowick in company
with her uncle and Celia. Mr. Casaubon's home was the manor-house.
Close by, visible from some parts of the garden, was the little church,
with the old parsonage opposite. In the beginning of his career, Mr.
Casaubon had only held the living, but the death of his brother had put
him in possession of the manor also. It had a small park, with a fine
old oak here and there, and an avenue of limes towards the southwest
front, with a sunk fence between park and pleasure-ground, so that from
the drawing-room windows the glance swept uninterruptedly along a slope
of greensward till the limes ended in a level of corn and pastures,
which often seemed to melt into a lake under the setting sun. This was
the happy side of the house, for the south and east looked rather
melancholy even under the brightest morning. The grounds here were
more confined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance, and
large clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews, had risen high, not ten
yards from the windows. The building, of greenish stone, was in the
old English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking:
the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows,
and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home. In
this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves
falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without
sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr.
Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown
into relief by that background.
"Oh dear!" Celia said to herself, "I am sure Freshitt Hall would have
been pleasanter than this." She thought of the white freestone, the
pillared portico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir James smiling
above them like a prince issuing from his enchantment in a rose-bush,
with a handkerchief swiftly metamorphosed from the most delicately
odorous petals--Sir James, who talked so agreeably, always about things
which had common-sense in them, and not about learning! Celia had
those light young feminine tastes which grave and weatherworn gentlemen
sometimes prefer in a wife; but happily Mr. Casaubon's bias had been
different, for he would have had no chance with Celia.