 offer of marriage could care for a dried bookworm towards fifty,
except, indeed, in a religious sort of way, as for a clergyman of some
distinction.
    However, since Miss Brooke had become engaged in a conversation with Mr.
Casaubon about the Vaudois clergy, Sir James betook himself to Celia, and talked
to her about her sister; spoke of a house in town, and asked whether Miss Brooke
disliked London. Away from her sister, Celia talked quite easily, and Sir James
said to himself that the second Miss Brooke was certainly very agreeable as well
as pretty, though not, as some people pretended, more clever and sensible than
the elder sister. He felt that he had chosen the one who was in all respects the
superior; and a man naturally likes to look forward to having the best. He would
be the very Mawworm of bachelors who pretended not to expect it.
 

                                  Chapter III

 »Say, goddess, what ensued, when Raphaël,
 The affable archangel ...
Eve
 The story heard attentive, and was filled
 With admiration, and deep muse, to hear
 Of things so high and strange.«
                                                          Paradise Lost, B. vii.
 
If it had really occurred to Mr. Casaubon to think of Miss Brooke as a suitable
wife for him, the reasons that might induce her to accept him were already
planted in her mind, and by the evening of the next day the reasons had budded
and bloomed. For they had had a long conversation in the morning, while Celia,
who did not like the company of Mr. Casaubon's moles and sallowness, had escaped
to the vicarage to play with the curate's ill-shod but merry children.
    Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir of Mr.
Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine extension every
quality she herself brought; had opened much of her own experience to him, and
had understood from him the scope of his great work, also of attractively
labyrinthine extent. For he had been as instructive as Milton's »affable
archangel;« and with something of the archangelic manner he told her how he had
undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not with that
thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness of arrangement at which
Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical systems or erratic mythical fragments
in the world were corruptions of a tradition originally revealed. Having once
mastered the true position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of
mythical constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected
light of correspondences. But to gather
