Middlemarch

Mr. Vincy returns from the will-reading with his temper adjusted. Fred's idleness acquires a sudden new edge; Mr. Vincy expresses this obliquely by throwing an embroidered cap onto the hall floor. That evening he tells Fred he must go up next term and pass his examination. Mrs. Vincy soothes him, and mentions while she is at it that she could have wished Rosamond had not engaged herself — somebody at Miss Willoughby's might have been a better match. Mr. Vincy replies: "Damn relations! I've had enough of them. I don't want a son-in-law who has got nothing but his relations to recommend him." He will give no money. Let the engagement wait or be given up. Rosamond, informed by her mother the next morning, listens in silence and gives "a certain turn of her graceful neck, of which only long experience could teach you that it meant perfect obstinacy." Then she says, quietly, "Papa does not mean anything of the kind. I shall marry Mr. Lydgate." Mr. Vincy is helpless against this. Rosamond is like "a white soft living substance" that makes its way in spite of opposing rock. He eventually tells her to have Lydgate write to him. Lydgate's reply offers to insure his life — a demand Mr. Vincy immediately accepts, as a "delightfully reassuring idea supposing that Lydgate died, but in the mean time not a self-supporting idea." Aunt Bulstrode, stirred again, goes to the warehouse to challenge her brother directly. He deflects expertly: if Bulstrode hadn't pushed Lydgate forward, he would never have been invited. Harriet is left defending her husband instead of blaming her brother. Bulstrode himself accepts the news with resignation, speaking of the risks attendant on medical practice; Mrs. Bulstrode attributes her own dissatisfaction to her want of spirituality. Meanwhile the love-making continues flourishingly under Mr. Vincy's own eyes. Lydgate takes old Mrs. Bretton's house on Lowick Gate. He tells Farebrother it would be better for his work to be married soon: "I feel sure that marriage must be the best thing for a man who wants to work steadily. He has everything at home then — no teasing with personal speculations — he can get calmness and freedom." One summer evening he finds Rosamond alone in the drawing-room with red eyelids. She tells him, after some hesitation, that papa said last night he should speak to Lydgate and say the engagement must be given up. Lydgate replies: "Will you give it up?" She says, recovering her calmness at the touch of this chord: "I never give up anything that I choose to do." "God bless you!" He urges a wedding in six weeks. Rosamond mentally goes through lace-edging and hosiery intricacies before agreeing, adding only that they must be away "more than a week" — she is already thinking of visiting Sir Godwin Lydgate at Quallingham. Lydgate buys an expensive dinner-service in Brassing the very next day, reasoning that "furnishing was necessarily expensive; but then it had to be done only once." Rosamond enquires sweetly about his uncle Sir Godwin, and manipulates Lydgate into writing to him to arrange a visit on the honeymoon. When Mrs. Vincy nearly undoes everything by hoping that "a thousand or two can be nothing to a baronet," Rosamond gives her a filial lecture afterwards, and reflects that it would be desirable that Lydgate should by-and-by get some first-rate position elsewhere than Middlemarch. "Lydgate relied much on the psychological difference between what for the sake of variety I will call goose and gander: especially on the innate submissiveness of the goose as beautifully corresponding to the strength of the gander."