dress the first item to be deducted from, when any
margin was required for expenses more distinctive
of rank. Such reasons would have been enough
to account for plain dress, quite apart from religious
feeling; but in Miss Brooke’s case, religion
alone would have determined it; and Celia mildly acquiesced
in all her sister’s sentiments, only infusing
them with that common-sense which is able to accept
momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation.
Dorothea knew many passages of Pascal’s Pensees
and of Jeremy Taylor by heart; and to her the destinies
of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity, made
the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation
for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties
of a spiritual life involving eternal consequences,
with a keen interest in gimp and artificial protrusions
of drapery. Her mind was theoretic, and yearned
by its nature after some lofty conception of the world
which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and
her own rule of conduct there; she was enamoured of
intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever
seemed to her to have those aspects; likely to seek
martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur
martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not
sought it. Certainly such elements in the character
of a marriageable girl tended to interfere with her
lot, and hinder it from being decided according to
custom, by good looks, vanity, and merely canine affection.
With all this, she, the elder of the sisters, was not
yet twenty, and they had both been educated, since
they were about twelve years old and had lost their
parents, on plans at once narrow and promiscuous,
first in an English family and afterwards in a Swiss
family at Lausanne, their bachelor uncle and guardian
trying in this way to remedy the disadvantages of
their orphaned condition.
It was hardly a year since they had come to live at
Tipton Grange with their uncle, a man nearly sixty,
of acquiescent temper, miscellaneous opinions, and
uncertain vote. He had travelled in his younger
years, and was held in this part of the county to
have contracted a too rambling habit of mind.
Mr. Brooke’s conclusions were as difficult
to predict as the weather: it was only safe to
say that he would act with benevolent intentions,
and that he would spend as little money as possible
in carrying them out. For the most glutinously
indefinite minds enclose some hard grains of habit;
and a man has been seen lax about all his own interests
except the retention of his snuff-box, concerning
which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch.
In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy
was clearly in abeyance; but in his niece Dorothea
it glowed alike through faults and virtues, turning
sometimes into impatience of her uncle’s talk
or his way of “letting things be” on his
estate, and making her long all the more for the time
when she would be of age and have some command of
money for generous schemes. She was regarded