 presume to think that he can
paint your ideal. This is serious, my friend! Your great-aunt! Der Neffe als
Onkel in a tragic sense-ungeheuer!«
    »You and I shall quarrel, Naumann, if you call that lady my aunt again.«
    »How is she to be called then?«
    »Mrs. Casaubon.«
    »Good. Suppose I get acquainted with her in spite of you, and find that she
very much wishes to be painted?«
    »Yes, suppose!« said Will Ladislaw, in a contemptuous undertone, intended to
dismiss the subject. He was conscious of being irritated by ridiculously small
causes, which were half of his own creation. Why was he making any fuss about
Mrs. Casaubon? And yet he felt as if something had happened to him with regard
to her. There are characters which are continually creating collisions and nodes
for themselves in dramas which nobody is prepared to act with them. Their
susceptibilities will clash against objects that remain innocently quiet.
 

                                   Chapter XX

 A child forsaken, waking suddenly,
 Whose gaze afeard on all things round doth rove,
 And seeth only that it cannot see
 The meeting eyes of love.
 
Two hours later, Dorothea was seated in an inner room or boudoir of a handsome
apartment in the Via Sistina.
    I am sorry to add that she was sobbing bitterly, with such abandonment to
this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually controlled by pride on
her own account and thoughtfulness for others will sometimes allow herself when
she feels securely alone. And Mr. Casaubon was certain to remain away for some
time at the Vatican.
    Yet Dorothea had no distinctly shapen grievance that she could state even to
herself; and in the midst of her confused thought and passion, the mental act
that was struggling forth into clearness was a self-accusing cry that her
feeling of desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty. She had
married the man of her choice, and with the advantage over most girls that she
had contemplated her marriage chiefly as the beginning of new duties: from the
very first she had thought of Mr. Casaubon as having a mind so much above her
own, that he must often be claimed by studies which she could not entirely
share; moreover, after the brief narrow experience of her girlhood she was
beholding Rome, the city of visible history, where the past of a whole
hemisphere seems moving in funeral procession with strange ancestral images and
trophies gathered from afar.
    But this stupendous fragmentariness heightened the dream-like strangeness of
her bridal life. Dorothea had now been five weeks in Rome,
