For the first time since Dorothea had known him, Mr. Casaubon’s face had a quick angry flush upon it.

“My love,” he said, with irritation reined in by propriety, “you may rely upon me for knowing the times and the seasons, adapted to the different stages of a work which is not to be measured by the facile conjectures of ignorant onlookers.  It had been easy for me to gain a temporary effect by a mirage of baseless opinion; but it is ever the trial of the scrupulous explorer to be saluted with the impatient scorn of chatterers who attempt only the smallest achievements, being indeed equipped for no other.  And it were well if all such could be admonished to discriminate judgments of which the true subject-matter lies entirely beyond their reach, from those of which the elements may be compassed by a narrow and superficial survey.”

This speech was delivered with an energy and readiness quite unusual with Mr. Casaubon.  It was not indeed entirely an improvisation, but had taken shape in inward colloquy, and rushed out like the round grains from a fruit 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?