Will was thoroughly out of temper with himself as well as with his ‘principle’, and he went to shut himself in his rooms with a half-formed resolve to throw up the Pioneer and Mr Brooke together. Why should he stay? If the impassable gulf between himself and Dorothea were ever to be filled up, it must rather be by his going away and getting into a thoroughly different position  than by staying here and slipping into deserved contempt as an understrapper of Brooke’s. Then came the young dream of wonders that he might do – in five years, for example: political writing, political speaking, would get a higher value now public life was going to be wider and more national, and they might give him such distinction that he would not seem to be asking Dorothea to step down to him. Five years: – if he could only be sure that she cared for him more than for others; if he could only make her aware that he stood aloof until he could tell his love without lowering himself – then he would go away easily, and begin a career which at five-and-twenty seemed probable enough in the inward order of things, where talent brings fame, and fame everything else which is delightful. He could speak and he could write; he could master any subject if he chose, and he meant always to take the side of reason and justice, on which he would carry all his ardour. Why should he not one day be lifted above the shoulders of the crowd, and feel that he won that eminence well? Without doubt he would leave Middlemarch, go to town, and make himself fit for celebrity by ‘eating his dinners’.