ated by the wide embrace of this conception. Here was
something beyond the shallows of ladies' school literature. Here was a
modern Augustine who united the glories of doctor and saint. Dorothea
said to herself: "His feeling, his experience, what a lake compared to my
little pool!" The little pool runs into the great reservoir.

Will you take this reservoir to be your husband, and will you promise to
be unto him a fetcher of slippers, a dotter of I's and crosser of T's and
a copier and condenser of manuscripts; until death doth you part? I
will.

They spend their honeymoon in Rome, and on page 211 of Vol. I. we find
poor Dorothea "alone in her apartments, sobbing bitterly, with such an
abandonment to this relief of an oppressed heart as a woman habitually
controlled by pride will sometimes allow herself when she feels securely
alone." What was she crying about? "She thought her feeling of
desolation was the fault of her own spiritual poverty." A characteristic
George Eliot probe. Why does not Dorothea give the real reason for her
desolateness? Because she does not know what the real reason
is--conscience makes blunderers of us all. "How was it that in the weeks
since their marriage Dorothea had not distinctly observed, but felt, with
a stifling depression, that the large vistas and wide fresh air which she
had dreamed of finding in her husband's mind were replaced by anterooms
and winding passages which seemed to lead no whither? I suppose it was
because in courtship everything is regarded as provisional and
preliminary, and the smallest sample of virtue or accomplishment is taken
to guarantee delightful stores which the broad leisure of marriage will
reveal. But, the door-sill of marriage once crossed, expectation is
concentrated on the present. Having once embarked on your marital
voyage, you may become aware that you make no way, and that the sea is
not within sight--that in fact you are exploring an inclosed basin." So
the ungauged reservoir turns out to be an inclosed basin, but Dorothea
was prevented by her social lot, and perverse goodness, and puritanical
"reversion," from foreseeing that. She might have been saved from her
gloomy marital voyage "if she could have fed her affection with those
childlike caresses which are the bent of every sweet woman who has begun
by showering kisses on the hard pate of her bald doll, creating a happy
soul within that woodenness from the wealth of her own love."