MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

BOOK 8- SUNSET AND SUNRISE- Chapter 72

Full souls are double mirrors, making still

An endless vista of fair things before,

Repeating things behind.

Dorothea's impetuous generosity, which would have leaped at once

to the vindication of Lydgate from the suspicion of having

accepted money as a bribe, underwent a melancholy check when she

came to consider all the circumstances of the case by the light

of Mr. Farebrother's experience.

"It is a delicate matter to touch," he said. "How can we begin

to inquire into it? It must be either publicly by setting the

magistrate and coroner to work, or privately by questioning Lydgate.

As to the first proceeding there is no solid ground to go upon,

else Hawley would have adopted it; and as to opening the subject

with Lydgate, I confess I should shrink from it. He would probably

take it as a deadly insult. I have more than once experienced the

difficulty of speaking to him on personal matters. And--one should

know the truth about his conduct beforehand, to feel very confident

of a good result."

"I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty: I believe that

people are almost always better than their neighbors think they are,"

said Dorothea. Some of her intensest experience in the last two

years had set her mind strongly in opposition to any unfavorable

construction of others; and for the first time she felt rather

discontented with Mr. Farebrother. She disliked this cautious

weighing of consequences, instead of an ardent faith in efforts

of justice and mercy, which would conquer by their emotional force.

Two days afterwards, he was dining at the Manor with her uncle

and the Chettams, and when the dessert was standing uneaten,

the servants were out of the room, and Mr. Brooke was nodding

in a nap, she returned to the subject with renewed vivacity.

"Mr. Lydgate would understand that if his friends hear a calumny

about him their first wish must be to justify him. What do we

live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?

I cannot be indifferent to the troubles of a man who advised me

in _my_ trouble, and attended me in my illness."

Dorothea's tone and manner were not more energetic than they

had been when she was at the head of her uncle's table nearly

three years before, and her experience since had given her more

right to express a decided opinion. But Sir James Chettam was no

longer the diffident and acquiescent suitor: he was the anxious