Art, Beauty, and Unexpected Encounters — Middlemarch

Rosamond has been floating above Middlemarch on the visit of Captain Lydgate, Sir Godwin's son, who flatters her for hours while Tertius suppresses disgust and leaves the feather-headed officer to his wife. Mrs. Mengan stays two nights; rank seems to penetrate every guest. When the Captain offers his gentle gray horse, Rosamond rides without asking her husband, wins permission after the first secret success, then rides again in secret; the horse bolts at a tree being felled in Halsell wood, and she loses her baby. Lydgate cannot rage at her, only grow bearish toward the Captain, while Rosamond insists the ride changed nothing and would have ended the same at home.

The miscarriage clears the surface but deepens the marriage's real fracture. Lydgate discovers that Rosamond's cleverness serves her tastes and Quallingham connections, not his science; affection does not make her compliant on practical questions. He has been sacrificing more than half his best intent to tenderness while she sees his professional ambition as oil apart from social advancement.

Meanwhile debt presses like mud in clear water: expenses nearly double receipts at nearly a thousand against five hundred income, tradesmen's letters gall his pride, and he has hidden the swamp from Rosamond until now. He must give security on the furniture, perhaps return the amethyst bridal present, and face an inventory while practice ebbs and Brassing creditors press.

Returning home to find Will Ladislaw singing with Rosamond at the piano, Lydgate scowls through tea, abruptly announces serious business, and after Will leaves tries to tell her the truth. Rosamond meets his confession with neutral What can I do, urges her father over Lydgate's refusal, proposes flight to London or Durham, then returns with all his jewellery in a basket and announces she will go to her father's. The inventory will come tomorrow; love and finance collide in one evening while Dorothea's voice of compassion haunts Lydgate's memory. Shakespeare's sonnet on unchanged sweet looks cannot read the false heart's history in Rosamond's face; her impassibility is its own network aloof from his science and his swamp of debt and unpaid Brassing bills.