h have constituted her husband's
nearest approach to life have been labour in vain; that the "great mind"
has been toiling, with feeble uncertain steps, in a path which has
already been trodden into firmness and completeness; toiling in wilful
and obdurate ignorance that other and abler natures have more than
anticipated all he has been painfully and abortively labouring to
accomplish. Again a cry bursts from the wounded heart, seemingly of
anger against her informant, really of anguish--anguish, not for her own
sinking hopes, but for the burden of disappointment and failure which she
instinctively perceives must, sooner or later, fall on the husband who is
thus throwing away life in vain.

So it goes on, through all the ever-darkening problem of her married, yet
unmated, life. Effort, always more earnest on the part of her yearning,
unselfish tenderness, to establish true relations between them; to find
in him something of that sweet support, that expansive and elevating
force, silently entering into her own innermost life, which her first
childlike trust inspired; to become to him, even if no more may be, that
to which her childlike humility at first alone aspired--eyes to his
weakness, and strength and freedom to his pen. So it goes on;
ever-gnawing pain and anguish, as all her yearning love and pity is
thrown back, and that dulled insensate heart and all-absorbing egoism can
find only irritation in her timid attempts at sympathy, only dread of
detection 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 keene