 words as a
probable allusion to a feeling towards Mrs. Lydgate which he was determined to
cut himself off from indulging, she had had a quick, sad, excusing vision of the
charm there might be in his constant opportunities of companionship with that
fair creature, who most likely shared his other tastes as she evidently did his
delight in music. But there had followed his parting words - the few passionate
words in which he had implied that she herself was the object of whom his love
held him in dread, that it was his love for her only which he was resolved not
to declare but to carry away into banishment. From the time of that parting,
Dorothea, believing in Will's love for her, believing with a proud delight in
his delicate sense of honour and his determination that no one should impeach
him justly, felt her heart quite at rest as to the regard he might have for Mrs.
Lydgate. She was sure that the regard was blameless.
    There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having a
sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us over to rectitude and purity by
their pure belief about us; and our sins become that worst kind of sacrilege
which tears down the invisible altar of trust. »If you are not good, none is
good« - those little words may give a terrific meaning to responsibility, may
hold a vitriolic intensity for remorse.
    Dorothea's nature was of that kind: her own passionate faults lay along the
easily-counted open channels of her ardent character; and while she was full of
pity for the visible mistakes of others, she had not yet any material within her
experience for subtle constructions and suspicions of hidden wrong. But that
simplicity of hers, holding up an ideal for others in her believing conception
of them, was one of the great powers of her womanhood. And it had from the first
acted strongly on Will Ladislaw. He felt, when he parted from her, that the
brief words by which he had tried to convey to her his feeling about herself and
the division which her fortune made between them, would only profit by their
brevity when Dorothea had to interpret them: he felt that in her mind he had
found his highest estimate.
    And he was right there. In the months since their parting Dorothea had felt
a delicious though sad repose in their relation to each other, as one which was
inwardly whole and without blemish. She had an active force of antagonism within
her, when the antagonism turned on the defence either of plans or persons that
she believed in; and
