“You are excited, my dear..  And I also am feeling some unpleasant consequences of too much mental disturbance,” said Mr. Casaubon.  In fact, he had it in his thought to tell her that she ought not to have received young Ladislaw in his absence:  but he abstained, partly from the sense that it would be ungracious to bring a new complaint in the moment of her penitent acknowledgment, partly because he wanted to avoid further agitation of himself by speech, and partly because he was too proud to betray that jealousy of disposition which was not so exhausted on his scholarly compeers that there was none to spare in other directions.  There is a sort of jealousy which needs very little fire:  it is hardly a passion, but a blight bred in the cloudy, damp despondency of uneasy egoism.

“I think it is time for us to dress,” he added, looking at his watch.  They both rose, and there was never any further allusion between them to what had passed on this day.

But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies, or some new motive is born.  Today she had begun to see that she had been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on his side as on her own.

We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder to feed our supreme selves:  Dorothea had early begun to emerge from that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is no longer reflection but feeling—­ an idea wrought back to the directness of sense, like the solidity of objects—­that he had an equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always fall with a certain difference.

CHAPTER XXII.

“Nous causames longtemps; elle etait simple et bonne. 
Ne sachant pas le mal, elle faisait le bien;
Des richesses du coeur elle me fit l’aumone,
Et tout en ecoutant comme le coeur se donne,
Sans oser y penser je lui donnai le mien;
Elle emporta ma vie, et n’en sut jamais rien.” 

          
                                                              —­ALFRED DE MUSSET.

Will Ladislaw was delightfully agreeable at dinner the next day, and gave no opportunity for Mr. Casaubon to show disapprobation.  On the contrary it seemed to Dorothea that Will had a happier way of drawing her husband into conversation and of deferentially listening to him than she had ever observed in any one before.  To be sure, the listeners about Tipton were not highly gifted!  Will talked a good deal himself, but what he said was thrown in with such