"I think it is time for us to dress," he added, looking at his watch.
They both rose, and there was never any further allusion between them
to what had passed on this day.
But Dorothea remembered it to the last with the vividness with which we
all remember epochs in our experience when some dear expectation dies,
or some new motive is born. Today she had begun to see that she had
been under a wild illusion in expecting a response to her feeling from
Mr. Casaubon, and she had felt the waking of a presentiment that there
might be a sad consciousness in his life which made as great a need on
his side as on her own.
We are all of us born in moral stupidity, taking the world as an udder
to feed our supreme selves: Dorothea had early begun to emerge from
that stupidity, but yet it had been easier to her to imagine how she
would devote herself to Mr. Casaubon, and become wise and strong in his
strength and wisdom, than to conceive with that distinctness which is
no longer reflection but feeling--an idea wrought back to the
directness of sense, like the solidity of objects--that he had an
equivalent centre of self, whence the lights and shadows must always
fall with a certain difference.