From the time of that parting, Dorothea,
believing in Will's love for her, believing with a proud delight in
his delicate sense of honor and his determination that no one should
impeach him justly, felt her heart quite at rest as to the regard he
might have for Mrs. Lydgate. She was sure that the regard was blameless.
There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious
of having a sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us
over to rectitude and purity by their pure belief about us;
and our sins become that worst kind of sacrilege which tears down
the invisible altar of trust. "If you are not good, none is good"--
those little words may give a terrific meaning to responsibility,
may hold a vitriolic intensity for remorse.
Dorothea's nature was of that kind: her own passionate faults lay
along the easily counted open channels of her ardent character;
and while she was full of pity for the visible mistakes of others,
she had not yet any material within her experience for subtle
constructions and suspicions of hidden wrong. But that simplicity
of hers, holding up an ideal for others in her believing conception
of them, was one of the great powers of her womanhood. And it
had from the first acted strongly on Will Ladislaw. He felt,
when he parted from her, that the brief words by which he had tried
to convey to her his feeling about herself and the division which
her fortune made between them, would only profit by their brevity
when Dorothea had to interpret them: he felt that in her mind he
had found his highest estimate.
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