that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the deep degeneracy
of a superstition divorced from reverence; the dimmer but yet eager
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: all this vast wreck of ambitious ideals,
sensuous and spiritual, mixed confusedly with the signs of breathing
forgetfulness and degradation, at first jarred her as with an
electric shock, and then urged themselves on her with that ache
belonging to a glut of confused ideas which check the flow of emotion.
Forms both pale and glowing took possession of her young sense,
and fixed themselves in her memory even when she was not thinking
of them, preparing strange associations which remained through
her after-years. Our moods are apt to bring with them images
which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze;
and in certain states of dull forlornness Dorothea all her life
continued to see the vastness of St. Peter's, the huge bronze canopy,
the excited intention in the attitudes and garments of the prophets
and evangelists in the mosaics above, and the red drapery which was
being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease
of the retina.

Not that this inward amazement of Dorothea's was anything
very exceptional: many souls in their young nudity are tumbled
out among incongruities and left to "find their feet" among them,
while their elders go about their business. Nor can I suppose
that when Mrs. Casaubon is discovered in a fit of weeping six weeks
after her wedding, the situation will be regarded as tragic.
Some discouragement, some faintness of heart at the new real
future which replaces the imaginary, is not unusual, and we do
not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual.