Middlemarch

Two days after the scene in the Yew-tree Walk, Dorothea drives into Middlemarch alone — ostensibly on shopping errands — to find Lydgate and learn whether her husband had asked for a fuller account of his illness, and whether there had been any depressing new symptoms he was concealing from her. She feels "almost guilty in asking for knowledge about him from another, but the dread of being without it — the dread of that ignorance which would make her unjust or hard — overcame every scruple." Lydgate is not at home. She asks for Mrs. Lydgate and is admitted. On the way in, she hears through an open window a few notes from a man's voice and then a piano bursting into roulades — which break off suddenly when the servant goes to announce her. Eliot lingers over the contrast between the two women: Rosamond's "infantine blondness and wondrous crown of hair-plaits, her pale-blue dress of a fit and fashion so perfect that no dressmaker could look at it without emotion, her small hands duly set off with rings, and that controlled self-consciousness of manner which is the expensive substitute for simplicity," against Dorothea's thin white woollen dress, always in the shape of a pelisse hanging out of fashion, her simply parted hair and candid eyes. To Rosamond, Dorothea is one of those "county divinities not mixing with Middlemarch mortality" — and Rosamond is not without satisfaction that Mrs. Casaubon should have an opportunity of studying her. Dorothea enters and greets Rosamond — she is aware of a gentleman standing at a wide angle, seeing him only as "a coated figure." Will Ladislaw comes forward. He had already taken up his hat before she entered. She colors with surprise but gives him her hand with a smile of unmistakable pleasure. He offers to go fetch Lydgate at the Hospital; Dorothea says it would be quicker to send the carriage. Then, as Will moves toward the door, Dorothea's mind "flashed in an instant over many connected memories." She changes course: she will go herself. She thanks Rosamond, leaves the room "hardly conscious of what was immediately around her," and lets Will lead her to the carriage in silence. They say good-by without speaking. During the five-minute drive to the Hospital, Dorothea understands what happened to her. Her sudden departure came from "the sense that there would be a sort of deception in her voluntarily allowing any further intercourse between herself and Will which she was unable to mention to her husband." And now, alone in the carriage, the notes of the man's voice and the piano she had barely registered return to her — Will, singing with Rosamond, in Lydgate's absence. She thinks, with some wonder, that Will was passing his time with Mrs. Lydgate in her husband's absence. And then she remembers that he had also passed time with her under like circumstances — so why should there be any unfitness? But Casaubon had perhaps given signs she should have understood. "Perhaps I have been mistaken in many things," said poor Dorothea, while the tears came rolling. The image of Will, so clear before, is "mysteriously spoiled." Will, left behind in the Lydgate drawing-room, is mortified. For the first time, Dorothea has not been supremely occupied with him; worse, she has seen him under circumstances that make him appear not supremely occupied with her. "He felt thrust to a new distance from her, amongst the circles of Middlemarchers who made no part of her life." He returns to Rosamond and says, with irritation, that it is always fatal to have music interrupted — he hopes to come another day and finish the rendering of 'Lungi dal caro bene.' Rosamond says she quite envies his acquaintance with Mrs. Casaubon — is she very clever? Will says, with delightful pettishness: "Really, I never thought about it." Rosamond presses him. He says: "When one sees a perfect woman, one never thinks of her attributes — one is conscious of her presence." When Lydgate returns, Rosamond tells him at once. "Do you know, I think he adores Mrs. Casaubon." "Poor devil!" says Lydgate, pinching his wife's ears. Rosamond begins "to know a great deal of the world" — discovering that women, even after marriage, might make conquests and enslave men. "How delightful to make captives from the throne of marriage with a husband as crown-prince by your side." Her romance is for now chiefly centered on that crown-prince. She tells Lydgate what Mrs. Casaubon wanted: to ask about her husband's health. "But I think she is going to be splendid to our New Hospital," says Lydgate. "I think she will give us two hundred a-year."