He felt himself becoming violent and unreasonable as if raging under the pain of stings:  he was ready to curse the day on which he had come to Middlemarch.  Everything that bad happened to him there seemed a mere preparation for this hateful fatality, which had come as a blight on his honorable ambition, and must make even people who had only vulgar standards regard his reputation as irrevocably damaged.  In such moments a man can hardly escape being unloving.  Lydgate thought of himself as the sufferer, and of others as the agents who had injured his lot.  He had meant everything to turn out differently; and others had thrust themselves into his life and thwarted his purposes.  His marriage seemed an unmitigated calamity; and he was afraid of going to Rosamond before he had vented himself in this solitary rage, lest the mere sight of her should exasperate him and make him behave unwarrantably.  There are episodes in most men’s lives in which their highest qualities can only cast a deterring shadow over the objects that fill their inward vision:  Lydgate’s tenderheartedness was present just then only as a dread lest he should offend against it, not as an emotion that swayed him to tenderness.  For he was very miserable.  Only those who know the supremacy of the intellectual life—­ the life which has a seed of ennobling thought and purpose within it—­ can understand the grief of one who falls from that serene activity into the absorbing soul-wasting struggle with worldly annoyances.

How was he to live on without vindicating himself among people who suspected him of baseness?  How could he go silently away from Middlemarch as if he were retreating before a just condemnation?  And yet how was he to set about vindicating himself?

For that scene at the meeting, which he had just witnessed, although it had told him no particulars, had been enough to make his own situation thoroughly clear to him.  Bulstrode had been in dread of scandalous disclosures on the part of Raffles.  Lydgate could now construct all the probabilities of the case.  “He was afraid of some betrayal in my hearing:  all he wanted was to bind me to him by a strong obligation:  that was why he passed on a sudden from hardness to liberality.  And he may have tampered with the patient—­he may have disobeyed my orders.  I fear he did.  But whether he did or not, the world believes that he somehow or other poisoned the man and that I winked at the crime, if I didn’t help in it.  And yet—­and yet he may not be guilty of the last offence; and it is just possible that the change towards me may have been a genuine relenting—­the effect of second thoughts such as he alleged.  What we call the `just possible’ is sometimes true and the thing we find it easier to believe is grossly false.  In his last dealings with this man Bulstrode may have kept his hands pure, in spite of my suspicion to the contrary.”