ings more difficult to talk about. 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 labor 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 honor. As for the
property which was the sign of that broken tie, she would have been
glad to be free from it and have nothin