In this way it happened that one day near four o’clock, when Mr. Brooke and Ladislaw were seated in the library, the door opened and Mrs. Casaubon was announced.

Will, the moment before, had been low in the depths of boredom, and, obliged to help Mr. Brooke in arranging “documents” about hanging sheep-stealers, was exemplifying the power our minds have of riding several horses at once by inwardly arranging measures towards getting a lodging for himself in Middlemarch and cutting short his constant residence at the Grange; while there flitted through all these steadier images a tickling vision of a sheep-stealing epic written with Homeric particularity.  When Mrs. Casaubon was announced he started up as from an electric shock, and felt a tingling at his finger-ends.  Any one observing him would have seen a change in his complexion, in the adjustment of his facial muscles, in the vividness of his glance, which might have made them imagine that every molecule in his body had passed the message of a magic touch.  And so it had.  For effective magic is transcendent nature; and who shall measure the subtlety of those touches which convey the quality of soul as well as body, and make a man’s passion for one woman differ from his passion for another as joy in the morning light over valley and river and white mountain-top differs from joy among Chinese lanterns and glass panels?  Will, too, was made of very impressible stuff.  The bow of a violin drawn near him cleverly, would at one stroke change the aspect of the world for him, and his point of view shifted—­ as easily as his mood.  Dorothea’s entrance was the freshness of morning.

“Well, my dear, this is pleasant, now,” said Mr. Brooke, meeting and kissing her.  “You have left Casaubon with his books, I suppose.  That’s right.  We must not have you getting too learned for a woman, you know.”

“There is no fear of that, uncle,” said Dorothea, turning to Will and shaking hands with open cheerfulness, while she made no other form of greeting, but went on answering her uncle.  “I am very slow.  When I want to be busy with books, I am often playing truant among my thoughts.  I find it is not so easy to be learned as to plan cottages.”

She seated herself beside her uncle opposite to Will, and was evidently preoccupied with something that made her almost unmindful of him.  He was ridiculously disappointed, as if he had imagined that her coming had anything to do with him.

“Why, yes, my dear, it was quite your hobby to draw plans.  But it was good to break that off a little.  Hobbies are apt to ran away with us, you know; it doesn’t do to be run away with.  We must keep the reins.  I have never let myself be run away with; I always pulled up.  That is what I tell Ladislaw.  He and I are alike, you know:  he likes to go into everything.  We are working at capital punishment.  We shall do a great deal together, Ladislaw and I.”