 at once that
        your acceptance of the proposal above indicated would be highly
        offensive to me. That I have some claim to the exercise of a veto here,
        would not, I believe, be denied by any reasonable person cognisant of
        the relations between us: relations which, though thrown into the past
        by your recent procedure, are not thereby annulled in their character of
        determining antecedents. I will not here make reflections on any
        person's judgment. It is enough for me to point out to yourself that
        there are certain social fitnesses and proprieties which should hinder a
        somewhat near relative of mine from becoming in anywise conspicuous in
        this vicinity in a status not only much beneath my own, but associated
        at best with the sciolism of literary or political adventurers. At any
        rate, the contrary issue must exclude you from further reception at my
        house. - Yours faithfully,
                                                               EDWARD CASAUBON.«
 
Meanwhile Dorothea's mind was innocently at work towards the further
embitterment of her husband; dwelling, with a sympathy that grew to agitation,
on what Will had told her about his parents and grand-parents. Any private hours
in her day were usually spent in her blue-green boudoir, and she had come to be
very fond of its pallid quaintness. Nothing had been outwardly altered there;
but while the summer had gradually advanced over the western fields beyond the
avenue of elms, the bare room had gathered within it those memories of an inward
life which fill the air as with a cloud of good or bad angels, the invisible yet
active forms of our spiritual triumphs or our spiritual falls. She had been so
used to struggle for and to find resolve in looking along the avenue towards the
arch of western light that the vision itself had gained a communicating power.
Even the pale stag seemed to have reminding glances and to mean mutely, »Yes, we
know.« And the group of delicately-touched miniatures had made an audience as of
beings no longer disturbed about their own earthly lot, but still humanly
interested. Especially the mysterious »Aunt Julia« about whom Dorothea had never
found it easy to question her husband.
    And now, since her conversation with Will, many fresh images had gathered
round that Aunt Julia who was Will's grandmother; the presence of that delicate
miniature, so like a living face that she knew, helping to concentrate her
feelings. What a wrong, to cut off the girl from the family protection and
inheritance only because she had chosen a man who was poor! Dorothea, early
troubling her elders with questions about the facts around her, had wrought
herself into some independent
