“If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad,” he thought, “I might have got into some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived always in blinkers.  I should never have been happy in any profession that did not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good warm contact with my neighbors.  There is nothing like the medical profession for that:  one can have the exclusive scientific life that touches the distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too.  It is rather harder for a clergyman:  Farebrother seems to be an anomaly.”

This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures of the evening.  They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took up his bed-candle his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is apt to accompany agreeable recollections.  He was an ardent fellow, but at present his ardor was absorbed in love of his work and in the ambition of making his life recognized as a factor in the better life of mankind—­like other heroes of science who had nothing but an obscure country practice to begin with.

Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond!  Each lived in a world of which the other knew nothing.  It had not occurred to Lydgate that he had been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit, that inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases, which makes a large part in the lives of most girls.  He had not meant to look at her or speak to her with more than the inevitable amount of admiration and compliment which a man must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, it seemed to him that his enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, for he feared falling into the rudeness of telling her his great surprise at her possession of such accomplishment.  But Rosamond had registered every look and word, and estimated them as the opening incidents of a preconceived romance—­incidents which gather value from the foreseen development and climax.  In Rosamond’s romance it was not necessary to imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious business in the world:  of course, he had a profession and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which she would have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last associate with relatives quite equal to the county people who looked down on the Middlemarchers.  It was part of Rosamond’s cleverness to discern very subtly the faintest aroma of rank, and once when she had seen the Miss Brookes accompanying their uncle at the county assizes, and seated among the aristocracy, she had envied them, notwithstanding their plain dress.