MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 51

Party is Nature too, and you shall see

By force of Logic how they both agree:

The Many in the One, the One in Many;

All is not Some, nor Some the same as Any:

Genus holds species, both are great or small;

One genus highest, one not high at all;

Each species has its differentia too,

This is not That, and He was never You,

Though this and that are AYES, and you and he

Are like as one to one, or three to three.

No gossip about Mr. Casaubon's will had yet reached Ladislaw:

the air seemed to be filled with the dissolution of Parliament

and the coming election, as the old wakes and fairs were filled

with the rival clatter of itinerant shows; and more private noises

were taken little notice of. The famous "dry election" was at hand,

in which the depths of public feeling might be measured by the low

flood-mark of drink. Will Ladislaw was one of the busiest at this time;

and though Dorothea's widowhood was continually in his thought,

he was so far from wishing to be spoken to on the subject,

that when Lydgate sought him out to tell him what had passed about

the Lowick living, he answered rather waspishly--

"Why should you bring me into the matter? I never see Mrs. Casaubon,

and am not likely to see her, since she is at Freshitt.

I never go there. It is Tory ground, where I and the 'Pioneer'

are no more welcome than a poacher and his gun."

The fact was that Will had been made the more susceptible by

observing that Mr. Brooke, instead of wishing him, as before,

to come to the Grange oftener than was quite agreeable to himself,

seemed now to contrive that he should go there as little as possible.

This was a shuffling concession of Mr. Brooke's to Sir James

Chettam's indignant remonstrance; and Will, awake to the slightest

hint in this direction, concluded that he was to be kept away from

the Grange on Dorothea's account. Her friends, then, regarded him

with some suspicion? Their fears were quite superfluous: they were

very much mistaken if they imagined that he would put himself

forward as a needy adventurer trying to win the favor of a rich woman.

Until now Will had never fully seen the chasm between himself

and Dorothea--until now that he was come to the brink of it, and saw

her on the other side. He began, not without some inward rage,

to think of going away from the neighborhood: it would be impossible