had seen Dorothea he believed that he had found even more
than he demanded: she might really be such a helpmate to him as would
enable him to dispense with a hired secretary, an aid which Mr.
Casaubon had never yet employed and had a suspicious dread of. (Mr.
Casaubon was nervously conscious that he was expected to manifest a
powerful mind.) Providence, in its kindness, had supplied him with the
wife he needed. A wife, a modest young lady, with the purely
appreciative, unambitious abilities of her sex, is sure to think her
husband's mind powerful. Whether Providence had taken equal care of
Miss Brooke in presenting her with Mr. Casaubon was an idea which could
hardly occur to him. Society never made the preposterous demand that a
man should think as much about his own qualifications for making a
charming girl happy as he thinks of hers for making himself happy. As
if a man could choose not only his wife hut his wife's husband! Or as
if he were bound to provide charms for his posterity in his own
person!-- When Dorothea accepted him with effusion, that was only
natural; and Mr. Casaubon believed that his happiness was going to
begin.

He had not had much foretaste of happiness in his previous life. To
know intense joy without a strong bodily frame, one must have an
enthusiastic soul. Mr. Casaubon had never had a strong bodily frame,
and his soul was sensitive without being enthusiastic: it was too
languid to thrill out of self-consciousness into passionate delight; it
went on fluttering in the swampy ground where it was hatched, thinking
of its wings and never flying. His experience was of that pitiable
kind which shrinks from pity, and fears most of all that it should be
known: it was that proud narrow sensitiveness which has not mass enough
to spare for transformation into sympathy, and quivers thread-like in
small currents of self-preoccupation or at best of an egoistic
scrupulosity. And Mr. Casaubon had many scruples: he was capable of a
severe self-restraint; he was resolute in being a man of honor
according to the code; he would be unimpeachable by any recognized
opinion. In conduct these ends had been attained; but the difficulty
of making his Key to all Mythologies unimpeachable weighed like lead
upon his mind; and the pamphlets--or "Parerga" as he called them--by
which he tested his public and deposited small monumental records of
his march, were far from having been seen in all their significance.