MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 48

Surely the golden hours are turning gray

And dance no more, and vainly strive to run:

I see their white locks streaming in the wind--

Each face is haggard as it looks at me,

Slow turning in the constant clasping round

Storm-driven.

Dorothea's distress when she was leaving the church came chiefly

from the perception that Mr. Casaubon was determined not to speak

to his cousin, and that Will's presence at church had served

to mark more strongly the alienation between them. Will's coming

seemed to her quite excusable, nay, she thought it an amiable

movement in him towards a reconciliation which she herself had been

constantly wishing for. He had probably imagined, as she had,

that if Mr. Casaubon and he could meet easily, they would shake

hands and friendly intercourse might return. But now Dorothea felt

quite robbed of that hope. Will was banished further than ever,

for Mr. Casaubon must have been newly embittered by this thrusting

upon him of a presence which he refused to recognize.

He had not been very well that morning, suffering from some

difficulty in breathing, and had not preached in consequence;

she was not surprised, therefore, that he was nearly silent

at luncheon, still less that he made no allusion to Will Ladislaw.

For her own part she felt that she could never again introduce

that subject. They usually spent apart the hours between luncheon

and dinner on a Sunday; Mr. Casaubon in the library dozing chiefly,

and Dorothea in her boudoir, where she was wont to occupy

herself with some of her favorite books. There was a little

heap of them on the table in the bow-window--of various sorts,

from Herodotus, which she was learning to read with Mr. Casaubon,

to her old companion Pascal, and Keble's "Christian Year."

But to-day opened one after another, and could read none of them.

Everything seemed dreary: the portents before the birth of Cyrus--

Jewish antiquities--oh dear!--devout epigrams--the sacred chime

of favorite hymns--all alike were as flat as tunes beaten on wood:

even the spring flowers and the grass had a dull shiver in them

under the afternoon clouds that hid the sun fitfully; even the

sustaining thoughts which had become habits seemed to have in them

the weariness of long future days in which she would still live

with them for her sole companions. It was another or rather a

fuller sort of companionship that poor Dorothea was hungering for,