Middlemarch

That same evening Lydgate mentions Mrs. Casaubon to Rosamond, and she says — with the prettiest possible implication — that of course a wife is devoted to her husband. She also wonders, dimpling, whether it would be unprofessional to find her handsome, and notes that his practice is spreading nicely to the Chettams and now the Casaubons. But this holiday freedom could not continue indefinitely. Mrs. Bulstrode, calling on her old friend Mrs. Plymdale, learns that the whole town talks of Lydgate and Rosamond as engaged. She is genuinely surprised — her brother would surely have told her! Mrs. Plymdale, whose son Ned has been paying court to Rosamond, reveals that "nobody can see Miss Vincy and Mr. Lydgate together without taking them to be engaged." Mrs. Bulstrode drives straight to her niece, eyes rolling over the charming quilling of her bonnet. She puts the question directly: is there anything between them? Rosamond says she is not engaged, and declines to say more, her pride hurt by being unable to say yes. Mrs. Bulstrode asks her husband to sound out Lydgate in conversation. Lydgate, questioned, speaks as no man would who had any attachment that could issue in matrimony. Mrs. Bulstrode then arranges a private tête-à-tête with Lydgate and speaks, with her habitual good honest directness, of the dangers that arise when a man engrosses a young lady's attentions: "where you frequent a house it may militate very much against a girl's making a desirable settlement in life, and prevent her from accepting offers even if they are made." Lydgate, fuming a little, pushes his hair back and bends to coax Mrs. Bulstrode's tiny black spaniel, which has the insight to decline his hollow caresses. Then Farebrother, meeting Lydgate in the street, says lightly that he supposes they will meet at Vincy's that evening: "What! you are going to get lashed to the mast, eh, and are stopping your ears?" A few days before, Lydgate would have taken this as the Vicar's usual way of putting things. Now it seems an unmistakable innuendo. He resolves — and keeps his resolution — not to go to the Vincys' except on business. Rosamond becomes very unhappy. For ten days she does not see him. She plaits her fair hair as beautifully as usual and keeps herself proudly calm; but the world has a new dreariness, "as a wilderness that a magician's spells had turned for a little while into a garden." On the eleventh day, Lydgate is asked by Mrs. Vincy to let her husband know of a change in Featherstone's health. He could have written a note. He calls instead, at an hour when Mr. Vincy is not at home. Rosamond blushes deeply when he enters, and he, embarrassed in return, delivers his message formally and rises to go. Rosamond, mortified, drops her chain-work as if startled, and rises mechanically. Lydgate stoops to pick up the chain. When he raises his eyes, he sees "a certain helpless quivering" he had never noticed before — her tears rising, "like water on a blue flower." He is completely mastered. He says: "What is the matter? you are distressed. Tell me, pray." She cannot speak; he puts his arms round her and kisses each of her two large tears. "That moment of naturalness was the crystallizing feather-touch: it shook flirtation into love." In half an hour he left the house an engaged man, "whose soul was not his own, but the woman's to whom he had bound himself." He came that evening to speak to Mr. Vincy, who was in excellent spirits — having just coined the "felicitous word 'demise'" for Featherstone's impending death, which made the whole affair seem merely legal and rather cheerful — and gave his approbation of the engagement with astonishing facility.