it might be likely to cut short his labors or his life. On
this point, as on all others, he shrank from pity; and if the suspicion
of being pitied for anything in his lot surmised or known in spite of
himself was embittering, the idea of calling forth a show of compassion
by frankly admitting an alarm or a sorrow was necessarily intolerable
to him. Every proud mind knows something of this experience, and
perhaps it is only to be overcome by a sense of fellowship deep enough
to make all efforts at isolation seem mean and petty instead of
exalting.

But Mr. Casaubon was now brooding over something through which the
question of his health and life haunted his silence with a more
harassing importunity even than through the autumnal unripeness of his
authorship. It is true that this last might be called his central
ambition; but there are some kinds of authorship in which by far the
largest result is the uneasy susceptibility accumulated in the
consciousness of the author--one knows of the river by a few streaks
amid a long-gathered deposit of uncomfortable mud. That was the way
with Mr. Casaubon's hard intellectual labors. Their most
characteristic result was not the "Key to all Mythologies," but a
morbid consciousness that others did not give him the place which he
had not demonstrably merited--a perpetual suspicious conjecture that
the views entertained of him were not to his advantage--a melancholy
absence of passion in his efforts at achievement, and a passionate
resistance to the confession that he had achieved nothing.

Thus his intellectual ambition which seemed to others to have absorbed
and dried him, was really no security against wounds, least of all
against those which came from Dorothea. And he had begun now to frame
possibilities for the future which were somehow more embittering to him
than anything his mind had dwelt on before.

Against certain facts he was helpless: against Will Ladislaw's
existence, his defiant stay in the neighborhood of Lowick, and his
flippant state of mind with regard to the possessors of authentic,
well-stamped erudition: against Dorothea's nature, always taking on
some new shape of ardent activity, and even in submission and silence
covering fervid reasons which it was an irritation to think of: against
certain notions and likings which had taken possession of her mind in
relation to subjects that he could not possibly discuss with her.
There was no denying that Dorothea wa