MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

BOOK 1- MISS BROOKE- Chapter 1

"Since I can do no good because a woman,

Reach constantly at something that is near it.

--The Maid's Tragedy: BEAUMONT AND FLETCHER.

Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into

relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that

she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which

the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile

as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity

from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion

gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,--or

from one of our elder poets,--in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper.

She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the

addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense. Nevertheless,

Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close

observers that her dress differed from her sister's, and had a shade

of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke's plain dressing

was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared.

The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke

connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably

"good:" if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would

not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers--anything

lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor

discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell,

but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political

troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate.

Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house,

and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor,

naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's daughter.

Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in

dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required

for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been

enough to account for plain dress, quite apart from religious feeling;

but in Miss Brooke's case, religion alone would have determined it;

and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's sentiments,

only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept

momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea knew

many passages of Pascal's Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart;

and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity,