“Not on the condition I mentioned.”

After this chat Lydgate thought that he was going, but on moving towards the whist-tables, he got interested in watching Mr. Farebrother’s play, which was masterly, and also his face, which was a striking mixture of the shrewd and the mild.  At ten o’clock supper was brought in (such were the customs of Middlemarch) and there was punch-drinking; but Mr. Farebrother had only a glass of water.  He was winning, but there seemed to be no reason why the renewal of rubbers should end, and Lydgate at last took his leave.

But as it was not eleven o’clock, he chose to walk in the brisk air towards the tower of St. Botolph’s, Mr. Farebrother’s church, which stood out dark, square, and massive against the starlight.  It was the oldest church in Middlemarch; the living, however, was but a vicarage worth barely four hundred a-year.  Lydgate had heard that, and he wondered now whether Mr. Farebrother cared about the money he won at cards; thinking, “He seems a very pleasant fellow, but Bulstrode may have his good reasons.”  Many things would be easier to Lydgate if it should turn out that Mr. Bulstrode was generally justifiable.  “What is his religious doctrine to me, if he carries some good notions along with it?  One must use such brains as are to be found.”

These were actually Lydgate’s first meditations as he walked away from Mr. Vincy’s, and on this ground I fear that many ladies will consider him hardly worthy of their attention.  He thought of Rosamond and her music only in the second place; and though, when her turn came, he dwelt on the image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt no agitation, and had no sense that any new current had set into his life.  He could not marry yet; he wished not to marry for several years; and therefore he was not ready to entertain the notion of being in love with a girl whom he happened to admire.  He did admire Rosamond exceedingly; but that madness which had once beset him about Laure was not, he thought, likely to recur in relation to any other woman.  Certainly, if falling in love had been at all in question, it would have been quite safe with a creature like this Miss Vincy, who had just the kind of intelligence one would desire in a woman—­ polished, refined, docile, lending itself to finish in all the delicacies of life, and enshrined in a body which expressed this with a force of demonstration that excluded the need for other evidence.  Lydgate felt sure that if ever he married, his wife would have that feminine radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers and music, that sort of beauty which by its very nature was virtuous, being moulded only for pure and delicate joys.