would have come and gone
like breath in his transparent skin. But it is one thing to like defiance, and
another thing to like its consequences.
    Meanwhile, the town opinion about the new editor of the Pioneer was tending
to confirm Mr. Casaubon's view. Will's relationship in that distinguished
quarter did not, like Lydgate's high connections, serve as an advantageous
introduction: if it was rumoured that young Ladislaw was Mr. Casaubon's nephew
or cousin, it was also rumoured that »Mr. Casaubon would have nothing to do with
him.«
    »Brooke has taken him up,« said Mr. Hawley, »because that is what no man in
his senses could have expected. Casaubon has devilish good reasons, you may be
sure, for turning the cold shoulder on a young fellow whose bringing-up he paid
for. Just like Brooke - one of those fellows who would praise a cat to sell a
horse.«
    And some oddities of Will's, more or less poetical, appeared to support Mr.
Keck, the editor of the Trumpet in asserting that Ladislaw, if the truth were
known, was not only a Polish emissary but crack-brained, which accounted for the
preternatural quickness and glibness of his speech when he got on to a platform
- as he did whenever he had an opportunity, speaking with a facility which cast
reflections on solid Englishmen generally. It was disgusting to Keck to see a
strip of a fellow, with light curls round his head, get up and speechify by the
hour against institutions »which had existed when he was in his cradle.« And in
a leading article of the Trumpet, Keck characterised Ladislaw's speech at a
Reform meeting as »the violence of an energumen - a miserable effort to shroud
in the brilliancy of fireworks the daring of irresponsible statements and the
poverty of a knowledge which was of the cheapest and most recent description.«
    »That was a rattling article yesterday, Keck,« said Dr. Sprague, with
sarcastic intentions. »But what is an energumen?«
    »Oh, a term that came up in the French Revolution,« said Keck.
    This dangerous aspect of Ladislaw was strangely contrasted with other habits
which became matter of remark. He had a fondness, half artistic, half
affectionate, for little children - the smaller they were on tolerably active
legs, and the funnier their clothing, the better Will liked to surprise and
please them. We know that in Rome he was given to ramble about among the poor
people, and the taste did not quit him in Middlemarch.