that gentlewoman's world, where everything
was done for her and none asked for her aid--where the sense of
connection with a manifold pregnant existence had to be kept up
painfully as an inward vision, instead of coming from without in claims
that would have shaped her energies.-- "What shall I do?" "Whatever you
please, my dear:" that had been her brief history since she had left
off learning morning lessons and practising silly rhythms on the hated
piano. Marriage, which was to bring guidance into worthy and
imperative occupation, had not yet freed her from the gentlewoman's
oppressive liberty: it had not even filled her leisure with the
ruminant joy of unchecked tenderness. Her blooming full-pulsed youth
stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the
chill, colorless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the
never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that
seemed to be vanishing from the daylight.

In the first minutes when Dorothea looked out she felt nothing but the
dreary oppression; then came a keen remembrance, and turning away from
the window she walked round the room. The ideas and hopes which were
living in her mind when she first saw this room nearly three months
before were present now only as memories: she judged them as we judge
transient and departed things. All existence seemed to beat with a
lower pulse than her own, and her religious faith was a solitary cry,
the struggle out of a nightmare in which every object was withering and
shrinking away from her. Each remembered thing in the room was
disenchanted, was deadened as an unlit transparency, till her wandering
gaze came to the group of miniatures, and there at last she saw
something which had gathered new breath and meaning: it was the
miniature of Mr. Casaubon's aunt Julia, who had made the unfortunate
marriage--of Will Ladislaw's grandmother. Dorothea could fancy that
it was alive now--the delicate woman's face which yet had a headstrong
look, a peculiarity difficult to interpret. Was it only her friends
who thought her marriage unfortunate? or did she herself find it out to
be a mistake, and taste the salt bitterness of her tears in the
merciful silence of the night? What breadths of experience Dorothea
seemed to have passed over since she first looked at this miniature!
She felt a new companionship with it, as if it had an ear for her and
could see how she was looking at it. Here wa