agonising to such a nature, that only one nearly akin to her own can adequately conceive or picture it.  For it is a struggle not primarily to forego any certain or fancied mere personal good.  On one side is ranged tenderest pitifulness over her husband’s wasted life and energies, even though she knows those energies have been wasted—­that life has been thrown away—­on an object in which there is no gain to humanity, no advancement of human well-being, no profit even to himself, save, perchance, a barren and useless notoriety at last; an object that has been already far more fully and ably achieved.  On the other stands her clear undoubting conscience of her own truest and highest course,—­the course to which every prompting of the Divine within impels her,—­that she shall not thus isolate herself within this narrowest sphere, shut herself out from all social sympathies and social outgoings, and sacrifice to the Dead Hand that holds her in its cold remorseless clutch every interest that may be intrusted to her.  We instinctively shudder at the result; but we never doubt what the answer will be.  We know that the tender, womanly, wifely pitifulness, the causeless remorse, will be the nearest and most urgent conscience, and will prevail.  The agonised assent is to be given; but it falls on the ear of the dead.

It is scarcely necessary to follow Dorothea minutely through all the details of her widowed relations to Mr Casaubon.  Enough that these are all in touching and beautiful harmony with everything that has gone before.  No resentment, no recalcitration against all the ever-gathering perplexity, pain, and anguish he has caused her—­nothing but the sweet unfailing pitifulness, the uncalled-for repentance, almost remorse, over her own assumed shortcomings and deficiencies—­her failures to be to him what in those first days of her childlike simplicity and innocence she had hoped she might become.  Even on the discovery of the worse than treachery, of the mean insulting malignity with which, trusting to her confiding purity and truthfulness, he had sought to grasp her for life in his “Dead Hand” with regard to Ladislaw, and she only escaped the irrevocable bond her own blindly-given pledge would have fixed around her by his death,—­the momentary and violent shock of revulsion from her dead husband, who had had hidden thoughts of her, perhaps perverting everything she said or did, terrified her as if it had been a sin.

It is not alone, however, toward her husband that this simple, unconscious self-devotion and self-abnegation of Dorothea Brooke displays itself.  Toward every one with whom she comes in contact, it steals out unobtrusively and silently, as the dew from heaven on the tender grass, to each and all according to the kind and nearness of that relation.  Even for her “pulpy” uncle she has no supercilious contempt—­no sense of isolation or separation; not even the consciousness of toleration toward him.