“You have studied music, probably?” said Rosamond.

“No, I know the notes of many birds, and I know many melodies by ear; but the music that I don’t know at all, and have no notion about, delights me—­affects me.  How stupid the world is that it does not make more use of such a pleasure within its reach!”

“Yes, and you will find Middlemarch very tuneless.  There are hardly any good musicians.  I only know two gentlemen who sing at all well.”

“I suppose it is the fashion to sing comic songs in a rhythmic way, leaving you to fancy the tune—­very much as if it were tapped on a drum?”

“Ah, you have heard Mr. Bowyer,” said Rosamond, with one of her rare smiles.  “But we are speaking very ill of our neighbors.”

Lydgate was almost forgetting that he must carry on the conversation, in thinking how lovely this creature was, her garment seeming to be made out of the faintest blue sky, herself so immaculately blond, as if the petals of some gigantic flower had just opened and disclosed her; and yet with this infantine blondness showing so much ready, self-possessed grace.  Since he had had the memory of Laure, Lydgate had lost all taste for large-eyed silence:  the divine cow no longer attracted him, and Rosamond was her very opposite.  But he recalled himself.

“You will let me hear some music to-night, I hope.”

“I will let you hear my attempts, if you like,” said Rosamond.  “Papa is sure to insist on my singing.  But I shall tremble before you, who have heard the best singers in Paris.  I have heard very little:  I have only once been to London.  But our organist at St. Peter’s is a good musician, and I go on studying with him.”

“Tell me what you saw in London.”

“Very little.” (A more naive girl would have said, “Oh, everything!” But Rosamond knew better.) “A few of the ordinary sights, such as raw country girls are always taken to.”

“Do you call yourself a raw country girl?” said Lydgate, looking at her with an involuntary emphasis of admiration, which made Rosamond blush with pleasure.  But she remained simply serious, turned her long neck a little, and put up her hand to touch her wondrous hair-plaits—­ an habitual gesture with her as pretty as any movements of a kitten’s paw.  Not that Rosamond was in the least like a kitten:  she was a sylph caught young and educated at Mrs. Lemon’s.

“I assure you my mind is raw,” she said immediately; “I pass at Middlemarch.  I am not afraid of talking to our old neighbors.  But I am really afraid of you.”

“An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though her knowledge is of a different sort.  I am sure you could teach me a thousand things—­as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were any common language between them.  Happily, there is a common language between women and men, and so the bears can get taught.”

“Ah, there is Fred beginning to strum!  I must go and hinder him from jarring all your nerves,” said Rosamond, moving to the other side of the room, where Fred having opened the piano, at his father’s desire, that Rosamond might give them some music, was parenthetically performing “Cherry Ripe!” with one hand.  Able men who have passed their examinations will do these things sometimes, not less than the plucked Fred.