Mr. Casaubon gravely smiled approval, and said to Mr. Brooke, “You have an excellent secretary at hand, you perceive.”

“No, no,” said Mr. Brooke, shaking his head; “I cannot let young ladies meddle with my documents.  Young ladies are too flighty.”

Dorothea felt hurt.  Mr. Casaubon would think that her uncle had some special reason for delivering this opinion, whereas the remark lay in his mind as lightly as the broken wing of an insect among all the other fragments there, and a chance current had sent it alighting on her.

When the two girls were in the drawing-room alone, Celia said—­

“How very ugly Mr. Casaubon is!”

“Celia!  He is one of the most distinguished-looking men I ever saw.  He is remarkably like the portrait of Locke.  He has the same deep eye-sockets.”

“Had Locke those two white moles with hairs on them?”

“Oh, I dare say! when people of a certain sort looked at him,” said Dorothea, walking away a little.

“Mr. Casaubon is so sallow.”

“All the better.  I suppose you admire a man with the complexion of a cochon de lait.”

“Dodo!” exclaimed Celia, looking after her in surprise.  “I never heard you make such a comparison before.”

“Why should I make it before the occasion came?  It is a good comparison:  the match is perfect.”

Miss Brooke was clearly forgetting herself, and Celia thought so.

“I wonder you show temper, Dorothea.”

“It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human beings as if they were merely animals with a toilet, and never see the great soul in a man’s face.”

“Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul?” Celia was not without a touch of naive malice.

“Yes, I believe he has,” said Dorothea, with the full voice of decision.  “Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet on Biblical Cosmology.”

“He talks very little,” said Celia

“There is no one for him to talk to.”

Celia thought privately, “Dorothea quite despises Sir James Chettam; I believe she would not accept him.”  Celia felt that this was a pity.  She had never been deceived as to the object of the baronet’s interest.  Sometimes, indeed, she had reflected that Dodo would perhaps not make a husband happy who had not her way of looking at things; and stifled in the depths of her heart was the feeling that her sister was too religious for family comfort.  Notions and scruples were like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down, or even eating.