. Also, it must be admitted, Dorothea wished that this
could be known for Will's sake, since her friends seemed to think of him as
simply an object of Mr. Casaubon's charity. Why should he be compared with an
Italian carrying white mice? That word quoted from Mrs. Cadwallader seemed like
a mocking travesty wrought in the dark by an impish finger.
    At Lowick Dorothea searched desk and drawer - searched all her husband's
places of deposit for private writing, but found no paper addressed especially
to her, except that »Synoptical Tabulation« which was probably only the
beginning of many intended directions for her guidance. In carrying out this
bequest of labour to Dorothea, as in all else, Mr. Casaubon had been slow and
hesitating, oppressed in the plan of transmitting his work, as he had been in
executing it, by the sense of moving heavily in a dim and clogging medium:
distrust of Dorothea's competence to arrange what he had prepared was subdued
only by distrust of any other redactor. But he had come at last to create a
trust for himself out of Dorothea's nature: she could do what she resolved to
do: and he willingly imagined her toiling under the fetters of a promise to
erect a tomb with his name upon it. (Not that Mr. Casaubon called the future
volumes a tomb; he called them the Key to all Mythologies.) But the months
gained on him and left his plans belated: he had only had time to ask for that
promise by which he sought to keep his cold grasp on Dorothea's life.
    The grasp had slipped away. Bound by a pledge given from the depths of her
pity, she would have been capable of undertaking a toil which her judgment
whispered was vain for all uses except that consecration of faithfulness which
is a supreme use. But now her judgment, instead of being controlled by duteous
devotion, was made active by the imbittering discovery that in her past union
there had lurked the hidden alienation of secrecy and suspicion. The living,
suffering man was no longer before her to awaken her pity: there remained only
the retrospect of painful subjection to a husband whose thoughts had been lower
than she had believed, whose exorbitant claims for himself had even blinded his
scrupulous care for his own character, and made him defeat his own pride by
shocking men of ordinary honour. As for the property which was the sign of that
broken tie, she would have been glad to be free from it and have nothing more
than her original fortune which had been settled on her, if there had
