Middlemarch

Fred and Rosamond ride to Stone Court through the beautiful midland November landscape. Mrs. Waule — Featherstone's sister, perpetually in black crape — is already there with her funereal yellow gig. The old man is in his usual humor. Mrs. Waule has been telling him that Fred has been gambling at billiards and borrowing money on the expectation of the Featherstone property. She cites Bulstrode as her authority. Featherstone dismisses Mrs. Waule and summons Fred privately: he must bring a written denial from Bulstrode, or there will be consequences — codicils. While Fred is interrogated downstairs, Rosamond and Mary Garth are alone together upstairs, and Eliot gives us our first full portrait of Mary. She is twenty-two, brown, plainly made — "Rembrandt would have painted her with pleasure" — but her governing virtue is honesty: she never tries to create illusions, nor indulges in them for her own benefit. She greets Rosamond's hint about Lydgate with careful deflection, gives a sharp inventory of his appearance ("heavy eyebrows, dark eyes, a straight nose... an exquisite cambric pocket-handkerchief"), and remarks that he speaks to her "without seeming to see me." Featherstone asks Rosamond to sing for him. She sings "Home, sweet home" (which she detests) and then a second song of his choosing. Then Lydgate rides past the window. Nothing escapes him in Rosamond's graceful behavior — how delicately she handles old Featherstone's clumsy introductions, how she turns to Mary with such apparent warmth. When she goes to collect her whip, Lydgate reaches it first and turns to present it. "Their eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze." Lydgate turned a little paler; Rosamond blushed deeply. She had been expecting exactly this. Her imagination, always realistic once a foundation was presupposed, was already planning the house in Middlemarch and the visits to his high-bred relatives. Riding home, both brother and sister are preoccupied. Rosamond is lost in her future. Fred is occupied with a darker calculation: he has recently borrowed £160, the debt secured by a bill signed by Caleb Garth — Mary's father. He had always meant to repay it before anyone suffered for it. He has been, he realizes, a wretched figure.