LITMIR.BIZ

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said Rosamond. She would not have allowed herself so unsuitable a word to any one but Mary.

      “What do you mean by horrid?”

      “He is so idle, and makes papa so angry, and says he will not take orders.”

      “I think Fred is quite right.”

      “How can you say he is quite right, Mary? I thought you had more sense of religion.”

      “He is not fit to be a clergyman.”

      “But he ought to be fit.”—“Well, then, he is not what he ought to be. I know some other people who are in the same case.”

      “But no one approves of them. I should not like to marry a clergyman; but there must be clergymen.”

      “It does not follow that Fred must be one.”

      “But when papa has been at the expense of educating him for it! And only suppose, if he should have no fortune left him?”

      “I can suppose that very well,” said Mary, dryly.

      “Then I wonder you can defend Fred,” said Rosamond, inclined to push this point.

      “I don’t defend him,” said Mary, laughing; “I would defend any parish from having him for a clergyman.”

      “But of course if he were a clergyman, he must be different.”

      “Yes, he would be a great hypocrite; and he is not that yet.”

      “It is of no use saying anything to you, Mary. You always take Fred’s part.”

      “Why should I not take his part?” said Mary, lighting up. “He would take mine. He is the only person who takes the least trouble to oblige me.”

      “You make me feel very uncomfortable, Mary,” said Rosamond, with her gravest mildness; “I would not tell mamma for the world.”

      “What would you not tell her?” said Mary, angrily.

      “Pray do not go into a rage, Mary,” said Rosamond, mildly as ever.

      “If your mamma is afraid that Fred will make me an offer, tell her that I would not marry him if he asked me. But he is not going to do so, that I am aware. He certainly never has asked me.”

      “Mary, you are always so violent.”

      “And you are always so exasperating.”

      “I? What can you blame me for?”

      “Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating. There is the bell—I think we must go down.”

      “I did not mean to quarrel,” said Rosamond, putting on her hat.

      “Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarrelled. If one is not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being friends?”

      “Am I to repeat what you have said?” “Just as you please. I never say what I am afraid of having repeated. But let us go down.”

      Mr. Lydgate was rather late this morning, but the visitors stayed long enough to see him; for Mr. Featherstone asked Rosamond to sing to him, and she herself was so kind as to propose a second favorite song of his—“Flow on, thou shining river”—after she had sung “Home, sweet home” (which she detested). This hard-headed old Overreach approved of the sentimental song, as the suitable garnish for girls, and also as fundamentally fine, sentiment being the right thing for a song.

      Mr. Featherstone was still applauding the last performance, and assuring missy that her voice was as clear as a blackbird’s, when Mr. Lydgate’s horse passed the window.

      His dull expectation of the usual disagreeable routine with an aged patient—who can hardly believe that medicine would not “set him up” if the doctor were only clever enough—added to his general disbelief in Middlemarch charms, made a doubly effective background to this vision of Rosamond, whom old Featherstone made haste ostentatiously to introduce as his niece, though he had never thought it worth while to speak of Mary Garth in that light. Nothing escaped Lydgate in Rosamond’s graceful behavior: how delicately she waived the notice which the old man’s want of taste had thrust upon her by a quiet gravity, not showing her dimples on the wrong occasion, but showing them afterwards in speaking to Mary, to whom she addressed herself with so much good-natured interest, that Lydgate, after quickly examining Mary more fully than he had done before, saw an adorable kindness in Rosamond’s eyes. But Mary from some cause looked rather out of temper.

      “Miss Rosy has been singing me a song—you’ve nothing to say against that, eh, doctor?” said Mr. Featherstone. “I like it better than your physic.”

      “That has made me forget how the time was going,” said Rosamond, rising to reach her hat, which she had laid aside before singing, so that her flower-like head on its white stem was seen in perfection above-her riding-habit. “Fred, we must really go.”

      “Very good,” said Fred, who had his own reasons for not being in the best spirits, and wanted to get away.

      “Miss Vincy is a musician?” said Lydgate, following her with his eyes. (Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.)

      “The best in Middlemarch, I’ll be bound,” said Mr. Featherstone, “let the next be who she will. Eh, Fred? Speak up for your sister.”

      “I’m afraid I’m out of court, sir. My evidence would be good for nothing.”

      “Middlemarch has not a very high standard, uncle,” said Rosamond, with a pretty lightness, going towards her whip, which lay at a distance.

      Lydgate was quick in anticipating her. He reached the whip before she did, and turned to present it to her. She bowed and looked at him: he of course was looking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze. I think Lydgate turned a little paler than usual, but Rosamond blushed deeply and felt a certain astonishment. After that, she was really anxious to go, and did not know what sort of stupidity her uncle was talking of when she went to shake hands with him.

      Yet this result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called falling in love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand. Ever since that important new arrival in Middlemarch she had woven a little future, of which something like this scene was the necessary beginning. Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native merit has urged itself in vain. And a stranger was absolutely necessary to Rosamond’s social romance, which had always turned on a lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher, and who had no connections at all like her own: of late, indeed, the construction seemed to demand that he should somehow be related to a baronet. Now that she and the stranger had met, reality proved much more moving than anticipation, and Rosamond could not doubt that this was the great epoch of her life. She judged of her own symptoms as those of awakening love, and she held it still more natural that Mr. Lydgate should have fallen in love at first sight of her. These things happened so often at balls, and why not by the morning light, when the complexion showed all the better for it? Rosamond, though no older than Mary, was rather used to being fallen in love with; but she, for her part, had remained indifferent and fastidiously critical towards both fresh sprig and faded bachelor. And here was Mr. Lydgate suddenly corresponding to her ideal, being altogether foreign to Middlemarch, carrying a certain air of distinction congruous with good family, and possessing connections which offered vistas of that middle-class heaven, rank; a man of talent, also, whom it would be especially delightful to enslave: in fact, a man who had touched her nature quite newly, and brought a vivid interest into her life which was better than any fancied “might-be” such as she was in the habit of opposing to the actual.

      Thus, in riding home, both the brother and the sister

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