Middlemarch

Two hours before Naumann spotted her in the Vatican, Dorothea was in the Via Sistina apartment, sobbing with the abandonment of a woman who feels securely alone. She had no distinctly shaped grievance. She could only accuse herself: her desolation must be the fault of her own spiritual poverty. She had been five weeks in Rome. Eliot gives us the city through her eyes: ruins and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid present where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in degeneracy. "Titanic life gazing and struggling on walls and ceilings; the long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seemed to hold the monotonous light of an alien world." St. Peter's in its red Christmas drapery, "spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina." Dorothea, brought up on meagre Protestant histories and art chiefly of the hand-screen sort, had no defence against it. She took to driving out to the Campagna alone, where she could feel the earth and sky. And what was Mr. Casaubon? Just as learned as before. His chronology had not failed him. He knew the names of those who held every theory. He was ready to acquit himself worthily at every ruin — "only of acquitting himself." What was fresh to her mind was worn out to his; the large vistas and wide fresh air she had dreamed of finding in his mind had been replaced by anterooms and winding passages that seemed to lead nowhither. He had perhaps wanted a soft fence against the cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life; instead he had given it a more substantial presence. That morning at breakfast he made a small speech — "See Rome as a bride, and live henceforth as a happy wife" — with blinking conscientious intention and a concluding smile. Dorothea held herself steady. Then her heart burned within her, and she could not help speaking: "All those rows of volumes—will you not now do what you used to speak of?—will you not make up your mind what part of them you will use, and begin to write the book which will make your vast knowledge useful to the world?" She ended, "in a most unaccountable, darkly feminine manner," with a slight sob. For Casaubon, Dorothea's words were among the most cutting possible. She was giving loud emphatic iteration to suggestions he had tried to explain away as mere fancy. "We are angered even by the full acceptance of our humiliating confessions—how much more by hearing in hard distinct syllables, from the lips of a near observer, those confused murmurs which we try to call morbid." He delivered a sharp reply — she had not the least notion what it costs to reach great ends — and had for the first time a quick angry flush on his face. She answered with prompt resentment. Both were shocked at themselves. Neither spoke again. To maintain appearances, Dorothea drove with him to the Vatican, walked him to the Library entrance, then went on through the Museum out of mere listlessness. It was in this condition — inwardly seeing the light of years to come and finding the way unclear — that Naumann first saw her, standing near the marble Ariadne.