sly," said Dorothea.
"It would be a happiness to your friends, who believe in your future,
in your power to do great things, if you would let them save you from
that. Think how much money I have; it would be like taking a burthen
from me if you took some of it every year till you got free from this
fettering want of income. Why should not people do these things? It
is so difficult to make shares at all even. This is one way."

"God bless you, Mrs. Casaubon!" said Lydgate, rising as if with the
same impulse that made his words energetic, and resting his arm on the
back of the great leather chair he had been sitting in. "It is good
that you should have such feelings. But I am not the man who ought to
allow himself to benefit by them. I have not given guarantees enough.
I must not at least sink into the degradation of being pensioned for
work that I never achieved. It is very clear to me that I must not
count on anything else than getting away from Middlemarch as soon as I
can manage it. I should not be able for a long while, at the very
best, to get an income here, and--and it is easier to make necessary
changes in a new place. I must do as other men do, and think what will
please the world and bring in money; look for a little opening in the
London crowd, and push myself; set up in a watering-place, or go to
some southern town where there are plenty of idle English, and get
myself puffed,--that is the sort of shell I must creep into and try to
keep my soul alive in."

"Now that is not brave," said Dorothea,--"to give up the fight."

"No, it is not brave," said Lydgate, "but if a man is afraid of
creeping paralysis?" Then, in another tone, "Yet you have made a great
difference in my courage by believing in me. Everything seems more
bearable since I have talked to you; and if you can clear me in a few
other minds, especially in Farebrother's, I shall be deeply grateful.
The point I wish you not to mention is the fact of disobedience to my
orders. That would soon get distorted. After all, there is no
evidence for me but people's opinion of me beforehand. You can only
repeat my own report of myself."

"Mr. Farebrother will believe--others will believe," said Dorothea. "I
can say of you what will make it stupidity to suppose that you would be
bribed to do a wickedness."

"I don't know," said Lydgate, with something like a groan in his voice.
"I have not taken a bribe yet. But there is a pale shade of bri