Neither of them felt it possible to speak again at present. To have
reversed a previous arrangement and declined to go out would have been
a show of persistent anger which Dorothea's conscience shrank from,
seeing that she already began to feel herself guilty. However just her
indignation might be, her ideal was not to claim justice, but to give
tenderness. So when the carriage came to the door, she drove with Mr.
Casaubon to the Vatican, walked with him through the stony avenue of
inscriptions, and when she parted with him at the entrance to the
Library, went on through the Museum out of mere listlessness as to what
was around her. She had not spirit to turn round and say that she
would drive anywhere. It was when Mr. Casaubon was quitting her that
Naumann had first seen her, and he had entered the long gallery of
sculpture at the same time with her; but here Naumann had to await
Ladislaw with whom he was to settle a bet of champagne about an
enigmatical mediaeval-looking figure there. After they had examined
the figure, and had walked on finishing their dispute, they had parted,
Ladislaw lingering behind while Naumann had gone into the Hall of
Statues where he again saw Dorothea, and saw her in that brooding
abstraction which made her pose remarkable. She did not really see the
streak of sunlight on the floor more than she saw the statues: she was
inwardly seeing the light of years to come in her own home and over the
English fields and elms and hedge-bordered highroads; and feeling that
the way in which they might be filled with joyful devotedness was not
so clear to her as it had been. But in Dorothea's mind there was a
current into which all thought and feeling were apt sooner or later to
flow--the reaching forward of the whole consciousness towards the
fullest truth, the least partial good. There was clearly something
better than anger and despondency.