to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr.
Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to
conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling - an
idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects -
that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must
always fall with a certain difference.
 

                                  Chapter XXII

 »Nous causâmes longtemps; elle était simple et bonne.
 Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien;
 Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l'aumône,
 Et tout en écoutant comme le coeur se donne,
 Sans oser y penser, je lui donnai le mien;
 Elle emporta ma vie, et n'en sut jamais rien.«
                                                               Alfred de Musset.
 
Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day, and gave no
opportunity for Mr. Casaubon to show disapprobation. On the contrary it seemed
to Dorothea that Will had a happier way of drawing her husband into conversation
and of deferentially listening to him than she had ever observed in any one
before. To be sure, the listeners about Tipton were not highly gifted! Will
talked a good deal himself, but what he said was thrown in with such rapidity,
and with such an unimportant air of saying something by the way, that it seemed
a gay little chime after the great bell. If Will was not always perfect, this
was certainly one of his good days. He described touches of incident among the
poor people in Rome, only to be seen by one who could move about freely; he
found himself in agreement with Mr. Casaubon as to the unsound opinions of
Middleton concerning the relations of Judaism and Catholicism; and passed easily
to a half-enthusiastic half-playful picture of the enjoyment he got out of the
very miscellaneousness of Rome, which made the mind flexible with constant
comparison, and saved you from seeing the world's ages as a set of box-like
partitions without vital connection. Mr. Casaubon's studies, Will observed, had
always been of too broad a kind for that, and he had perhaps never felt any such
sudden effect, but for himself he confessed that Rome had given him quite a new
sense of history as a whole: the fragments stimulated his imagination and made
him constructive. Then occasionally, but not too often, he appealed to Dorothea,
and discussed what she said, as if her sentiment were an item to be considered
in the final judgment even of the Madonna di Foligno or the Laocoon. A sense of
contributing to form the world's opinion makes