“Oh, I told you beforehand what he would say,” answered Mrs. Cadwallader, lifting up her eyebrows.  “I have done what I could:  I wash my hands of the marriage.”

“In the first place,” said the Rector, looking rather grave, “it would be nonsensical to expect that I could convince Brooke, and make him act accordingly.  Brooke is a very good fellow, but pulpy; he will run into any mould, but he won’t keep shape.”

“He might keep shape long enough to defer the marriage,” said Sir James.

“But, my dear Chettam, why should I use my influence to Casaubon’s disadvantage, unless I were much surer than I am that I should be acting for the advantage of Miss Brooke?  I know no harm of Casaubon.  I don’t care about his Xisuthrus and Fee-fo-fum and the rest; but then he doesn’t care about my fishing-tackle.  As to the line he took on the Catholic Question, that was unexpected; but he has always been civil to me, and I don’t see why I should spoil his sport.  For anything I can tell, Miss Brooke may be happier with him than she would be with any other man.”

“Humphrey!  I have no patience with you.  You know you would rather dine under the hedge than with Casaubon alone.  You have nothing to say to each other.”

“What has that to do with Miss Brooke’s marrying him?  She does not do it for my amusement.”

“He has got no good red blood in his body,” said Sir James.

“No.  Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all semicolons and parentheses,” said Mrs. Cadwallader.

“Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying,” said Sir James, with a disgust which he held warranted by the sound feeling of an English layman.

“Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains.  They say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of `Hop o’ my Thumb,’ and he has been making abstracts ever since.  Ugh!  And that is the man Humphrey goes on saying that a woman may be happy with.”

“Well, he is what Miss Brooke likes,” said the Rector.  “I don’t profess to understand every young lady’s taste.”

“But if she were your own daughter?” said Sir James.

“That would be a different affair.  She is not my daughter, and I don’t feel called upon to interfere.  Casaubon is as good as most of us.  He is a scholarly clergyman, and creditable to the cloth.  Some Radical fellow speechifying at Middlemarch said Casaubon was the learned straw-chopping incumbent, and Freke was the brick-and-mortar incumbent, and I was the angling incumbent.  And upon my word, I don’t see that one is worse or better than the other.”  The Rector ended with his silent laugh.  He always saw the joke of any satire against himself.  His conscience was large and easy, like the rest of him:  it did only what it could do without any trouble.