she could slyly touch his coat with her cheek. “I daresay Dodo likes it: she is fond of melancholy things and ugly people.”
“I am fond of knowing something about the people I live among,” said Dorothea, who had been watching everything with the interest of a monk on his holiday tour. “It seems to me we know nothing of our neighbours, unless they are cottagers. One is constantly wondering what sort of lives other people lead, and how they take things. I am quite obliged to Mrs Cadwallader for coming and calling me out of the library.”
“Quite right to feel obliged to me,” said Mrs Cadwallader. “Your rich Lowick farmers are as curious as any buffaloes or bisons, and I daresay you don’t half see them at church. They are quite different from your uncle’s tenants or Sir James’s—monsters—farmers without landlords—one can’t tell how to class them.”
“Most of these followers are not Lowick people,” said Sir James; “I suppose they are legatees from a distance, or from Middlemarch. Lovegood tells me the old fellow has left a good deal of money as well as land.”
“Think of that now! when so many younger sons can’t dine at their own expense,” said Mrs Cadwallader. “Ah,” turning round at the sound of the opening door, “here is Mr Brooke. I felt that we were incomplete before, and here is the explanation. You are come to see this odd funeral, of course?”
“No, I came to look after Casaubon—to see how he goes on, you know. And to bring a little news—a little news, my dear,” said Mr Brooke, nodding at Dorothea as she came towards him. “I looked into the library, and I saw Casaubon over his books. I told him it wouldn’t do: I said, ‘This will never do, you know: think of your wife, Casaubon.’ And he promised me to come up. I didn’t tell him my news: I said, he must come up.”
“Ah, now they are coming out of church,” Mrs Cadwallader exclaimed. “Dear me, what a wonderfully mixed set! Mr Lydgate as doctor, I suppose. But that is really a good-looking woman, and the fair young man must be her son. Who are they, Sir James, do you know?”
“I see Vincy, the mayor of Middlemarch; they are probably his wife and son,” said Sir James, looking interrogatively at Mr Brooke, who nodded and said—
“Yes, a very decent family—a very good fellow is Vincy; a credit to the manufacturing interest. You have seen him at my house, you know.”
“Ah, yes: one of your secret committee,” said Mrs Cadwallader, provokingly.
“A coursing fellow, though,” said Sir James, with a fox-hunter’s disgust.
“And one of those who suck the life out of the wretched handloom weavers in Tipton and Freshitt. That is how his family look so fair and sleek,” said Mrs Cadwallader. “Those dark, purple-faced people
