Page 530 - middlemarch

fields beyond the avenue of elms, the bare room had gath-
ered within it those memories of an inward life which fill the
air as with a cloud of good or had angels, the invisible yet
active forms of our spiritual triumphs or our spiritual falls.
She had been so used to struggle for and to find resolve in
looking along the avenue towards the arch of western light
that the vision itself had gained a communicating power.
Even the pale stag seemed to have reminding glances and
to mean mutely, ‘Yes, we know.’ And the group of delicate-
ly touched miniatures had made an audience as of beings
no longer disturbed about their own earthly lot, but still
humanly interested. Especially the mysterious ‘Aunt Julia’
about whom Dorothea had never found it easy to question
her husband.
And now, since her conversation with Will, many fresh
images had gathered round that Aunt Julia who was Will’s
grandmother; the presence of that delicate miniature, so
like a living face that she knew, helping to concentrate her
feelings. What a wrong, to cut off the girl from the fam-
ily protection and inheritance only because she had chosen
a man who was poor! Dorothea, early troubling her elders
with questions about the facts around her, had wrought
herself into some independent clearness as to the histori-
cal, political reasons why eldest sons had superior rights,
and why land should be entailed: those reasons, impressing
her with a certain awe, might be weightier than she knew,
but here was a question of ties which left them uninfringed.
Here was a daughter whose child— even according to the
ordinary aping of aristocratic institutions by people who