don't see why I should spoil his sport. For anything I can
tell, Miss Brooke may be happier with him than she would be with any
other man."

"Humphrey! I have no patience with you. You know you would rather
dine under the hedge than with Casaubon alone. You have nothing to say
to each other."

"What has that to do with Miss Brooke's marrying him? She does not do
it for my amusement."

"He has got no good red blood in his body," said Sir James.

"No. Somebody put a drop under a magnifying-glass and it was all
semicolons and parentheses," said Mrs. Cadwallader.

"Why does he not bring out his book, instead of marrying," said Sir
James, with a disgust which he held warranted by the sound feeling of
an English layman.

"Oh, he dreams footnotes, and they run away with all his brains. They
say, when he was a little boy, he made an abstract of 'Hop o' my
Thumb,' and he has been making abstracts ever since. Ugh! And that is
the man Humphrey goes on saying that a woman may be happy with."

"Well, he is what Miss Brooke likes," said the Rector. "I don't
profess to understand every young lady's taste."

"But if she were your own daughter?" said Sir James.

"That would be a different affair. She is _not_ my daughter, and I
don't feel called upon to interfere. Casaubon is as good as most of
us. He is a scholarly clergyman, and creditable to the cloth. Some
Radical fellow speechifying at Middlemarch said Casaubon was the
learned straw-chopping incumbent, and Freke was the brick-and-mortar
incumbent, and I was the angling incumbent. And upon my word, I don't
see that one is worse or better than the other." The Rector ended with
his silent laugh. He always saw the joke of any satire against
himself. His conscience was large and easy, like the rest of him: it
did only what it could do without any trouble.

Clearly, there would be no interference with Miss Brooke's marriage
through Mr. Cadwallader; and Sir James felt with some sadness that she
was to have perfect liberty of misjudgment. It was a sign of his good
disposition that he did not slacken at all in his intention of carrying
out Dorothea's design of the cottages. Doubtless this persistence was
the best course for his own dignity: but pride only helps us to be
generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.
She was now enough aware of Sir James's position with regard to her, to
appreciate the rectitude of his perseverance in a lan