 and dreaming along endless vistas of unwearying
companionship, was a little drama which never tired our fathers and mothers, and
had been put into all costumes. Let but Pumpkin have a figure which would
sustain the disadvantages of the short-waisted swallow-tail, and everybody felt
it not only natural but necessary to the perfection of womanhood, that a sweet
girl should be at once convinced of his virtue, his exceptional ability, and
above all, his perfect sincerity. But perhaps no persons then living - certainly
none in the neighbourhood of Tipton - would have had a sympathetic understanding
for the dreams of a girl whose notions about marriage took their colour entirely
from an exalted enthusiasm about the ends of life, an enthusiasm which was lit
chiefly by its own fire, and included neither the niceties of the trousseau, the
pattern of plate, nor even the honours and sweet joys of the blooming matron.
    It had now entered Dorothea's mind that Mr. Casaubon might wish to make her
his wife, and the idea that he would do so touched her with a sort of
reverential gratitude. How good of him - nay, it would be almost as if a winged
messenger had suddenly stood beside her path and held out his hand towards her!
For a long while she had been oppressed by the indefiniteness which hung in her
mind, like a thick summer haze, over all her desire to make her life greatly
effective. What could she do, what ought she to do? - she, hardly more than a
budding woman, but yet with an active conscience and a great mental need, not to
be satisfied by a girlish instruction comparable to the nibblings and judgments
of a discursive mouse. With some endowment of stupidity and conceit, she might
have thought that a Christian young lady of fortune should find her ideal of
life in village charities, patronage of the humbler clergy, the perusal of
Female Scripture Characters, unfolding the private experience of Sara under the
Old Dispensation, and Dorcas under the New, and the care of her soul over her
embroidery in her own boudoir - with a background of prospective marriage to a
man who, if less strict than herself, as being involved in affairs religiously
inexplicable, might be prayed for and seasonably exhorted. From such contentment
poor Dorothea was shut out. The intensity of her religious disposition, the
coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a nature altogether
ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent: and with such a nature,
struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching, hemmed in by a social life which
seemed nothing but a labyrinth of petty courses
