t when sudden heat cracks it. Dorothea was not only
his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which
surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.

Dorothea was indignant in her turn. Had she not been repressing
everything in herself except the desire to enter into some fellowship
with her husband's chief interests?

"My judgment _was_ a very superficial one--such as I am capable of
forming," she answered, with a prompt resentment, that needed no
rehearsal. "You showed me the rows of notebooks--you have often spoken
of them--you have often said that they wanted digesting. But I never
heard you speak of the writing that is to be published. Those were
very simple facts, and my judgment went no farther. I only begged you
to let me be of some good to you."

Dorothea rose to leave the table and Mr. Casaubon made no reply, taking
up a letter which lay beside him as if to reperuse it. Both were
shocked at their mutual situation--that each should have betrayed anger
towards the other. If they had been at home, settled at Lowick in
ordinary life among their neighbors, the clash would have been less
embarrassing: but on a wedding journey, the express object of which is
to isolate two people on the ground that they are all the world to each
other, the sense of disagreement is, to say the least, confounding and
stultifying. To have changed your longitude extensively and placed
yourselves in a moral solitude in order to have small explosions, to
find conversation difficult and to hand a glass of water without
looking, can hardly be regarded as satisfactory fulfilment even to the
toughest minds. To Dorothea's inexperienced sensitiveness, it seemed
like a catastrophe, changing all prospects; and to Mr. Casaubon it was
a new pain, he never having been on a wedding journey before, or found
himself in that close union which was more of a subjection than he had
been able to imagine, since this charming young bride not only obliged
him to much consideration on her behalf (which he had sedulously
given), but turned out to be capable of agitating him cruelly just
where he most needed soothing. Instead of getting a soft fence against
the cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life, had he only given
it a more substantial presence?

Neither of them felt it possible to speak again at present. To have
reversed a previous arrangement and declined to go out would have been
a show of persistent anger which Doro