She gave him the hand he held out his own for, and bade him good evening, with her head lifted just imperceptibly higher than was its wont, and her face turned full toward him. Her eyes met his with an honest calmness; she had summoned herself back.
He saw strength and earnestness; a flush of feeling; the face of a woman made to look nobleness and enthusiasm into the soul of a man.
She sat in the library that evening at nine o'clock.
She had drawn up her large chair to the open fire; her feet were resting on the low fender; her eyes were watching shapes in the coals.
Mrs. Lewes's "Middlemarch" lay on her lap; she had just begun to read it. Her hands, crossed upon each other, had fallen upon the page; she had found something of herself in those first chapters. Something that reminded of her old longings and hindrances; of the shallowness and half-living that had been about her, and the chafe of her discontent in it.
She did not wonder that Dorothea was going to marry Mr. Casaubon. Into some dream-trap just such as that she might have fallen, had a Mr. Casaubon come in her way.
Instead, had come pain and mistake; a keen self-searching; a learning to bear with all her might, to work, and to wait.
She had not been waiting for any making good in God Providence of that special happiness which had passed her by. If she had, she would not have been doing the sort of work she had taken into her hands. When we wait for one particular hope, and will not be satisfied with any other, the whole force of ourselves bends toward it; we dictate to life, and wrest its tendencies at every turn.
The thing comes. Ask,—with the real might of whatever asking there is in you,—and it shall be given you. But when you have got it, it may not be the thing you thought it would be. Whosoever will have his life shall lose it.