Utterly callous and impenetrable to his
feelings, to every manlier instinct within him, as she is utterly
insensible of, and indeed incapable of, entering into his higher and
wider professional aims, she not only ignores these, but in her dull and
hard insensibility runs counter to, and tramples on them all.
Even toward Mary Garth there is nothing approaching true friendship or
affection; no power of recognising her honesty, unselfishness, and
earnestness of nature. She is nothing to her but a tool and
_confidante_, the recipient of her own petty hopes and desires, worries
and cares.
All Dorothea's gentle, unobtrusive attempts to soothe, to win her back to
truer and better relations with her husband, and to awaken to active life
and exercise the true womanhood, which she in her sweet instinct believes
to be inherent in all her sex, are met by hard indifference or dull
resistance. And in the one act of apparent friendliness or rather
explanation toward Dorothea, she is actuated far less by sympathy or
desire to clear away what has come between her and Ladislaw, than by
sullen resentment against the latter for his rejection of her unseemly
and unwifely advances to him.
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