Will Ladislaw’s first farewell to Dorothea turns a brief leave-taking into what she believes is the permanent end of their personal bond. His departure is shaped by pride and the threat of Edward Casaubon’s codicil, but Dorothea cannot see the motive behind Will’s resolve. She interprets the parting as the loss of their rare friendship, then privately grieves over a miniature that brings Will together in her thoughts with the woman whose memory she wants to defend.

The Leave-Taking

Will tells Dorothea, “I must say good-by, Mrs. Casaubon; and probably for a long while.” The formal address and guarded prediction make the separation sound final, even as the narration reveals that the two are not responding to it in the same way. Will is resolved to forestall any suspicion that he might be a needy adventurer seeking a rich woman; Dorothea does not imagine this motive. She supposes instead that he regards Casaubon’s codicil, like herself, as a cruel prohibition on active friendship between them.

Dorothea’s Sense of Finality

The morning’s parting seems to Dorothea to close their personal relations. She imagines Will going into years of distance and believes that, if he ever returns, he will have become another man. Their happiness in speaking together—saying what no one else would care to hear—seems to her finished and irrecoverable. The gap between what she believes and what Will intends gives the farewell its painful asymmetry: she mourns an ending without knowing that his departure is also an effort to protect his independence and pride.

The Miniature and Private Grief

Because Dorothea believes their shared happiness is dead, she feels free to dwell on it without restraint. For the first time, she takes down a miniature from the wall and holds the little oval picture in her palm, leaning her cheek against it. In the image she joins the woman she believes was judged too harshly with Will, whose character her own heart and judgment defend. The gesture makes the portrait a focus for grief and sympathy, not simply a likeness: Dorothea tries to comfort, through the image, those she thinks have suffered unjust condemnation.

Loss, Misreading, and What Follows

The narrator gives Dorothea’s sorrow a significance she herself does not yet recognize: she is saying farewell to love, though she experiences it as the loss of a uniquely intimate friendship. The image of morning light being banished by an irresistible day frames that love as a brief awakening cut short by circumstances she cannot change. Feeling that something in her lot is irrevocably amiss, Dorothea readily shapes her thoughts about the future into resolve. The scene thus makes the farewell consequential beyond the separation itself: her grief rests on a sincere but incomplete reading of Will, while the affection revealed in her response persists beneath the apparent ending.