BOOK II. OLD AND YOUNG.
20. CHAPTER XX.
(continued)
"I am very glad that my presence has made any difference to you,"
said Dorothea, who had a vivid memory of evenings in which she
had supposed that Mr. Casaubon's mind had gone too deep during
the day to be able to get to the surface again. I fear there
was a little temper in her reply. "I hope when we get to Lowick,
I shall be more useful to you, and be able to enter a little more
into what interests you."
"Doubtless, my dear," said Mr. Casaubon, with a slight bow.
"The notes I have here made will want sifting, and you can,
if you please, extract them under my direction."
"And all your notes," said Dorothea, whose heart had already
burned within her on this subject, so that now she could not help
speaking with her tongue. "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. Here, towards this particular
point of the compass, Mr. Casaubon had a sensitiveness to match
Dorothea's, and an equal quickness to imagine more than the fact.
He had formerly observed with approbation her capacity for worshipping
the right object; he now foresaw with sudden terror that this
capacity might be replaced by presumption, this worship by the most
exasperating of all criticism,--that which sees vaguely a great
many fine ends, and has not the least notion what it costs to reach them.
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