 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 heart-beats, 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.
    For the first time since Dorothea had known him, Mr. Casaubon's face had a
quick angry flush upon it.
    »My love,« he said, with irritation reined in by propriety, »you may rely
upon me for knowing the times and the seasons, adapted to the different stages
of a work which is not to be measured by the facile conjectures of ignorant
onlookers. It had been easy for me to gain a temporary effect by a mirage of
baseless opinion; but it is ever the trial of the scrupulous explorer to be
saluted with the impatient scorn of chatterers who attempt only the smallest
achievements, being indeed equipped for no other. And it were well if all such
could be admonished to discriminate judgments of which
