Still, early in March his affairs were at that pass in which men begin to say that their oaths were delivered in ignorance, and to perceive that the act which they had called impossible to them is becoming manifestly possible.  With Dover’s ugly security soon to be put in force, with the proceeds of his practice immediately absorbed in paying back debts, and with the chance, if the worst were known, of daily supplies being refused on credit, above all with the vision of Rosamond’s hopeless discontent continually haunting him, Lydgate had begun to see that he should inevitably bend himself to ask help from somebody or other.  At first he had considered whether he should write to Mr. Vincy; but on questioning Rosamond he found that, as he had suspected, she had already applied twice to her father, the last time being since the disappointment from Sir Godwin; and papa had said that Lydgate must look out for himself.  “Papa said he had come, with one bad year after another, to trade more and more on borrowed capital, and had had to give up many indulgences; he could not spare a single hundred from the charges of his family.  He said, let Lydgate ask Bulstrode:  they have always been hand and glove.”

Indeed, Lydgate himself had come to the conclusion that if he must end by asking for a free loan, his relations with Bulstrode, more at least than with any other man, might take the shape of a claim which was not purely personal.  Bulstrode had indirectly helped to cause the failure of his practice, and had also been highly gratified by getting a medical partner in his plans:—­ but who among us ever reduced himself to the sort of dependence in which Lydgate now stood, without trying to believe that he had claims which diminished the humiliation of asking?  It was true that of late there had seemed to be a new languor of interest in Bulstrode about the Hospital; but his health had got worse, and showed signs of a deep-seated nervous affection.  In other respects he did not appear to be changed:  he had always been highly polite, but Lydgate had observed in him from the first a marked coldness about his marriage and other private circumstances, a coldness which he had hitherto preferred to any warmth of familiarity between them.  He deferred the intention from day to day, his habit of acting on his conclusions being made infirm by his repugnance to every possible conclusion and its consequent act.  He saw Mr. Bulstrode often, but he did not try to use any occasion for his private purpose.  At one moment he thought, “I will write a letter:  I prefer that to any circuitous talk;” at another he thought, “No; if I were talking to him, I could make a retreat before any signs of disinclination.”

Still the days passed and no letter was written, no special interview sought.  In his shrinking from the humiliation of a dependent attitude towards Bulstrode, he began to familiarize his imagination with another step even more unlike his remembered self.  He began spontaneously to consider whether it would be possible to carry out that puerile notion of Rosamond’s which had often made him angry, namely, that they should quit Middlemarch without seeing anything beyond that preface.  The question came—­“Would any man buy the practice of me even now, for as little as it is worth?  Then the sale might happen as a necessary preparation for going away.”