Certainly her thoughts were much occupied with Lydgate himself; he

seemed to her almost perfect: if he had known his notes so that his

enchantment under her music had been less like an emotional elephant's,

and if he had been able to discriminate better the refinements of her

taste in dress, she could hardly have mentioned a deficiency in him.

How different he was from young Plymdale or Mr. Caius Larcher! Those

young men had not a notion of French, and could speak on no subject

with striking knowledge, except perhaps the dyeing and carrying trades,

which of course they were ashamed to mention; they were Middlemarch

gentry, elated with their silver-headed whips and satin stocks, but

embarrassed in their manners, and timidly jocose: even Fred was above

them, having at least the accent and manner of a university man.

Whereas Lydgate was always listened to, bore himself with the careless

politeness of conscious superiority, and seemed to have the right

clothes on by a certain natural affinity, without ever having to think

about them. Rosamond was proud when he entered the room, and when he

approached her with a distinguishing smile, she had a delicious sense

that she was the object of enviable homage. If Lydgate had been aware

of all the pride he excited in that delicate bosom, he might have been

just as well pleased as any other man, even the most densely ignorant

of humoral pathology or fibrous tissue: he held it one of the prettiest

attitudes of the feminine mind to adore a man's pre-eminence without

too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in. But Rosamond was not

one of those helpless girls who betray themselves unawares, and whose

behavior is awkwardly driven by their impulses, instead of being

steered by wary grace and propriety. Do you imagine that her rapid

forecast and rumination concerning house-furniture and society were

ever discernible in her conversation, even with her mamma? On the

contrary, she would have expressed the prettiest surprise and

disapprobation if she had heard that another young lady had been

detected in that immodest prematureness--indeed, would probably have

disbelieved in its possibility. For Rosamond never showed any

unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct

sentiments, music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private

album for extracted verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the

irresistible woman for the doomed man of that date. Think no unfair

evil of her, pray: she had no wicked plots, nothing sordid or

mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except as something

necessary which other people would always provide. She was not in the

habit of devising falsehoods, and if her statements were no direct clew

to fact, why, they were not intended in that light--they were among

her elegant accomplishments, intended to please. Nature had inspired

many arts in finishing Mrs. Lemon's favorite pupil, who by general

consent (Fred's excepted) was a rare compound of beauty, cleverness,

and amiability.




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