 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 Pensées 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
guimp 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 snuffbox, 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«
