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 Dorothea’s conscience shrank from, seeing that she already began to feel herself guilty.  However just her indignation might be, her ideal was not to claim justice, but to give tenderness.  So when the carriage came to the door, she drove with Mr. Casaubon to the Vatican, walked with him through the stony avenue of inscriptions, and when she parted with him at the entrance to the Library, went on through the Museum out of mere listlessness as to what was around her.  She had not spirit to turn round and say that she would drive anywhere.  It was when Mr. Casaubon was quitting her that Naumann had first seen her, and he had entered the long gallery of sculpture at the same time with her; but here Naumann had to await Ladislaw with whom he was to settle a bet of champagne about an enigmatical mediaeval-looking figure there.  After they had examined the figure, and had walked on finishing their dispute, they had parted, Ladislaw lingering behind while Naumann had gone into the Hall of Statues where he again saw Dorothea, and saw her in that brooding abstraction which made her pose remarkable.  She did not really see the streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues:  she was inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads; and feeling that the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not so clear to her as it had been.  But in Dorothea’s mind there was a current into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to flow—­the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the fullest truth, the least partial good.  There was clearly something better than anger and despondency.

CHAPTER XXI.

    “Hire facounde eke full womanly and plain,
     No contrefeted termes had she
     To semen wise.” 
                        —­CHAUCER.

It was in that way Dorothea came to be sobbing as soon as she was securely alone.  But she was presently roused by a knock at the door, which made her hastily dry her eyes before saying, “Come in.”  Tantripp had brought a card, and said that there was a gentleman waiting in the lobby.  The courier had told him that only Mrs. Casaubon was at home, but he said he was a relation of Mr. Casaubon’s:  would she see him?

“Yes,” said Dorothea, without pause; “show him into the salon.”  Her chief impressions about young Ladislaw were that when she had seen him at Lowick she had been made aware of Mr. Casaubon’s generosity towards him, and also that she had been interested in his own hesitation about his career.  She was alive to anything that gave her an opportunity for active sympathy, and at this moment it seemed as if the visit had come to shake her out of her self-absorbed