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 “But poverty may be as bad as leprosy, if it divides us from what we most care for.”

The words cut Dorothea to the heart, and made her relent. She answered in a tone of sad fellowship.

“Sorrow comes in so many ways. Two years ago I had no notion of that—I mean of the unexpected way in which trouble comes, and ties our hands, and makes us silent when we long to speak. I used to despise women a little for not shaping their lives more, and doing better things. I was very fond of doing as I liked, but I have almost given it up,” she ended, smiling playfully.

“I have not given up doing as I like, but I can very seldom do it,” said Will. He was standing two yards from her with his mind full of contradictory desires and resolves—desiring some unmistakable proof that she loved him, and yet dreading the position into which such a proof might bring him. “The thing one most longs for may be surrounded with conditions that would be intolerable.”

At this moment Pratt entered and said, “Sir James Chettam is in the library, madam.”

“Ask Sir James to come in here,” said Dorothea, immediately. It was as if the same electric shock had passed through her and Will. Each of them felt proudly resistant, and neither looked at the other, while they awaited Sir James’s entrance.

After shaking hands with Dorothea, he bowed as slightly as possible to Ladislaw, who repaid the slightness exactly, and then going towards Dorothea, said—

“I must say good-bye, Mrs Casaubon; and probably for a long while.”

Dorothea put out her hand and said her good-bye cordially. The sense that Sir James was depreciating Will, and behaving rudely to him, roused her resolution and dignity: there was no touch of confusion in her manner. And when Will had left the room, she looked with such calm self-possession at Sir James, saying, “How is Celia?” that he was obliged to behave as if nothing had annoyed him. And what would be the use of behaving otherwise? Indeed, Sir James shrank with so much dislike from the association even in thought of Dorothea with Ladislaw as her possible lover, that he would himself have wished to avoid an outward show of displeasure which would have recognised the disagreeable possibility. If any one had asked him why he shrank in that way, I am not sure that he would at first have said anything fuller or more precise than “that Ladislaw!”—though on reflection he might have urged that Mr Casaubon’s codicil, barring Dorothea’s marriage with Will, except under a penalty, was enough to cast unfitness over any relation at all between them. His aversion was all the stronger because he felt himself unable to interfere.

But Sir James was a power in a way unguessed by himself. Entering at that moment, he was an incorporation of the strongest reasons through which Will’s pride became a repellent force, keeping him asunder from Dorothea.