Middlemarch

Three days after his visit to Stone Court, Fred does not return to see Mary. The Houndsley streets were unsanitary, and from them he brought back not only a bad bargain in horse-flesh but the misfortune of an illness which at first seemed like mere depression and headache. After returning from Stone Court, he throws himself on the sofa and asks for Wrench. Mr. Wrench — small, neat, bilious, with a well-dressed wig, an irascible temper, and seven children — is already late for a four-miles drive to meet Dr. Minchin, and goes through the case with the zest of a daily bell-ringer. He speaks of a "slight derangement" and does not propose to come again. He sends the usual white parcels, which this time have black and drastic contents. The next morning Fred is worse. Wrench is on his rounds. Mrs. Vincy, seeing her darling's changed looks, is ready to send for Dr. Sprague when Rosamond, seated by the window, notices Lydgate passing on the other side of the iron palisading and suggests calling him in. Mrs. Vincy springs to the window and opens it in an instant. Lydgate is in the room within two minutes. He sees at once that Fred is in the pink-skinned stage of typhoid fever, and has been given exactly the wrong medicines. He writes to Wrench; Wrench meets him at the house that evening, hears Mrs. Vincy's reproaches and Mr. Vincy's official displeasure, swallows his ire — and then writes to decline all further attendance in the case. Lydgate had been polite in his offhand way, which is only an additional exasperation when a man has placed you at a disadvantage. Wrench complained afterwards that Lydgate "paraded flighty, foreign notions, which would not wear" and made biting remarks about his tricks being "worthy only of a quack." Lydgate, for his part, found that being "puffed by ignorance was not only humiliating, but perilous" — no better than the reputation of a weather-prophet. He was installed as medical attendant on the Vincys, and the event became the subject of general conversation. Some said the Vincys had behaved scandalously; others that Lydgate was wonderfully clever in fevers. Mrs. Taft, who gathered her information in misleading fragments caught between the rows of her knitting, got it into her head that Mr. Lydgate was a natural son of Bulstrode's — a fact which seemed to justify her suspicions of evangelical laymen. She communicated this to Mrs. Farebrother, who told her son. Farebrother gave an explosive laugh: Lydgate was of a good family in the North and had never heard of Bulstrode before he came to Middlemarch. "That is satisfactory so far as Mr. Lydgate is concerned," said the old lady, with an air of precision. "But as to Bulstrode — the report may be true of some other son."