mated by a more self-expansive fulness, guided
toward nobler and fuller aims.

Picturing to some extent, in degree as we are capable of entering into a
nature like hers, the anguish that such an awakening must be to her, it
is exquisitely painful to follow in imagination the slow sure process of
her awakening to what this man, who "has no good red blood in his body,"
really is--a cold, shallow pedant, whose entire existence is bound up in
researches, with regard to which he even shrinks from inquiry as to
whether all he has for years been vaguely attempting has not been
anticipated, and whose intense and absorbing egoism makes the remotest
hint of depreciation pierce like a dagger. The first faint dawn of
discovery breaks on her almost immediately on their arrival at Rome.
Conscious of her want of mere aesthetic culture--neglected in the past as
a turning aside from life's highest aims--she has looked forward to his
guidance and support for the supply of this want as enlarging her whole
being; broadening and deepening, refining and elevating all its
sympathies. For all shadow of aid or sympathy here, she finds herself as
utterly alone as if she were in a trackless and uninhabited desert. Nay,
more: he who sits by her side is as cold and dead to all sensations or
emotions that art can enkindle, as the glorious marbles amid which they
wander. Soon she finds herself relegated to the society and fellowship
of her maid; her husband is less to her, is incapable of being other than
less, amid those transcendant treasures of architecture, painting, and
sculpture, than a hired guide or cicerone would be.

Soon follows the scene where her timid offer of humble service is thrown
back with all the irritation of that absorbing egoism which is the very
essence and life-in-death of the man. For the first and only time, a
faint cry of conscious irritation escapes her, followed by an anguish of
repentance so deep, so meekly, humbly self-accusing, it reveals to us
more of her truest and innermost life than pages of elaborate description
could do. A single sentence descriptive of her mood even in that first
irritation brings before us her deepest soul, and the utter absence of
self isolation and self-insistence there:--"However just her indignation
might be, her ideal was not _to claim justice_, but _to give
tenderness_."

She meets Ladislaw; and he more than hints to her that the dim, vague
labours and accumulations of years whic