“Could I not be preparing myself now to be more useful?” said Dorothea to him, one morning, early in the time of courtship; “could I not learn to read Latin and Greek aloud to you, as Milton’s daughters did to their father, without understanding what they read?”

“I fear that would be wearisome to you,” said Mr. Casaubon, smiling; “and, indeed, if I remember rightly, the young women you have mentioned regarded that exercise in unknown tongues as a ground for rebellion against the poet.”

“Yes; but in the first place they were very naughty girls, else they would have been proud to minister to such a father; and in the second place they might have studied privately and taught themselves to understand what they read, and then it would have been interesting.  I hope you don’t expect me to be naughty and stupid?”

“I expect you to be all that an exquisite young lady can be in every possible relation of life.  Certainly it might be a great advantage if you were able to copy the Greek character, and to that end it were well to begin with a little reading.”

Dorothea seized this as a precious permission.  She would not have asked Mr. Casaubon at once to teach her the languages, dreading of all things to be tiresome instead of helpful; but it was not entirely out of devotion to her future husband that she wished to know Latin and Creek.  Those provinces of masculine knowledge seemed to her a standing-ground from which all truth could be seen more truly.  As it was, she constantly doubted her own conclusions, because she felt her own ignorance:  how could she be confident that one-roomed cottages were not for the glory of God, when men who knew the classics appeared to conciliate indifference to the cottages with zeal for the glory?  Perhaps even Hebrew might be necessary—­at least the alphabet and a few roots—­in order to arrive at the core of things, and judge soundly on the social duties of the Christian.  And she had not reached that point of renunciation at which she would have been satisfied with having a wise husband:  she wished, poor child, to be wise herself.  Miss Brooke was certainly very naive with all her alleged cleverness.  Celia, whose mind had never been thought too powerful, saw the emptiness of other people’s pretensions much more readily.  To have in general but little feeling, seems to be the only security against feeling too much on any particular occasion.

However, Mr. Casaubon consented to listen and teach for an hour together, like a schoolmaster of little boys, or rather like a lover, to whom a mistress’s elementary ignorance and difficulties have a touching fitness.  Few scholars would have disliked teaching the alphabet under such circumstances.  But Dorothea herself was a little shocked and discouraged at her own stupidity, and the answers she got to some timid questions about the value of the Greek accents gave her a painful suspicion that here indeed there might be secrets not capable of explanation to a woman’s reason.