"There is no fear of that, uncle," said Dorothea, turning to Will and

shaking hands with open cheerfulness, while she made no other form of

greeting, but went on answering her uncle. "I am very slow. When I

want to be busy with books, I am often playing truant among my

thoughts. I find it is not so easy to be learned as to plan cottages."

She seated herself beside her uncle opposite to Will, and was evidently

preoccupied with something that made her almost unmindful of him. He

was ridiculously disappointed, as if he had imagined that her coming

had anything to do with him.

"Why, yes, my dear, it was quite your hobby to draw plans. But it was

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good to break that off a little. Hobbies are apt to ran away with us,

you know; it doesn't do to be run away with. We must keep the reins.

I have never let myself be run away with; I always pulled up. That is

what I tell Ladislaw. He and I are alike, you know: he likes to go

into everything. We are working at capital punishment. We shall do a

great deal together, Ladislaw and I."

"Yes," said Dorothea, with characteristic directness, "Sir James has

been telling me that he is in hope of seeing a great change made soon

in your management of the estate--that you are thinking of having the

farms valued, and repairs made, and the cottages improved, so that

Tipton may look quite another place. Oh, how happy!"--she went on,

clasping her hands, with a return to that more childlike impetuous

manner, which had been subdued since her marriage. "If I were at home

still, I should take to riding again, that I might go about with you

and see all that! And you are going to engage Mr. Garth, who praised

my cottages, Sir James says."

"Chettam is a little hasty, my dear," said Mr. Brooke, coloring

slightly; "a little hasty, you know. I never said I should do anything

of the kind. I never said I should _not_ do it, you know."

"He only feels confident that you will do it," said Dorothea, in a

voice as clear and unhesitating as that of a young chorister chanting a

credo, "because you mean to enter Parliament as a member who cares for

the improvement of the people, and one of the first things to be made

better is the state of the land and the laborers. Think of Kit Downes,

uncle, who lives with his wife and seven children in a house with one

sitting room and one bedroom hardly larger than this table!--and those

poor Dagleys, in their tumble-down farmhouse, where they live in the

back kitchen and leave the other rooms to the rats! That is one reason

why I did not like the pictures here, dear uncle--which you think me

stupid about. I used to come from the village with all that dirt and

coarse ugliness like a pain within me, and the simpering pictures in

the drawing-room seemed to me like a wicked attempt to find delight in

what is false, while we don't mind how hard the truth is for the

neighbors outside our walls. I think we have no right to come forward

and urge wider changes for good, until we have tried to alter the evils

which lie under our own hands."




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