Lydgate was really better worth knowing than any one else in

the neighborhood, and he happened to have a wife who was musical
and altogether worth calling upon. Here was the whole history

of the situation in which Diana had descended too unexpectedly on
her worshipper. It was mortifying. Will was conscious that he should

not have been at Middlemarch but for Dorothea; and yet his position
there was threatening to divide him from her with those barriers

of habitualsentiment which are more fatal to the persistence
of mutual interest than all the distance between Rome and Britain.

Prejudices about rank and status were easy enough to defy in the
form of a tyrannical letter from Mr. Casaubon; but prejudices,

like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle--
solid as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo,

or as the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness.
And Will was of a temperament to feel keenly the presence

of subtleties: a man of clumsier perceptions would not have felt,
as he did, that for the first time some sense of unfitness

in perfect freedom with him had sprung up in Dorothea's mind,
and that their silence, as he conducted her to the carriage,

had had a chill in it. Perhaps Casaubon, in his hatred and jealousy,
had been insisting to Dorothea that Will had slid below her socially.

Confound Casaubon!
Will re-entered the drawing-room, took up his hat, and looking

irritated as he advanced towards Mrs. Lydgate, who had seated
herself at her work-table, said--

"It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted. May I
come another day and just finish about the rendering of `Lungi dal

caro bene'?"
"I shall be happy to be taught," said Rosamond. "But I am sure

you admit that the interruption was a very beautiful one. I quite
envy your acquaintance with Mrs. Casaubon. Is she very clever?

She looks as if she were."
"Really, I never thought about it," said Will, sulkily.

"That is just the answer Tertius gave me, when I first asked him
if she were handsome. What is it that you gentlemen are thinking

of when you are with Mrs. Casaubon?"
"Herself," said Will, not indisposed to provoke the charming

Mrs. Lydgate. "When one sees a perfect woman, one never thinks
of her attributes--one is conscious of her presence."

"I shall be jealous when Tertius goes to Lowick," said Rosamond,
dimpling, and speaking with aery lightness. "He will come back

and think nothing of me."
"That does not seem to have been the effect on Lydgate hitherto.

Mrs. Casaubon is too unlike other women for them to be compared
with her."

"You are a devout worshipper, I perceive. You often see her,
I suppose."

"No," said Will, almost pettishly. "Worship is usually a matter
of theory rather than of practice. But I am practising it to excess

just at this moment--I must really tear myself away.
"Pray come again some evening: Mr. Lydgate will like to hear

the music, and I cannot enjoy it so well without him."
When her husband was at home again, Rosamond said, standing in

front of him and holding his coat-collar with both her hands,
"Mr. Ladislaw was here singing with me when Mrs. Casaubon came in.

He seemed vexed. Do you think he disliked her seeing him at our house?
Surely your position is more than equal to his--whatever may be his

relation to the Casaubons."
"No, no; it must be something else if he were really vexed,

Ladislaw is a sort of gypsy; he thinks nothing of leather and prunella."
"Music apart, he is not always very agreeable. Do you like him?"

"Yes: I think he is a good fellow: rather miscellaneous and
bric-a-brac, but likable."

"Do you know, I think he adores Mrs. Casaubon."
"Poor devil!" said Lydgate, smiling and pinching his wife's ears.

Rosamond felt herself beginning to know a great deal of the world,
especially in discovering what when she was in her unmarried girlhood

had been inconceivable to her except as a dim tragedy in by-gone costumes--
that women, even after marriage, might make conquests and enslave men.

At that time young ladies in the country, even when educated at
Mrs. Lemon's, read little French literature later than Racine,

and public prints had not cast their present magnificent illumination
over the scandals of life. Still, vanity, with a woman's whole

mind and day to work in, can construct abundantly on slight hints,
especially on such a hint as the possibility of indefinite conquests.

How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a
husband as crown-prince by your side--himself in fact a subject--

while the captives look up forever hopeless, losing their rest probably,
and if their appetite too, so much the better! But Rosamond's romance

turned at present chiefly on her crown-prince, and it was enough
to enjoy his assured subjection. When he said, "Poor devil I"

she asked, with playful curiosity--
"Why so?"

"Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids?
He only neglects his work and runs up bills."

"I am sure you do not neglect your work. You are always at the Hospital,
or seeing poor patients, or thinking about some doctor's quarrel;

and then at home you always want to pore over your microscope
and phials. Confess you like those things better than me."

"Haven't you ambition enough to wish that your husband should
be something better than a Middlemarch doctor?" said Lydgate,

letting his hands fall on to his wife's shoulders, and looking
at her with affectionategravity. "I shall make you learn

my favorite bit from an old poet--
`Why should our pride make such a stir to be

And be forgot? What good is like to this,
To do worthy the writing, and to write

Worthy the reading and the worlds delight?'
What I want, Rosy, is to do worthy the writing,--and to write out

myself what I have done. A man must work, to do that, my pet."
"Of course, I wish you to make discoveries: no one could more wish

you to attain a high position in some better place than Middlemarch.
You cannot say that I have ever tried to hinder you from working.

But we cannot live like hermits. You are not discontented
with me, Tertius?"

"No, dear, no. I am too entirely contented."
"But what did Mrs. Casaubon want to say to you?"

"Merely to ask about her husband's health. But I think she is
going to be splendid to our New Hospital: I think she will give

us two hundred a-year."
CHAPTER XLIV.

I would not creep along the coast but steer
Out in mid-sea, by guidance of the stars.

When Dorothea, walking round the laurel-planted plots of the New
Hospital with Lydgate, had learned from him that there were no signs

of change in Mr. Casaubon's bodily condition beyond the mental
sign of anxiety to know the truth about his illness, she was

silent for a few moments, wondering whether she had said or done
anything to rouse this new anxiety. Lydgate, not willing to let

slip an opportunity of furthering a favorite purpose, ventured to say--
"I don't know whether your or Mr.--Casaubon's attention has been drawn

to the needs of our New Hospital. Circumstances have made it seem
rather egotistic in me to urge the subject; but that is not my fault:

it is because there is a fight being made against it by the other
medical men. I think you are generally interested in such things,

for I remember that when I first had the pleasure of seeing you
at Tipton Grange before your marriage, you were asking me some

questions about the way in which the health of the poor was affected
by their miserable housing."

"Yes, indeed," said Dorothea, brightening. "I shall be quite
grateful to you if you will tell me how I can help to make things

a little better. Everything of that sort has slipped away from me