"
This speech was delivered with an energy and readiness quite unusual
with Mr. Casaubon. It was not indeed entirely an improvisation,
but had taken shape in inward colloquy, and rushed out like the round
grains from a fruit when sudden heat cracks it. Dorothea was not
only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world
which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.
Dorothea was indignant in her turn. Had she not been repressing
everything in herself except the desire to enter into some fellowship
with her husband's chief interests?
"My judgment _was_ a very superficial one--such as I am capable
of forming," she answered, with a prompt resentment, that needed
no rehearsal. "You showed me the rows of notebooks--you have often
spoken of them--you have often said that they wanted digesting.
But I never heard you speak of the writing that is to be published.
Those were very simple facts, and my judgment went no farther.
I only begged you to let me be of some good to you."
Dorothea rose to leave the table and Mr. Casaubon made no reply,
taking up a letter which lay beside him as if to reperuse it.
Both were shocked at their mutual situation--that each should
have betrayed anger towards the other. If they had been at home,
settled at Lowick in ordinary life among their neighbors, the clash
would have been less embarrassing: but on a wedding journey,
the express object of which is to isolate two people on the ground
that they are all the world to each other, the sense of disagreement is,
to say the least, confounding and stultifying.
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