Both were shocked at their mutual situation--that each should
have betrayed anger towards the other. If they had been at home,
settled at Lowick in ordinary life among their neighbors, the clash
would have been less embarrassing: but on a wedding journey,
the express object of which is to isolate two people on the ground
that they are all the world to each other, the sense of disagreement is,
to say the least, confounding and stultifying. To have changed
your longitude extensively and placed yourselves in a moral
solitude in order to have small explosions, to find conversation
difficult and to hand a glass of water without looking, can hardly
be regarded as satisfactory fulfilment even to the toughest minds.
To Dorothea's inexperienced sensitiveness, it seemed like a catastrophe,
changing all prospects; and to Mr. Casaubon it was a new pain,
he never having been on a wedding journey before, or found himself
in that close union which was more of a subjection than he had been
able to imagine, since this charming young bride not only obliged
him to much consideration on her behalf (which he had sedulously
given), but turned out to be capable of agitating him cruelly just
where he most needed soothing. Instead of getting a soft fence
against the cold, shadowy, unapplausive audience of his life, had he
only given it a more substantial presence?

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