t and dead of soul,
incapable of one thought or emotion that rises above or extends beyond
self, insistent on her own petty claims and ambitions to the exclusion of
all others, ever aiming to achieve these, now by dogged sullen
persistence, now by mean concealments and frauds, no more repellent
portraiture of womanhood has ever been placed before us. The fundamental
character of her entire home relations is, on her first appearance, drawn
by a single delicate touch--her objecting to her brother's red herring,
or rather to its presence after she enters the room, because its odour
jars on her sense of pseudo-refinement. In her relation to her husband
there is not from first to last one shadow of anything that can be called
love, no approach to sympathy or harmony of life. She looks on him
solely as a means for removing herself to what she considers a higher
social circle, securing to her greater ease, freedom, and luxury of daily
life, and ultimately withdrawing her to a wider sphere of petty and
selfish enjoyment. Seeking these ends, she resorts to every mean device
of deceit and concealment. Utterly callous and impenetrable to his
feelings, to every manlier instinct within him, as she is utterly
insensible of, and indeed incapable of, entering into his higher and
wider professional aims, she not only ignores these, but in her dull and
hard insensibility runs counter to, and tramples on them all.

Even toward Mary Garth there is nothing approaching true friendship or
affection; no power of recognising her honesty, unselfishness, and
earnestness of nature. She is nothing to her but a tool and
_confidante_, the recipient of her own petty hopes and desires, worries
and cares.

All Dorothea's gentle, unobtrusive attempts to soothe, to win her back to
truer and better relations with her husband, and to awaken to active life
and exercise the true womanhood, which she in her sweet instinct believes
to be inherent in all her sex, are met by hard indifference or dull
resistance. And in the one act of apparent friendliness or rather
explanation toward Dorothea, she is actuated far less by sympathy or
desire to clear away what has come between her and Ladislaw, than by
sullen resentment against the latter for his rejection of her unseemly
and unwifely advances to him.

In the position she at last takes up toward Ladislaw, there is no
approach to anything in the very least resembling love--even illicit and
overmastering pa