“You are excited, my dear.. And I also
am feeling some unpleasant consequences of too much
mental disturbance,” said Mr. Casaubon.
In fact, he had it in his thought to tell her that
she ought not to have received young Ladislaw in his
absence: but he abstained, partly from the sense
that it would be ungracious to bring a new complaint
in the moment of her penitent acknowledgment, partly
because he wanted to avoid further agitation of himself
by speech, and partly because he was too proud to betray
that jealousy of disposition which was not so exhausted
on his scholarly compeers that there was none to spare
in other directions. There is a sort of jealousy
which needs very little fire: it is hardly a passion,
but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of
uneasy egoism.
“I think it is time for us to dress,”
he added, looking at his watch. They both rose,
and there was never any further allusion between them
to what had passed on this day.
But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness
with which we all remember epochs in our experience
when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive
is born. Today she had begun to see that she
had been under a wild illusion in expecting a response
to her feeling from Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt
the waking of a presentiment that there might be a
sad consciousness in his life which made as great
a need on his side as on her own.
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the
world as an udder to feed our supreme selves:
Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity,
but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she
would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise
and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive
with that distinctness which is no longer reflection
but feeling— an idea wrought back to the
directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—that
he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights
and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.
“Nous causames longtemps; elle
etait simple et bonne.
Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien;
Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l’aumone,
Et tout en ecoutant comme le coeur se donne,
Sans oser y penser je lui donnai le mien;
Elle emporta ma vie, et n’en sut jamais
rien.”
—ALFRED
DE MUSSET.
Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner
the next day, and gave no opportunity for Mr. Casaubon
to show disapprobation. On the contrary it seemed
to Dorothea that Will had a happier way of drawing
her husband into conversation and of deferentially
listening to him than she had ever observed in any
one before. To be sure, the listeners about Tipton
were not highly gifted! Will talked a good deal
himself, but what he said was thrown in with such
