As Lydgate had said of him, he was a sort of gypsy, rather enjoying the sense of belonging to no class; he had a feeling of romance in his position, and a pleasant consciousness of creating a little surprise wherever he went.  That sort of enjoyment had been disturbed when he had felt some new distance between himself and Dorothea in their accidental meeting at Lydgate’s, and his irritation had gone out towards Mr. Casaubon, who had declared beforehand that Will would lose caste.  “I never had any caste,” he would have said, if that prophecy had been uttered to him, and the quick blood would have come and gone like breath in his transparent skin.  But it is one thing to like defiance, and another thing to like its consequences.

Meanwhile, the town opinion about the new editor of the “Pioneer” was tending to confirm Mr. Casaubon’s view.  Will’s relationship in that distinguished quarter did not, like Lydgate’s high connections, serve as an advantageous introduction:  if it was rumored that young Ladislaw was Mr. Casaubon’s nephew or cousin, it was also rumored that “Mr. Casaubon would have nothing to do with him.”

“Brooke has taken him up,” said Mr. Hawley, “because that is what no man in his senses could have expected.  Casaubon has devilish good reasons, you may be sure, for turning the cold shoulder on a young fellow whose bringing-up he paid for.  Just like Brooke—­ one of those fellows who would praise a cat to sell a horse.”

And some oddities of Will’s, more or less poetical, appeared to support Mr. Keck, the editor of the “Trumpet,” in asserting that Ladislaw, if the truth were known, was not only a Polish emissary but crack-brained, which accounted for the preternatural quickness and glibness of his speech when he got on to a platform—­as he did whenever he had an opportunity, speaking with a facility which cast reflections on solid Englishmen generally.  It was disgusting to Keck to see a strip of a fellow, with light curls round his head, get up and speechify by the hour against institutions “which had existed when he was in his cradle.”  And in a leading article of the “Trumpet,” Keck characterized Ladislaw’s speech at a Reform meeting as “the violence of an energumen—­a miserable effort to shroud in the brilliancy of fireworks the daring of irresponsible statements and the poverty of a knowledge which was of the cheapest and most recent description.”

“That was a rattling article yesterday, Keck,” said Dr. Sprague, with sarcastic intentions.  “But what is an energumen?”

“Oh, a term that came up in the French Revolution,” said Keck.

This dangerous aspect of Ladislaw was strangely contrasted with other habits which became matter of remark.  He had a fondness, half artistic, half affectionate, for little children—­the smaller they were on tolerably active legs, and the funnier their clothing, the better Will liked to surprise and please them.  We know that in Rome he was given to ramble about among the poor people, and the taste did not quit him in Middlemarch.