BOOK I. MISS BROOKE .
CHAPTER I. " Since I can do no good because a woman , Reach constantly at something that is near it .
-- The Maid 's Tragedy : BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER .
Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress .
Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters ; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments , which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible , -- or from one of our elder poets , -- in a paragraph of to-day 's newspaper .
She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever , but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense .
Nevertheless , Celia wore scarcely more trimmings ; and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister 's , and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements ; for Miss Brooke 's plain dressing was due to mixed conditions , in most of which her sister shared .
The pride of being ladies had something to do with it : the Brooke connections , though not exactly aristocratic , were unquestionably " good : " if you inquired backward for a generation or two , you would not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers -- anything lower than an admiral or a clergyman ; and there was even an ancestor discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell , but afterwards conformed , and managed to come out of all political troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate .
Young women of such birth , living in a quiet country-house , and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor , naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster 's daughter .
Then there was well-bred economy , which in those days made show in 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 as an heiress ; for not only had the sisters seven hundred a-year each from their parents , but if Dorothea married and had a son , that son would inherit Mr. Brooke 's estate , presumably worth about three thousand a-year -- a rental which seemed wealth to provincial families , still discussing Mr. Peel 's late conduct on the Catholic question , innocent of future gold-fields , and of that gorgeous plutocracy which has so nobly exalted the necessities of genteel life .
And how should Dorothea not marry ?
-- a girl so handsome and with such prospects ?
Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes , and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which might cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer , or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers .
A young lady of some birth and fortune , who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thought herself living in the time of the Apostles -- who had strange whims of fasting like a Papist , and of sitting up at night to read old theological books !
Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses : a man would naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship .
Women were expected to have weak opinions ; but the great safeguard of society and of domestic life was , that opinions were not acted on .
Sane people did what their neighbors did , so that if any lunatics were at large , one might know and avoid them .
The rural opinion about the new young ladies , even among the cottagers , was generally in favor of Celia , as being so amiable and innocent-looking , while Miss Brooke 's large eyes seemed , like her religion , too unusual and striking .
Poor Dorothea !
compared with her , the innocent-looking Celia was knowing and worldly-wise ; so much subtler is a human mind than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face for it .
Yet those who approached Dorothea , though prejudiced against her by this alarming hearsay , found that she had a charm unaccountably reconcilable with it .
Most men thought her bewitching when she was on horseback .
She loved the fresh air and the various aspects of the country , and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled pleasure she looked very little like a devotee .
Riding was an indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms ; she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way , and always looked forward to renouncing it .
She was open , ardent , and not in the least self-admiring ; indeed , it was pretty to see how her imagination adorned her sister Celia with attractions altogether superior to her own , and if any gentleman appeared to come to the Grange from some other motive than that of seeing Mr. Brooke , she concluded that he must be in love with Celia : Sir James Chettam , for example , whom she constantly considered from Celia 's point of view , inwardly debating whether it would be good for Celia to accept him .
That he should be regarded as a suitor to herself would have seemed to her a ridiculous irrelevance .
Dorothea , with all her eagerness to know the truths of life , retained very childlike ideas about marriage .
She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker , if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony ; or John Milton when his blindness had come on ; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure ; but an amiable handsome baronet , who said " Exactly " to her remarks even when she expressed uncertainty , -- how could he affect her as a lover ?
The really delightful marriage must be that where your husband was a sort of father , and could teach you even Hebrew , if you wished it .
These peculiarities of Dorothea 's character caused Mr. Brooke to be all the more blamed in neighboring families for not securing some middle-aged lady as guide and companion to his nieces .
But he himself dreaded so much the sort of superior woman likely to be available for such a position , that he allowed himself to be dissuaded by Dorothea 's objections , and was in this case brave enough to defy the world -- that is to say , Mrs. Cadwallader the Rector 's wife , and the small group of gentry with whom he visited in the northeast corner of Loamshire .
So Miss Brooke presided in her uncle 's household , and did not at all dislike her new authority , with the homage that belonged to it .
Sir James Chettam was going to dine at the Grange to-day with another gentleman whom the girls had never seen , and about whom Dorothea felt some venerating expectation .
This was the Reverend Edward Casaubon , noted in the county as a man of profound learning , understood for many years to be engaged on a great work concerning religious history ; also as a man of wealth enough to give lustre to his piety , and having views of his own which were to be more clearly ascertained on the publication of his book .
His very name carried an impressiveness hardly to be measured without a precise chronology of scholarship .
Early in the day Dorothea had returned from the infant school which she had set going in the village , and was taking her usual place in the pretty sitting-room which divided the bedrooms of the sisters , bent on finishing a plan for some buildings ( a kind of work which she delighted in ) , when Celia , who had been watching her with a hesitating desire to propose something , said --