“I am sure you and Wrench ought to be obliged to him,” said Dr. Minchin, looking towards Toller, “for he has sent you the cream of Peacock’s patients.”

“Lydgate has been living at a great rate for a young beginner,” said Mr. Harry Toller, the brewer.  “I suppose his relations in the North back him up.”

“I hope so,” said Mr. Chichely, “else he ought not to have married that nice girl we were all so fond of.  Hang it, one has a grudge against a man who carries off the prettiest girl in the town.”

“Ay, by God! and the best too,” said Mr. Standish.

“My friend Vincy didn’t half like the marriage, I know that,” said Mr. Chichely. “He wouldn’t do much.  How the relations on the other side may have come down I can’t say.”  There was an emphatic kind of reticence in Mr. Chichely’s manner of speaking.

“Oh, I shouldn’t think Lydgate ever looked to practice for a living,” said Mr. Toller, with a slight touch of sarcasm, and there the subject was dropped.

This was not the first time that Mr. Farebrother had heard hints of Lydgate’s expenses being obviously too great to be met by his practice, but he thought it not unlikely that there were resources or expectations which excused the large outlay at the time of Lydgate’s marriage, and which might hinder any bad consequences from the disappointment in his practice.  One evening, when he took the pains to go to Middlemarch on purpose to have a chat with Lydgate as of old, he noticed in him an air of excited effort quite unlike his usual easy way of keeping silence or breaking it with abrupt energy whenever he had anything to say.  Lydgate talked persistently when they were in his work-room, putting arguments for and against the probability of certain biological views; but he had none of those definite things to say or to show which give the waymarks of a patient uninterrupted pursuit, such as he used himself to insist on, saying that “there must be a systole and diastole in all inquiry,” and that “a man’s mind must be continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and the horizon of an object-glass.”  That evening he seemed to be talking widely for the sake of resisting any personal bearing; and before long they went into the drawing room, where Lydgate, having asked Rosamond to give them music, sank back in his chair in silence, but with a strange light in his eyes.  “He may have been taking an opiate,” was a thought that crossed Mr. Farebrother’s mind—­“tic-douloureux perhaps—­or medical worries.”

It did not occur to him that Lydgate’s marriage was not delightful:  he believed, as the rest did, that Rosamond was an amiable, docile creature, though he had always thought her rather uninteresting—­ a little too much the pattern-card of the finishing-school; and his mother could not forgive Rosamond because she never seemed to see that Henrietta Noble was in the room.  “However, Lydgate fell in love with her,” said the Vicar to himself, “and she must be to his taste.”