after all, self-culture was the principal point; while in politics he would have been sympathising warmly with liberty and progress in general. Our sense of duty must often wait for some work which shall take the place of dilettanteism and make us feel that the quality of our action is not a matter of indifference.
Ladislaw had now accepted his bit of work, though it was not that indeterminate loftiest thing which he had once dreamed of as alone worthy of continuous effort. His nature warmed easily in the presence of subjects which were visibly mixed with life and action, and the easily-stirred rebellion in him helped the glow of public spirit. In spite of Mr Casaubon and the banishment from Lowick, he was rather happy; getting a great deal of fresh knowledge in a vivid way and for practical purposes, and making the ‘Pioneer’ celebrated as far as Brassing (never mind the smallness of the area; the writing was not worse than much that reaches the four corners of the earth).
Mr Brooke was occasionally irritating; but Will’s impatience was relieved by the division of his time between visits to the Grange and retreats to his Middlemarch lodgings, which gave variety to his life.
“Shift the pegs a little,” he said to himself, “and Mr Brooke might be in the Cabinet, while I was Under-Secretary. That is the common order of things: the little waves make the large ones and are of the same pattern. I am better here than in the sort of life Mr Casaubon would have trained me for, where the doing would be all laid down by a precedent too rigid for me to react upon. I don’t care for prestige or high pay.”
As Lydgate had said of him, he was a sort of gypsy, rather enjoying the sense of belonging to no class; he had a feeling of romance in his position, and a pleasant consciousness of creating a little surprise wherever he went. That sort of enjoyment had been disturbed when he had felt some new distance between himself and Dorothea in their accidental meeting at Lydgate’s, and his irritation had gone out towards Mr Casaubon, who had declared beforehand that Will would lose caste. “I never had any caste,” he would have said, if that prophecy had been uttered to him, and the quick blood 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 sup-
