"All those rows of volumes--will you not
now do what you used to speak of?--will you not make up your mind
what part of them you will use, and begin to write the book which
will make your vast knowledge useful to the world? I will write
to your dictation, or I will copy and extract what you tell me:
I can be of no other use." Dorothea, in a most unaccountable,
darkly feminine manner, ended with a slight sob and eyes full
of tears.
The excessive feeling manifested would alone have been highly disturbing
to Mr. Casaubon, but there were other reasons why Dorothea's words
were among the most cutting and irritating to him that she could
have been impelled to use. She was as blind to his inward troubles
as he to hers: she had not yet learned those hidden conflicts in her
husband which claim our pity. She had not yet listened patiently
to his heartbeats, but only felt that her own was beating violently.
In Mr. Casaubon's ear, Dorothea's voice gave loud emphatic iteration
to those muffled suggestions of consciousness which it was possible
to explain as mere fancy, the illusion of exaggerated sensitiveness:
always when such suggestions are unmistakably repeated from without,
they are resisted as cruel and unjust. We are angered even by the
full acceptance of our humiliating confessions--how much more by
hearing in hard distinct syllables from the lips of a near observer,
those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid, and strive
against as if they were the oncoming of numbness! And this cruel
outward accuser was there in the shape of a wife--nay, of a
young bride, who, instead of observing his abundant pen-scratches
and amplitude of paper with the uncritical awe of an elegant-minded
canary-bird, seemed to present herself as a spy watching everything
with a malign power of inference.
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