ppy side of the house, for the south and east looked rather
melancholy even under the brightest morning. The grounds here were
more confined, the flower-beds showed no very careful tendance, and
large clumps of trees, chiefly of sombre yews, had risen high, not ten
yards from the windows. The building, of greenish stone, was in the
old English style, not ugly, but small-windowed and melancholy-looking:
the sort of house that must have children, many flowers, open windows,
and little vistas of bright things, to make it seem a joyous home. In
this latter end of autumn, with a sparse remnant of yellow leaves
falling slowly athwart the dark evergreens in a stillness without
sunshine, the house too had an air of autumnal decline, and Mr.
Casaubon, when he presented himself, had no bloom that could be thrown
into relief by that background.

"Oh dear!" Celia said to herself, "I am sure Freshitt Hall would have
been pleasanter than this." She thought of the white freestone, the
pillared portico, and the terrace full of flowers, Sir James smiling
above them like a prince issuing from his enchantment in a rose-bush,
with a handkerchief swiftly metamorphosed from the most delicately
odorous petals--Sir James, who talked so agreeably, always about things
which had common-sense in them, and not about learning! Celia had
those light young feminine tastes which grave and weatherworn gentlemen
sometimes prefer in a wife; but happily Mr. Casaubon's bias had been
different, for he would have had no chance with Celia.

Dorothea, on the contrary, found the house and grounds all that she
could wish: the dark book-shelves in the long library, the carpets and
curtains with colors subdued by time, the curious old maps and
bird's-eye views on the walls of the corridor, with here and there an
old vase below, had no oppression for her, and seemed more cheerful
than the easts and pictures at the Grange, which her uncle had long ago
brought home from his travels--they being probably among the ideas he
had taken in at one time. To poor Dorothea these severe classical
nudities and smirking Renaissance-Correggiosities were painfully
inexplicable, staring into the midst of her Puritanic conceptions: she
had never been taught how she could bring them into any sort of
relevance with her life. But the owners of Lowick apparently had not
been travellers, and Mr. Casaubon's studies of the past were not
carried on by means of such aids.

Dorothea wa