Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly than other young ladies of her age.  Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a diffused thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge.  They are not always too grossly deceived; for Sinbad himself may have fallen by good-luck on a true description, and wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions:  starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.  Because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it.

He stayed a little longer than he had intended, on a slight pressure of invitation from Mr. Brooke, who offered no bait except his own documents on machine-breaking and rick-burning.  Mr. Casaubon was called into the library to look at these in a heap, while his host picked up first one and then the other to read aloud from in a skipping and uncertain way, passing from one unfinished passage to another with a “Yes, now, but here!” and finally pushing them all aside to open the journal of his youthful Continental travels.

“Look here—­here is all about Greece.  Rhamnus, the ruins of Rhamnus—­you are a great Grecian, now.  I don’t know whether you have given much study to the topography.  I spent no end of time in making out these things—­Helicon, now.  Here, now!—­`We started the next morning for Parnassus, the double-peaked Parnassus.’  All this volume is about Greece, you know,” Mr. Brooke wound up, rubbing his thumb transversely along the edges of the leaves as he held the book forward.

Mr. Casaubon made a dignified though somewhat sad audience; bowed in the right place, and avoided looking at anything documentary as far as possible, without showing disregard or impatience; mindful that this desultoriness was associated with the institutions of the country, and that the man who took him on this severe mental scamper was not only an amiable host, but a landholder and custos rotulorum.  Was his endurance aided also by the reflection that Mr. Brooke was the uncle of Dorothea?

Certainly he seemed more and more bent on making her talk to him, on drawing her out, as Celia remarked to herself; and in looking at her his face was often lit up by a smile like pale wintry sunshine.  Before he left the next morning, while taking a pleasant walk with Miss Brooke along the gravelled terrace, he had mentioned to her that he felt the disadvantage of loneliness, the need of that cheerful companionship with which the presence of youth can lighten or vary the serious toils of maturity.  And he delivered this statement with as much careful precision as if he had been a diplomatic envoy whose words would be attended with results.  Indeed, Mr. Casaubon