of the half-conscious futility of all his labours, in her humble proffers of even mechanical aid.  Not easily can even the most fervid and penetrative imagination conceive what, to a nature like Dorothea’s, such a life must be, with its never-ceasing, ever-gathering pain; its longing tenderness not even actively repelled, but simply ignored or misinterpreted; its humblest, equally with its highest yearnings, baffled and shattered against that triple mail of shallowest self-includedness.  And all has to be borne in silence and alone.  No word, no look, no sign, betrays to other eye the inward anguish, the deepening disappointment, the slow dying away of hope.  Nay, for long, on indeed to the bitter close, failure seems to her to be almost wholly on her own side; and repentance and self-upbraiding leave no room for resentment.

Ere long—­indeed, very soon—­another, and, if possible, a still deeper humiliation comes upon her,—­another, and, in some respects, a keener pang, as showing more intensely how entirely she stands alone, is thrown into her life,—­in her husband’s jealousy of Ladislaw.  Yet jealousy it cannot be called.  Of any emotion so comparatively profound, any passion so comparatively elevated, that self-absorbed, self-tormenting nature is utterly incapable.  Jealousy, in some degree, presupposes love; love not wholly absorbed in self, but capable to some extent of going forth from our own mean and sordid self-inclusion in sympathetic relation, dependence, and aid, towards another existence.  In Mr Casaubon there is no capability, no possibility of this.  What in him wears the aspect of jealousy is simply and solely self-love, callous irritation, that any one should—­not stand above, but—­approach himself in importance with the woman he has purchased as a kind of superior slave.  For long her guileless innocence and purity, her utter inability to conceive such a feeling, leaves her only in doubt and perplexity before it; long after it has first betrayed itself, she reveals this incapability in the fullest extent, and in the way most intensely irritating to her husband’s self-love—­by her simple-hearted proposal that whatever of his property would devolve on her should be shared with Ladislaw.  Then it is that Casaubon is roused to inflict on her the last long and bitter anguish; to lay on her for life—­had not death intervened—­the cold, soul-benumbing, life contracting clutch of “the Dead Hand.”  In the innocence of her entire relations with Ladislaw, not the faintest dawning of thought connects itself with him in her husband’s cold, insistent demand on her blind obedience to his will.  She thinks alone of his thus binding her to a lifelong task, not only hard and ungenial, but one that shall absorb and fetter all her energies, restrain all her faculties, impair and frustrate all her higher and broader aims, make impossible all that better and purer fulness of life for which she yearns.  Then follows the long and painful struggle,—­a struggle so