Dorothea colored with pleasure, and looked up gratefully to the speaker.  Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life, and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could illuminate principle with the widest knowledge a man whose learning almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!

Dorothea’s inferences may seem large; but really life could never have gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusions, which has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization.  Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?

“Certainly,” said good Sir James.  “Miss Brooke shall not be urged to tell reasons she would rather be silent upon.  I am sure her reasons would do her honor.”

He was not in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea had looked up at Mr. Casaubon:  it never occurred to him that a girl to whom he was meditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried bookworm towards fifty, except, indeed, in a religious sort of way, as for a clergyman of some distinction.

However, since Miss Brooke had become engaged in a conversation with Mr. Casaubon about the Vaudois clergy, Sir James betook himself to Celia, and talked to her about her sister; spoke of a house in town, and asked whether Miss Brooke disliked London.  Away from her sister, Celia talked quite easily, and Sir James said to himself that the second Miss Brooke was certainly very agreeable as well as pretty, though not, as some people pretended, more clever and sensible than the elder sister.  He felt that he had chosen the one who was in all respects the superior; and a man naturally likes to look forward to having the best.  He would be the very Mawworm of bachelors who pretended not to expect it.

CHAPTER III.

“Say, goddess, what ensued, when Raphael,
The affable archangel . . . 
Eve
The story heard attentive, and was filled
With admiration, and deep muse, to hear
Of things so high and strange.” 
—­Paradise Lost, B. vii.

If it had really occurred to Mr. Casaubon to think of Miss Brooke as a suitable wife for him, the reasons that might induce her to accept him were already planted in her mind, and by the evening of the next day the reasons had budded and bloomed.  For they had had a long conversation in the morning, while Celia, who did not like the company of Mr. Casaubon’s moles and sallowness, had escaped to the vicarage to play with the curate’s ill-shod but merry children.