Will has come to Lowick to tell Dorothea that he is leaving Middlemarch and wants to say goodbye. They have a kind and polite yet restrained conversation, and at one point Will cries out, unable to suppress his emotions. Dorothea comments that Will is happier than she could be with being poor; in this quotation, he responds by saying that for the first time in his life, he regrets being poor because it prevents him from having the one thing he treasures most in the world. By this he means, of course, Dorothea—although because of Will’s tortured, indirect way of…