s as virtuous and lovely a young
lady as he could have obtained for a wife; but a young lady turned out
to be something more troublesome than he had conceived. She nursed
him, she read to him, she anticipated his wants, and was solicitous
about his feelings; but there had entered into the husband's mind the
certainty that she judged him, and that her wifely devotedness was like
a penitential expiation of unbelieving thoughts--was accompanied with a
power of comparison by which himself and his doings were seen too
luminously as a part of things in general. His discontent passed
vapor-like through all her gentle loving manifestations, and clung to
that inappreciative world which she had only brought nearer to him.

Poor Mr. Casaubon! This suffering was the harder to bear because it
seemed like a betrayal: the young creature who had worshipped him with
perfect trust had quickly turned into the critical wife; and early
instances of criticism and resentment had made an impression which no
tenderness and submission afterwards could remove. To his suspicious
interpretation Dorothea's silence now was a suppressed rebellion; a
remark from her which he had not in any way anticipated was an
assertion of conscious superiority; her gentle answers had an
irritating cautiousness in them; and when she acquiesced it was a
self-approved effort of forbearance. The tenacity with which he strove
to hide this inward drama made it the more vivid for him; as we hear
with the more keenness what we wish others not to hear.

Instead of wondering at this result of misery in Mr. Casaubon, I think
it quite ordinary. Will not a tiny speck very close to our vision blot
out the glory of the world, and leave only a margin by which we see the
blot? I know no speck so troublesome as self. And who, if Mr.
Casaubon had chosen to expound his discontents--his suspicions that he
was not any longer adored without criticism--could have denied that
they were founded on good reasons? On the contrary, there was a strong
reason to be added, which he had not himself taken explicitly into
account--namely, that he was not unmixedly adorable. He suspected
this, however, as he suspected other things, without confessing it, and
like the rest of us, felt how soothing it would have been to have a
companion who would never find it out.

This sore susceptibility in relation to Dorothea was thoroughly
prepared before Will Ladislaw had returned to Lowick, and what h