To this mental estate mapped out a quarter of a century before, to

sensibilities thus fenced in, Mr. Casaubon had thought of annexing

happiness with a lovely young bride; but even before marriage, as we

have seen, he found himself under a new depression in the consciousness

that the new bliss was not blissful to him. Inclination yearned back

to its old, easier custom. And the deeper he went in domesticity the

more did the sense of acquitting himself and acting with propriety

predominate over any other satisfaction. Marriage, like religion and

erudition, nay, like authorship itself, was fated to become an outward

requirement, and Edward Casaubon was bent on fulfilling unimpeachably

all requirements. Even drawing Dorothea into use in his study,

according to his own intention before marriage, was an effort which he

was always tempted to defer, and but for her pleading insistence it

might never have begun. But she had succeeded in making it a matter of

course that she should take her place at an early hour in the library

and have work either of reading aloud or copying assigned her. The

work had been easier to define because Mr. Casaubon had adopted an

immediate intention: there was to be a new Parergon, a small monograph

on some lately traced indications concerning the Egyptian mysteries

whereby certain assertions of Warburton's could be corrected.

References were extensive even here, but not altogether shoreless; and

sentences were actually to be written in the shape wherein they would

be scanned by Brasenose and a less formidable posterity. These minor

monumental productions were always exciting to Mr. Casaubon; digestion

was made difficult by the interference of citations, or by the rivalry

of dialectical phrases ringing against each other in his brain. And

from the first there was to be a Latin dedication about which

everything was uncertain except that it was not to be addressed to

Carp: it was a poisonous regret to Mr. Casaubon that he had once

addressed a dedication to Carp in which he had numbered that member of

the animal kingdom among the viros nullo aevo perituros, a mistake

which would infallibly lay the dedicator open to ridicule in the next

age, and might even be chuckled over by Pike and Tench in the present.

Thus Mr. Casaubon was in one of his busiest epochs, and as I began to

say a little while ago, Dorothea joined him early in the library where

he had breakfasted alone. Celia at this time was on a second visit to

Lowick, probably the last before her marriage, and was in the

drawing-room expecting Sir James.

Dorothea had learned to read the signs of her husband's mood, and she

saw that the morning had become more foggy there during the last hour.

She was going silently to her desk when he said, in that distant tone

which implied that he was discharging a disagreeable duty--




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