Middlemarch

Eliot opens with the image of a pier-glass — a polished surface minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions — against which, if you place a lighted candle, the scratches appear to arrange themselves in perfect concentric circles. The candle is egoism. Rosamond's Providence had kindly arranged Fred's illness and Mr. Wrench's mistake in order to bring her and Lydgate into effective proximity. When Miss Morgan and the children were sent away to a farmhouse, Rosamond refused to leave papa and mamma. Mrs. Vincy, broken by anxiety, follows Lydgate out of Fred's room and catches his arm, moaning: "Save my boy." Rosamond manages the household with perfect presence of mind, carrying out Lydgate's hints with admirable adroitness. It is not wonderful, Eliot notes, that the idea of seeing Rosamond began to mingle with his interest in the case. As Fred improves, the brief impersonal conversations between Lydgate and Rosamond produce a peculiar intimacy — the intimacy which consists in shyness. They are obliged to look at each other in speaking, and the looking cannot be carried through as the matter of course which it really was. Lydgate looked down to avoid it; the next day Rosamond looked down; when their eyes met again, both were more conscious than before. "There was no help for this in science." It was therefore a relief when neighbors no longer considered the house in quarantine. That intimacy, once established, could not be undone. They slide gracefully into ease: Lydgate takes his seat by Rosamond, calls himself her captive — meaning all the while not to be her captive. He flirts, thinking it is only flirtation. Rosamond does not distinguish flirtation from love in herself or in another; she was "quite determined, when she was married, to rid herself adroitly of all the visitors who were not agreeable to her" and was imagining the drawing-room in the handsome house on Lowick Gate with various styles of furniture. "To Rosamond it seemed as if she and Lydgate were as good as engaged." Rosamond's idea had a shaping activity and looked through watchful blue eyes; Lydgate's counter-idea of remaining unengaged lay "blind and unconcerned as a jelly-fish which gets melted without knowing it." One evening Lydgate arrives late to find Ned Plymdale — one of the good matches in Middlemarch, though not one of its leading minds — showing Rosamond the latest Keepsake, a gorgeous watered-silk publication full of copper-plate smiles and sentimental verse. Lydgate opens it, gives a short scornful laugh, and wonders aloud which would turn out sillier — the engravings or the writing. Plymdale is wounded; Rosamond is thrilled. Plymdale retreats to the whist-table thinking Lydgate one of the most conceited, unpleasant fellows he had ever met. Rosamond tells Lydgate he is a bear. He replies that there is a bird who can teach him what she will. Rosamond sails on. After the visit, Lydgate goes home and looks at his phials, writes his notes with usual precision, and thinks about his research. Only a few days later, he is overtaken by a servant on horseback while he is walking Rosamond home along the Lowick road: he has been called in to Lowick Manor. It is Sir James Chettam's messenger. This is the second house of importance where Peacock had never attended.