“Yes, but not my style of woman:  I like a woman who lays herself out a little more to please us.  There should be a little filigree about a woman—­something of the coquette.  A man likes a sort of challenge.  The more of a dead set she makes at you the better.”

“There’s some truth in that,” said Mr. Standish, disposed to be genial.  “And, by God, it’s usually the way with them.  I suppose it answers some wise ends:  Providence made them so, eh, Bulstrode?”

“I should be disposed to refer coquetry to another source,” said Mr. Bulstrode.  “I should rather refer it to the devil.”

“Ay, to be sure, there should be a little devil in a woman,” said Mr. Chichely, whose study of the fair sex seemed to have been detrimental to his theology.  “And I like them blond, with a certain gait, and a swan neck.  Between ourselves, the mayor’s daughter is more to my taste than Miss Brooke or Miss Celia either.  If I were a marrying man I should choose Miss Vincy before either of them.”

“Well, make up, make up,” said Mr. Standish, jocosely; “you see the middle-aged fellows early the day.”

Mr. Chichely shook his head with much meaning:  he was not going to incur the certainty of being accepted by the woman he would choose.

The Miss Vincy who had the honor of being Mr. Chichely’s ideal was of course not present; for Mr. Brooke, always objecting to go too far, would not have chosen that his nieces should meet the daughter of a Middlemarch manufacturer, unless it were on a public occasion.  The feminine part of the company included none whom Lady Chettam or Mrs. Cadwallader could object to; for Mrs. Renfrew, the colonel’s widow, was not only unexceptionable in point of breeding, but also interesting on the ground of her complaint, which puzzled the doctors, and seemed clearly a case wherein the fulness of professional knowledge might need the supplement of quackery.  Lady Chettam, who attributed her own remarkable health to home-made bitters united with constant medical attendance, entered with much exercise of the imagination into Mrs. Renfrew’s account of symptoms, and into the amazing futility in her case of all, strengthening medicines.

“Where can all the strength of those medicines go, my dear?” said the mild but stately dowager, turning to Mrs. Cadwallader reflectively, when Mrs. Renfrew’s attention was called away.

“It strengthens the disease,” said the Rector’s wife, much too well-born not to be an amateur in medicine.  “Everything depends on the constitution:  some people make fat, some blood, and some bile—­that’s my view of the matter; and whatever they take is a sort of grist to the mill.”

“Then she ought to take medicines that would reduce—­reduce the disease, you know, if you are right, my dear.  And I think what you say is reasonable.”

“Certainly it is reasonable.  You have two sorts of potatoes, fed on the same soil.  One of them grows more and more watery—­”