with accomplishments for the refined amusement of man.
But he made some enemies, other than medical, by his success with Miss Vincy. One evening he came into the drawing-room rather late, when several other visitors were there. The card-table had drawn off the elders, and Mr. Ned Plymdale (one of the good matches in Middlemarch, though not one of its leading minds) was in tete-a-tete with Rosamond. He had brought the last “Keepsake,” the gorgeous watered-silk publication which marked modern progress at that time; and he considered himself very fortunate that he could be the first to look over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and gentlemen with shiny copper-plate cheeks and copper-plate smiles, and pointing to comic verses as capital and sentimental stories as interesting. Rosamond was gracious, and Mr. Ned was satisfied that he had the very best thing in art and literature as a medium for “paying addresses”—the very thing to please a nice girl. He had also reasons, deep rather than ostensible, for being satisfied with his own appearance. To superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as if it were being gradually reabsorbed. And it did indeed cause him some difficulty about the fit of his satin stocks, for which chins were at that time useful.
“I think the Honorable Mrs. S. is something like you,” said Mr. Ned. He kept the book open at the bewitching portrait, and looked at it rather languishingly.
“Her back is very large; she seems to have sat for that,” said Rosamond, not meaning any satire, but thinking how red young Plymdale’s hands were, and wondering why Lydgate did not come. She went on with her tatting all the while.
“I did not say she was as beautiful as you are,” said Mr. Ned, venturing to look from the portrait to its rival.
“I suspect you of being an adroit flatterer,” said Rosamond, feeling sure that she should have to reject this young gentleman a second time.
But now Lydgate came in; the book was closed before he reached Rosamond’s corner, and as he took his seat with easy confidence on the other side of her, young Plymdale’s jaw fell like a barometer towards the cheerless side of change. Rosamond enjoyed not only Lydgate’s presence but its effect: she liked to excite jealousy.
“What a late comer you are!” she said, as they shook hands. “Mamma had given you up a little while ago. How do you find Fred?”
“As usual; going on well, but slowly. I want him to go away— to Stone Court, for example. But your mamma seems to have some objection.”
“Poor fellow!” said Rosamond, prettily. “You will see Fred so changed,” she added, turning to the other suitor; “we have looked to Mr. Lydgate as our guardian angel during this illness.”
Mr. Ned smiled nervously, while Lydgate, drawing the “Keepsake” towards him and opening it, gave a short scornful laugh and tossed up his chill, as if in wonderment at human folly.
“What are you laughing at so profanely?” said Rosamond, with bland neutrality.
“I wonder which would turn out to be the silliest—the engravings or the writing here,” said Lydgate, in his most convinced tone, while he turned over the pages quickly, seeming to see all through the book in no time, and showing his large white hands to much advantage, as Rosamond thought. “Do look at this bridegroom coming out of church: did you ever see such a `sugared invention’—as the Elizabethans used to say? Did any haberdasher ever look so smirking? Yet I will answer for it the story makes him one of the first gentlemen in the land.”
“You are so severe, I am frightened at you,” said Rosamond, keeping her amusement duly moderate. Poor young Plymdale had lingered with admiration over this very engraving, and his spirit was stirred.
“There are a great many celebrated people writing in the `Keepsake,’ at all events,” he said, in a tone at once piqued and timid. “This is the first time I have heard it called silly.”
“I think I shall turn round on you and accuse you of being a Goth,” said Rosamond, looking at Lydgate with a smile. “I suspect you know nothing about Lady Blessington and L. E. L.” Rosamond herself was not without relish for these writers, but she did not readily commit herself by admiration, and was alive to the slightest hint that anything was not, according to Lydgate, in the very highest taste.
“But Sir Walter Scott—I suppose Mr. Lydgate knows him,” said young Plymdale, a little cheered by this advantage.
“Oh, I read no literature now,” said Lydgate, shutting the book, and pushing it away. “I read so much when I was a lad, that I suppose it will last me all my life. I used to know Scott’s poems by heart.”
“I should like to know when you left off,” said Rosamond, “because then I might be sure that I knew something which you did not know.”
“Mr. Lydgate would say that was not worth knowing,” said Mr. Ned, purposely caustic.
“On the contrary,” said Lydgate, showing no smart; but smiling with exasperating confidence at Rosamond. “It would be worth knowing by the fact that Miss Vincy could tell it me.”
Young Plymdale soon went to look at the whist-playing, thinking that Lydgate was one of the most conceited, unpleasant fellows it had ever been his ill-fortune to meet.
“How rash you are!” said Rosamond, inwardly delighted. “Do you see that you have given offence?”
“What! is it Mr. Plymdale’s book? I am sorry. I didn’t think about it.”
“I shall begin to admit what you said of yourself when you first came here—that you are a bear, and want teaching by the birds.”
“Well, there is a bird who can teach me what she will. Don’t I listen to her willingly?”
To Rosamond it seemed as if she and Lydgate were as good as engaged. That they were some time to be engaged had long been an idea in her mind; and ideas, we know, tend to a more solid kind of existence, the necessary materials being at hand. It is true, Lydgate had the counter-idea of remaining unengaged; but this was a mere negative, a shadow east by other resolves which themselves were capable of shrinking. Circumstance was almost sure to be on the side of Rosamond’s idea, which had a shaping activity and looked through watchful blue eyes, whereas Lydgate’s lay blind and unconcerned as a jelly-fish which gets melted without knowing it.
That evening when he went home, he looked at his phials to see how a process of maceration was going on, with undisturbed interest; and he wrote out his daily notes with as much precision as usual. The reveries from which it was difficult for him to detach himself were ideal constructions of something else than Rosamond’s virtues, and the primitive tissue was still his fair unknown. Moreover, he was beginning to feel some zest for the growing
