"You talk as if you had never known any youth. It is
monstrous--as if you had had a vision of Hades in your childhood, like
the boy in the legend. You have been brought up in some of those
horrible notions that choose the sweetest women to devour--like
Minotaurs And now you will go and be shut up in that stone prison at
Lowick: you will be buried alive. It makes me savage to think of it!
I would rather never have seen you than think of you with such a
prospect."

Will again feared that he had gone too far; but the meaning we attach
to words depends on our feeling, and his tone of angry regret had so
much kindness in it for Dorothea's heart, which had always been giving
out ardor and had never been fed with much from the living beings
around her, that she felt a new sense of gratitude and answered with a
gentle smile--

"It is very good of you to be anxious about me. It is because you did
not like Lowick yourself: you had set your heart on another kind of
life. But Lowick is my chosen home."

The last sentence was spoken with an almost solemn cadence, and Will
did not know what to say, since it would not be useful for him to
embrace her slippers, and tell her that he would die for her: it was
clear that she required nothing of the sort; and they were both silent
for a moment or two, when Dorothea began again with an air of saying at
last what had been in her mind beforehand.

"I wanted to ask you again about something you said the other day.
Perhaps it was half of it your lively way of speaking: I notice that
you like to put things strongly; I myself often exaggerate when I speak
hastily."

"What was it?" said Will, observing that she spoke with a timidity
quite new in her. "I have a hyperbolical tongue: it catches fire as it
goes. I dare say I shall have to retract."

"I mean what you said about the necessity of knowing German--I mean,
for the subjects that Mr. Casaubon is engaged in. I have been thinking
about it; and it seems to me that with Mr. Casaubon's learning he must
have before him the same materials as German scholars--has he not?"
Dorothea's timidity was due to an indistinct consciousness that she was
in the strange situation of consulting a third person about the
adequacy of Mr. Casaubon's learning.

"Not exactly the same materials," said Will, thinking that he would be
duly reserved. "He is not an Orientalist, you know. He does not
profess to have more than second-hand knowledge there."