prompt:
Chapter: "Inconsistencies," answered Imlac, "cannot both be right,
    but imputed to man they may both be true."--Rasselas.

The same night, when Mr. Bulstrode returned from a journey to Brassing
on business, his good wife met him in the entrance-hall and drew him
into his private sitting-room.

"Nicholas," she said, fixing her honest eyes upon him anxiously, "there
has been such a disagreeable man here asking for you--it has made me
quite uncomfortable."

"What kind of man, my dear," said Mr. Bulstrode, dreadfully certain of
the answer.

"A red-faced man with large whiskers, and most impudent in his manner.
He declared he was an old friend of yours, and said you would be sorry
not to see him.  He wanted to wait for you here, but I told him he
could see you at the Bank to-morrow morning.  Most impudent he
was!--stared at me, and said his friend Nick had luck in wives.  I
don't believe he would have gone away, if Blucher had not happened to
break his chain and come running round on the gravel--for I was in the
garden; so I said, 'You'd better go away--the dog is very fierce, and I
can't hold him.'  Do you really know anything of such a man?"

"I believe I know who he is, my dear," said Mr. Bulstrode, in his usual
subdued voice, "an unfortunate dissolute wretch, whom I helped too much
in days gone by.  However, I presume you will not be troubled by him
again.  He will probably come to the Bank--to beg, doubtless."

No more was said on the subject until the next day, when Mr. Bulstrode
had returned from the town and was dressing for dinner.  His wife, not
sure that he was come home, looked into his dressing-room and saw him
with his coat and cravat off, leaning one arm on a chest of drawers and
staring absently at the ground.  He started nervously and looked up as
she entered.

"You look very ill, Nicholas.  Is there anything the matter?"

"I have a good deal of pain in my head," said Mr. Bulstrode, who was so
frequently ailing that his wife was always ready to believe in this
cause of depression.

"Sit down and let me sponge it with vinegar."

Physically Mr. Bulstrode did not want the vinegar, but morally the
affectionate attention soothed him.  Though always polite, it was his
habit to receive such services with marital coolness, as his wife's
duty.  But to-day, while she was bending over him, he said, "You are
very good, Harriet," in a tone which had something new in it to her
ear; she did not know exactly what the novelty was, but her woman's
solicitude shaped itself into a darting thought that he might be going
to have an illness.

"Has anything worried you?" she said.  "Did that man come to you at the
Bank?"

"Yes; it was as I had supposed.  He is a man who at one time might have
done better.  But he has sunk into a drunken debauched creature."

"Is he quite gone away?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, anxiously but for certain
reasons she refrained from adding, "It was very disagreeable to hear
him calling himself a friend of yours."  At that moment she would not
have liked to say anything which implied her habitual consciousness
that her husband's earlier connections were not quite on a level with
her own.  Not that she knew much about them.  That her husband had at
first been employed in a bank, that he had afterwards entered into what
he called city business and gained a fortune before he was
three-and-thirty, that he had married a widow who was much older than
himself--a Dissenter, and in other ways probably of that
disadvantageous quality usually perceptible in a first wife if inquired
into with the dispassionate judgment of a second--was almost as much as
she had cared to learn beyond the glimpses which Mr. Bulstrode's
narrative occasionally gave of his early bent towards religion, his
inclination to be a preacher, and his association with missionary and
philanthropic efforts.  She believed in him as an excellent man whose
piety carried a peculiar eminence in belonging to a layman, whose
influence had turned her own mind toward seriousness, and whose share
of perishable good had been the means of raising her own position.  But
she also liked to think that it was well in every sense for Mr.
Bulstrode to have won the hand of Harriet Vincy; whose family was
undeniable in a Middlemarch light--a better light surely than any
thrown in London thoroughfares or dissenting chapel-yards. The
unreformed provincial mind distrusted London; and while true religion
was everywhere saving, honest Mrs. Bulstrode was convinced that to be
saved in the Church was more respectable.  She so much wished to ignore
towards others that her husband had ever been a London Dissenter, that
she liked to keep it out of sight even in talking to him.  He was quite
aware of this; indeed in some respects he was rather afraid of this
ingenuous wife, whose imitative piety and native worldliness were
equally sincere, who had nothing to be ashamed of, and whom he had
married out of a thorough inclination still subsisting.  But his fears
were such as belong to a man who cares to maintain his recognized
supremacy: the loss of high consideration from his wife, as from every
one else who did not clearly hate him out of enmity to the truth, would
be as the beginning of death to him.  When she said--

"Is he quite gone away?"

"Oh, I trust so," he answered, with an effort to throw as much sober
unconcern into his tone as possible!

But in truth Mr. Bulstrode was very far from a state of quiet trust.
In the interview at the Bank, Raffles had made it evident that his
eagerness to torment was almost as strong in him as any other greed.
He had frankly said that he had turned out of the way to come to
Middlemarch, just to look about him and see whether the neighborhood
would suit him to live in.  He had certainly had a few debts to pay
more than he expected, but the two hundred pounds were not gone yet: a
cool five-and-twenty would suffice him to go away with for the present.
What he had wanted chiefly was to see his friend Nick and family, and
know all about the prosperity of a man to whom he was so much attached.
By-and-by he might come back for a longer stay.  This time Raffles
declined to be "seen off the premises," as he expressed it--declined to
quit Middlemarch under Bulstrode's eyes.  He meant to go by coach the
next day--if he chose.

Bulstrode felt himself helpless.  Neither threats nor coaxing could
avail: he could not count on any persistent fear nor on any promise.
On the contrary, he felt a cold certainty at his heart that
Raffles--unless providence sent death to hinder him--would come back
to Middlemarch before long.  And that certainty was a terror.

It was not that he was in danger of legal punishment or of beggary: he
was in danger only of seeing disclosed to the judgment of his neighbors
and the mournful perception of his wife certain facts of his past life
which would render him an object of scorn and an opprobrium of the
religion with which he had diligently associated himself.  The terror
of being judged sharpens the memory: it sends an inevitable glare over
that long-unvisited past which has been habitually recalled only in
general phrases.  Even without memory, the life is bound into one by a
zone of dependence in growth and decay; but intense memory forces a man
to own his blameworthy past.  With memory set smarting like a reopened
wound, a man's past is not simply a dead history, an outworn
preparation of the present: it is not a repented error shaken loose
from the life: it is a still quivering part of himself, bringing
shudders and bitter flavors and the tinglings of a merited shame.

Into this second life Bulstrode's past had now risen, only the
pleasures of it seeming to have lost their quality.  Night and day,
without interruption save of brief sleep which only wove retrospect and
fear into a fantastic present, he felt the scenes of his earlier life
coming between him and everything else, as obstinately as when we look
through the window from a lighted room, the objects we turn our backs
on are still before us, instead of the grass and the trees. The
successive events inward and outward were there in one view: though
each might be dwelt on in turn, the rest still kept their hold in the
consciousness.

Once more he saw himself the young banker's clerk, with an agreeable
person, as clever in figures as he was fluent in speech and fond of
theological definition: an eminent though young member of a Calvinistic
dissenting church at Highbury, having had striking experience in
conviction of sin and sense of pardon.  Again he heard himself called
for as Brother Bulstrode in prayer meetings, speaking on religious
platforms, preaching in private houses.  Again he felt himself thinking
of the ministry as possibly his vocation, and inclined towards
missionary labor.  That was the happiest time of his life: that was the
spot he would have chosen now to awake in and find the rest a dream.
The people among whom Brother Bulstrode was distinguished were very
few, but they were very near to him, and stirred his satisfaction the
more; his power stretched through a narrow space, but he felt its
effect the more intensely.  He believed without effort in the peculiar
work of grace within him, and in the signs that God intended him for
special instrumentality.

Then came the moment of transition; it was with the sense of promotion
he had when he, an orphan educated at a commercial charity-school, was
invited to a fine villa belonging to Mr. Dunkirk, the richest man in
the congregation.  Soon he became an intimate there, honored for his
piety by the wife, marked out for his ability by the husband, whose
wealth was due to a flourishing city and west-end trade.  That was the
setting-in of a new current for his ambition, directing his prospects
of "instrumentality" towards the uniting of distinguished religious
gifts with successful business.

By-and-by came a decided external leading: a confidential subordinate
partner died, and nobody seemed to the principal so well fitted to fill
the severely felt vacancy as his young friend Bulstrode, if he would
become confidential accountant.  The offer was accepted.  The business
was a pawnbroker's, of the most magnificent sort both in extent and
profits; and on a short acquaintance with it Bulstrode became aware
that one source of magnificent profit was the easy reception of any
goods offered, without strict inquiry as to where they came from.  But
there was a branch house at the west end, and no pettiness or dinginess
to give suggestions of shame.

He remembered his first moments of shrinking.  They were private, and
were filled with arguments; some of these taking the form of prayer.
The business was established and had old roots; is it not one thing to
set up a new gin-palace and another to accept an investment in an old
one?  The profits made out of lost souls--where can the line be drawn
at which they begin in human transactions?  Was it not even God's way
of saving His chosen?  "Thou knowest,"--the young Bulstrode had said
then, as the older Bulstrode was saying now--"Thou knowest how loose
my soul sits from these things--how I view them all as implements for
tilling Thy garden rescued here and there from the wilderness."

Metaphors and precedents were not wanting; peculiar spiritual
experiences were not wanting which at last made the retention of his
position seem a service demanded of him: the vista of a fortune had
already opened itself, and Bulstrode's shrinking remained private.  Mr.
Dunkirk had never expected that there would be any shrinking at all: he
had never conceived that trade had anything to do with the scheme of
salvation.  And it was true that Bulstrode found himself carrying on
two distinct lives; his religious activity could not be incompatible
with his business as soon as he had argued himself into not feeling it
incompatible.

Mentally surrounded with that past again, Bulstrode had the same
pleas--indeed, the years had been perpetually spinning them into
intricate thickness, like masses of spider-web, padding the moral
sensibility; nay, as age made egoism more eager but less enjoying, his
soul had become more saturated with the belief that he did everything
for God's sake, being indifferent to it for his own.  And yet--if he
could be back in that far-off spot with his youthful poverty--why, then
he would choose to be a missionary.

But the train of causes in which he had locked himself went on.  There
was trouble in the fine villa at Highbury.  Years before, the only
daughter had run away, defied her parents, and gone on the stage; and
now the only boy died, and after a short time Mr. Dunkirk died also.
The wife, a simple pious woman, left with all the wealth in and out of
the magnificent trade, of which she never knew the precise nature, had
come to believe in Bulstrode, and innocently adore him as women often
adore their priest or "man-made" minister.  It was natural that after a
time marriage should have been thought of between them.  But Mrs.
Dunkirk had qualms and yearnings about her daughter, who had long been
regarded as lost both to God and her parents.  It was known that the
daughter had married, but she was utterly gone out of sight.  The
mother, having lost her boy, imagined a grandson, and wished in a
double sense to reclaim her daughter.  If she were found, there would
be a channel for property--perhaps a wide one--in the provision for
several grandchildren.  Efforts to find her must be made before Mrs.
Dunkirk would marry again.  Bulstrode concurred; but after
advertisement as well as other modes of inquiry had been tried, the
mother believed that her daughter was not to be found, and consented to
marry without reservation of property.

The daughter had been found; but only one man besides Bulstrode knew
it, and he was paid for keeping silence and carrying himself away.

That was the bare fact which Bulstrode was now forced to see in the
rigid outline with which acts present themselves onlookers.  But for
himself at that distant time, and even now in burning memory, the fact
was broken into little sequences, each justified as it came by
reasonings which seemed to prove it righteous.  Bulstrode's course up
to that time had, he thought, been sanctioned by remarkable
providences, appearing to point the way for him to be the agent in
making the best use of a large property and withdrawing it from
perversion.  Death and other striking dispositions, such as feminine
trustfulness, had come; and Bulstrode would have adopted Cromwell's
words--"Do you call these bare events?  The Lord pity you!"  The
events were comparatively small, but the essential condition was
there--namely, that they were in favor of his own ends.  It was easy
for him to settle what was due from him to others by inquiring what
were God's intentions with regard to himself.  Could it be for God's
service that this fortune should in any considerable proportion go to a
young woman and her husband who were given up to the lightest pursuits,
and might scatter it abroad in triviality--people who seemed to lie
outside the path of remarkable providences?  Bulstrode had never said
to himself beforehand, "The daughter shall not be found"--nevertheless
when the moment came he kept her existence hidden; and when other
moments followed, he soothed the mother with consolation in the
probability that the unhappy young woman might be no more.

There were hours in which Bulstrode felt that his action was
unrighteous; but how could he go back?  He had mental exercises, called
himself nought, laid hold on redemption, and went on in his course of
instrumentality.  And after five years Death again came to widen his
path, by taking away his wife.  He did gradually withdraw his capital,
but he did not make the sacrifices requisite to put an end to the
business, which was carried on for thirteen years afterwards before it
finally collapsed.  Meanwhile Nicholas Bulstrode had used his hundred
thousand discreetly, and was become provincially, solidly important--a
banker, a Churchman, a public benefactor; also a sleeping partner in
trading concerns, in which his ability was directed to economy in the
raw material, as in the case of the dyes which rotted Mr. Vincy's silk.
And now, when this respectability had lasted undisturbed for nearly
thirty years--when all that preceded it had long lain benumbed in the
consciousness--that past had risen and immersed his thought as if with
the terrible irruption of a new sense overburthening the feeble being.

Meanwhile, in his conversation with Raffles, he had learned something
momentous, something which entered actively into the struggle of his
longings and terrors.  There, he thought, lay an opening towards
spiritual, perhaps towards material rescue.

The spiritual kind of rescue was a genuine need with him.  There may be
coarse hypocrites, who consciously affect beliefs and emotions for the
sake of gulling the world, but Bulstrode was not one of them.  He was
simply a man whose desires had been stronger than his theoretic
beliefs, and who had gradually explained the gratification of his
desires into satisfactory agreement with those beliefs.  If this be
hypocrisy, it is a process which shows itself occasionally in us all,
to whatever confession we belong, and whether we believe in the future
perfection of our race or in the nearest date fixed for the end of the
world; whether we regard the earth as a putrefying nidus for a saved
remnant, including ourselves, or have a passionate belief in the
solidarity of mankind.

The service he could do to the cause of religion had been through life
the ground he alleged to himself for his choice of action: it had been
the motive which he had poured out in his prayers.  Who would use money
and position better than he meant to use them?  Who could surpass him
in self-abhorrence and exaltation of God's cause?  And to Mr. Bulstrode
God's cause was something distinct from his own rectitude of conduct:
it enforced a discrimination of God's enemies, who were to be used
merely as instruments, and whom it would be as well if possible to keep
out of money and consequent influence.  Also, profitable investments in
trades where the power of the prince of this world showed its most
active devices, became sanctified by a right application of the profits
in the hands of God's servant.

This implicit reasoning is essentially no more peculiar to evangelical
belief than the use of wide phrases for narrow motives is peculiar to
Englishmen.  There is no general doctrine which is not capable of
eating out our morality if unchecked by the deep-seated habit of direct
fellow-feeling with individual fellow-men.

But a man who believes in something else than his own greed, has
necessarily a conscience or standard to which he more or less adapts
himself.  Bulstrode's standard had been his serviceableness to God's
cause: "I am sinful and nought--a vessel to be consecrated by use--but
use me!"--had been the mould into which he had constrained his immense
need of being something important and predominating.  And now had come
a moment in which that mould seemed in danger of being broken and
utterly cast away.

What if the acts he had reconciled himself to because they made him a
stronger instrument of the divine glory, were to become the pretext of
the scoffer, and a darkening of that glory?  If this were to be the
ruling of Providence, he was cast out from the temple as one who had
brought unclean offerings.

He had long poured out utterances of repentance.  But today a
repentance had come which was of a bitterer flavor, and a threatening
Providence urged him to a kind of propitiation which was not simply a
doctrinal transaction.  The divine tribunal had changed its aspect for
him; self-prostration was no longer enough, and he must bring
restitution in his hand.  It was really before his God that Bulstrode
was about to attempt such restitution as seemed possible: a great dread
had seized his susceptible frame, and the scorching approach of shame
wrought in him a new spiritual need.  Night and day, while the
resurgent threatening past was making a conscience within him, he was
thinking by what means he could recover peace and trust--by what
sacrifice he could stay the rod.  His belief in these moments of dread
was, that if he spontaneously did something right, God would save him
from the consequences of wrong-doing. For religion can only change when
the emotions which fill it are changed; and the religion of personal
fear remains nearly at the level of the savage.

He had seen Raffles actually going away on the Brassing coach, and this
was a temporary relief; it removed the pressure of an immediate dread,
but did not put an end to the spiritual conflict and the need to win
protection.  At last he came to a difficult resolve, and wrote a letter
to Will Ladislaw, begging him to be at the Shrubs that evening for a
private interview at nine o'clock. Will had felt no particular surprise
at the request, and connected it with some new notions about the
"Pioneer;" but when he was shown into Mr. Bulstrode's private room, he
was struck with the painfully worn look on the banker's face, and was
going to say, "Are you ill?" when, checking himself in that abruptness,
he only inquired after Mrs. Bulstrode, and her satisfaction with the
picture bought for her.

"Thank you, she is quite satisfied; she has gone out with her daughters
this evening.  I begged you to come, Mr. Ladislaw, because I have a
communication of a very private--indeed, I will say, of a sacredly
confidential nature, which I desire to make to you.  Nothing, I dare
say, has been farther from your thoughts than that there had been
important ties in the past which could connect your history with mine."

Will felt something like an electric shock.  He was already in a state
of keen sensitiveness and hardly allayed agitation on the subject of
ties in the past, and his presentiments were not agreeable.  It seemed
like the fluctuations of a dream--as if the action begun by that loud
bloated stranger were being carried on by this pale-eyed sickly looking
piece of respectability, whose subdued tone and glib formality of
speech were at this moment almost as repulsive to him as their
remembered contrast.  He answered, with a marked change of color--

"No, indeed, nothing."

"You see before you, Mr. Ladislaw, a man who is deeply stricken.  But
for the urgency of conscience and the knowledge that I am before the
bar of One who seeth not as man seeth, I should be under no compulsion
to make the disclosure which has been my object in asking you to come
here to-night. So far as human laws go, you have no claim on me
whatever."

Will was even more uncomfortable than wondering.  Mr. Bulstrode had
paused, leaning his head on his hand, and looking at the floor.  But he
now fixed his examining glance on Will and said--

"I am told that your mother's name was Sarah Dunkirk, and that she ran
away from her friends to go on the stage.  Also, that your father was
at one time much emaciated by illness.  May I ask if you can confirm
these statements?"

"Yes, they are all true," said Will, struck with the order in which an
inquiry had come, that might have been expected to be preliminary to
the banker's previous hints.  But Mr. Bulstrode had to-night followed
the order of his emotions; he entertained no doubt that the opportunity
for restitution had come, and he had an overpowering impulse towards
the penitential expression by which he was deprecating chastisement.

"Do you know any particulars of your mother's family?" he continued.

"No; she never liked to speak of them.  She was a very generous,
honorable woman," said Will, almost angrily.

"I do not wish to allege anything against her.  Did she never mention
her mother to you at all?"

"I have heard her say that she thought her mother did not know the
reason of her running away.  She said 'poor mother' in a pitying tone."

"That mother became my wife," said Bulstrode, and then paused a moment
before he added, "you have a claim on me, Mr. Ladislaw: as I said
before, not a legal claim, but one which my conscience recognizes.  I
was enriched by that marriage--a result which would probably not have
taken place--certainly not to the same extent--if your grandmother
could have discovered her daughter.  That daughter, I gather, is no
longer living!"

"No," said Will, feeling suspicion and repugnance rising so strongly
within him, that without quite knowing what he did, he took his hat
from the floor and stood up.  The impulse within him was to reject the
disclosed connection.

"Pray be seated, Mr. Ladislaw," said Bulstrode, anxiously.  "Doubtless
you are startled by the suddenness of this discovery.  But I entreat
your patience with one who is already bowed down by inward trial."

Will reseated himself, feeling some pity which was half contempt for
this voluntary self-abasement of an elderly man.

"It is my wish, Mr. Ladislaw, to make amends for the deprivation which
befell your mother.  I know that you are without fortune, and I wish to
supply you adequately from a store which would have probably already
been yours had your grandmother been certain of your mother's existence
and been able to find her."

Mr. Bulstrode paused.  He felt that he was performing a striking piece
of scrupulosity in the judgment of his auditor, and a penitential act
in the eyes of God.  He had no clew to the state of Will Ladislaw's
mind, smarting as it was from the clear hints of Raffles, and with its
natural quickness in construction stimulated by the expectation of
discoveries which he would have been glad to conjure back into
darkness.  Will made no answer for several moments, till Mr. Bulstrode,
who at the end of his speech had cast his eyes on the floor, now raised
them with an examining glance, which Will met fully, saying--

"I suppose you did know of my mother's existence, and knew where she
might have been found."

Bulstrode shrank--there was a visible quivering in his face and hands.
He was totally unprepared to have his advances met in this way, or to
find himself urged into more revelation than he had beforehand set down
as needful.  But at that moment he dared not tell a lie, and he felt
suddenly uncertain of his ground which he had trodden with some
confidence before.

"I will not deny that you conjecture rightly," he answered, with a
faltering in his tone.  "And I wish to make atonement to you as the one
still remaining who has suffered a loss through me.  You enter, I
trust, into my purpose, Mr. Ladislaw, which has a reference to higher
than merely human claims, and as I have already said, is entirely
independent of any legal compulsion.  I am ready to narrow my own
resources and the prospects of my family by binding myself to allow you
five hundred pounds yearly during my life, and to leave you a
proportional capital at my death--nay, to do still more, if more should
be definitely necessary to any laudable project on your part."  Mr.
Bulstrode had gone on to particulars in the expectation that these
would work strongly on Ladislaw, and merge other feelings in grateful
acceptance.

But Will was looking as stubborn as possible, with his lip pouting and
his fingers in his side-pockets. He was not in the least touched, and
said firmly,--

"Before I make any reply to your proposition, Mr. Bulstrode, I must beg
you to answer a question or two.  Were you connected with the business
by which that fortune you speak of was originally made?"

Mr. Bulstrode's thought was, "Raffles has told him."  How could he
refuse to answer when he had volunteered what drew forth the question?
He answered, "Yes."

"And was that business--or was it not--a thoroughly dishonorable
one--nay, one that, if its nature had been made public, might have
ranked those concerned in it with thieves and convicts?"

Will's tone had a cutting bitterness: he was moved to put his question
as nakedly as he could.

Bulstrode reddened with irrepressible anger.  He had been prepared for
a scene of self-abasement, but his intense pride and his habit of
supremacy overpowered penitence, and even dread, when this young man,
whom he had meant to benefit, turned on him with the air of a judge.

"The business was established before I became connected with it, sir;
nor is it for you to institute an inquiry of that kind," he answered,
not raising his voice, but speaking with quick defiantness.

"Yes, it is," said Will, starting up again with his hat in his hand.
"It is eminently mine to ask such questions, when I have to decide
whether I will have transactions with you and accept your money.  My
unblemished honor is important to me.  It is important to me to have no
stain on my birth and connections.  And now I find there is a stain
which I can't help.  My mother felt it, and tried to keep as clear of
it as she could, and so will I.  You shall keep your ill-gotten money.
If I had any fortune of my own, I would willingly pay it to any one who
could disprove what you have told me.  What I have to thank you for is
that you kept the money till now, when I can refuse it.  It ought to
lie with a man's self that he is a gentleman.  Good-night, sir."

Bulstrode was going to speak, but Will, with determined quickness, was
out of the room in an instant, and in another the hall-door had closed
behind him.  He was too strongly possessed with passionate rebellion
against this inherited blot which had been thrust on his knowledge to
reflect at present whether he had not been too hard on Bulstrode--too
arrogantly merciless towards a man of sixty, who was making efforts at
retrieval when time had rendered them vain.

No third person listening could have thoroughly understood the
impetuosity of Will's repulse or the bitterness of his words.  No one
but himself then knew how everything connected with the sentiment of
his own dignity had an immediate bearing for him on his relation to
Dorothea and to Mr. Casaubon's treatment of him.  And in the rush of
impulses by which he flung back that offer of Bulstrode's there was
mingled the sense that it would have been impossible for him ever to
tell Dorothea that he had accepted it.

As for Bulstrode--when Will was gone he suffered a violent reaction,
and wept like a woman.  It was the first time he had encountered an
open expression of scorn from any man higher than Raffles; and with
that scorn hurrying like venom through his system, there was no
sensibility left to consolations.  But the relief of weeping had to be
checked.  His wife and daughters soon came home from hearing the
address of an Oriental missionary, and were full of regret that papa
had not heard, in the first instance, the interesting things which they
tried to repeat to him.

Perhaps, through all other hidden thoughts, the one that breathed most
comfort was, that Will Ladislaw at least was not likely to publish what
had taken place that evening.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: When Mr. Bulstrode gets home after the day of the auction, his wife tells him that someone had come to see him. It was Raffles. Raffles goes to see him the next day at the bank, and he comes home looking anxious. His wife thinks he has a headache, but he's really just thinking about his past, and wondering what to do about Raffles, who keeps haunting him. We finally learn more about Bulstrode's past as he goes into lengthy reflection about it: he was a young banking clerk in London, and caught the attention of the owner of a trading house who went to the same church he did. He eventually became a partner at the trading house, which was really more like a high-end pawnshop that didn't ask where the goods they sold came from. Bulstrode had some prickings of conscience, but learned to ignore them. He learns more about the Dunkirk family: they had a daughter who ran away from home some years before, and a son who died. After a while, the senior partner, Mr. Dunkirk, died, leaving Bulstrode as the sole owner of the business. The wife, Mrs. Dunkirk, didn't know anything about her husband's shady business. She fell in love with the younger Bulstrode, but before she would agree to marry him, she wanted to search for her daughter. After all, if the daughter were alive, some share of the family fortune should go to her. Bulstrode agreed to this, and did find Sarah Dunkirk , but concealed it from Mrs. Dunkirk. Mrs. Dunkirk believed her daughter to be dead, and agreed to marry Bulstrode. Bulstrode's conscience, in present-day Middlemarch, is starting to prick him again , but how can undo what he did then? Raffles is the only other person who knows that Bulstrode basically swooped in and took the family fortune away from Sarah Dunkirk , and that the family fortune was made in shady ways. Bulstrode is having a harder time justifying his past actions to himself . So he decides to do right by Will Ladislaw. He asks Will to meet him in a private room at a pub. Will assumes that it has something to do with the Pioneer newspaper. Bulstrode asks if it's true that Will's mother's name was Sarah Dunkirk. Yes, Will says. Bulstrode says what Will already knows - that Sarah Dunkirk had run away from her family, but that her mother had never known the reason why. Bulstrode then tells Will that he had married Sarah's mother, and was enriched by the marriage, but that he couldn't have gotten the money had Sarah not run away. Will is put off by the information, although he doesn't know why. Bulstrode adds that Will has no legal claim on him . Will asks if Bulstrode had known where Sarah was, but concealed it from her mother. Bulstrode can't bring himself to lie. He hadn't expected Will to ask that. He admits that he did know that Sarah was alive. Bulstrode then offers to pay Will five hundred pounds a year, and to leave him something when he dies, as a way to atone for what he did to Sarah. Will then asks whether Bulstrode was involved in the family business. Bulstrode realizes that Raffles must have told him. But again, he can't deny it. Will then refuses any and all money from Bulstrode - he calls it "ill-gotten" money - and says that his mother had tried to stay clear of that whole business, and he means to, as well. The bitterness and scorn in Will's voice makes Bulstrode break down and cry after Will leaves. But at least, he figures, Will is unlikely to tell anyone about it.


prompt:
Chapter: "He was a squyer of lowe degre,
     That loved the king's daughter of Hungrie.
                                    --Old Romance.

Will Ladislaw's mind was now wholly bent on seeing Dorothea again, and
forthwith quitting Middlemarch.  The morning after his agitating scene
with Bulstrode he wrote a brief letter to her, saying that various
causes had detained him in the neighborhood longer than he had
expected, and asking her permission to call again at Lowick at some
hour which she would mention on the earliest possible day, he being
anxious to depart, but unwilling to do so until she had granted him an
interview.  He left the letter at the office, ordering the messenger to
carry it to Lowick Manor, and wait for an answer.

Ladislaw felt the awkwardness of asking for more last words.  His
former farewell had been made in the hearing of Sir James Chettam, and
had been announced as final even to the butler.  It is certainly trying
to a man's dignity to reappear when he is not expected to do so: a
first farewell has pathos in it, but to come back for a second lends an
opening to comedy, and it was possible even that there might be bitter
sneers afloat about Will's motives for lingering.  Still it was on the
whole more satisfactory to his feeling to take the directest means of
seeing Dorothea, than to use any device which might give an air of
chance to a meeting of which he wished her to understand that it was
what he earnestly sought.  When he had parted from her before, he had
been in ignorance of facts which gave a new aspect to the relation
between them, and made a more absolute severance than he had then
believed in.  He knew nothing of Dorothea's private fortune, and being
little used to reflect on such matters, took it for granted that
according to Mr. Casaubon's arrangement marriage to him, Will Ladislaw,
would mean that she consented to be penniless.  That was not what he
could wish for even in his secret heart, or even if she had been ready
to meet such hard contrast for his sake.  And then, too, there was the
fresh smart of that disclosure about his mother's family, which if
known would be an added reason why Dorothea's friends should look down
upon him as utterly below her.  The secret hope that after some years
he might come back with the sense that he had at least a personal value
equal to her wealth, seemed now the dreamy continuation of a dream.
This change would surely justify him in asking Dorothea to receive him
once more.

But Dorothea on that morning was not at home to receive Will's note.
In consequence of a letter from her uncle announcing his intention to
be at home in a week, she had driven first to Freshitt to carry the
news, meaning to go on to the Grange to deliver some orders with which
her uncle had intrusted her--thinking, as he said, "a little mental
occupation of this sort good for a widow."

If Will Ladislaw could have overheard some of the talk at Freshitt that
morning, he would have felt all his suppositions confirmed as to the
readiness of certain people to sneer at his lingering in the
neighborhood.  Sir James, indeed, though much relieved concerning
Dorothea, had been on the watch to learn Ladislaw's movements, and had
an instructed informant in Mr. Standish, who was necessarily in his
confidence on this matter.  That Ladislaw had stayed in Middlemarch
nearly two months after he had declared that he was going immediately,
was a fact to embitter Sir James's suspicions, or at least to justify
his aversion to a "young fellow" whom he represented to himself as
slight, volatile, and likely enough to show such recklessness as
naturally went along with a position unriveted by family ties or a
strict profession.  But he had just heard something from Standish
which, while it justified these surmises about Will, offered a means of
nullifying all danger with regard to Dorothea.

Unwonted circumstances may make us all rather unlike ourselves: there
are conditions under which the most majestic person is obliged to
sneeze, and our emotions are liable to be acted on in the same
incongruous manner.  Good Sir James was this morning so far unlike
himself that he was irritably anxious to say something to Dorothea on a
subject which he usually avoided as if it had been a matter of shame to
them both.  He could not use Celia as a medium, because he did not
choose that she should know the kind of gossip he had in his mind; and
before Dorothea happened to arrive he had been trying to imagine how,
with his shyness and unready tongue, he could ever manage to introduce
his communication.  Her unexpected presence brought him to utter
hopelessness in his own power of saying anything unpleasant; but
desperation suggested a resource; he sent the groom on an unsaddled
horse across the park with a pencilled note to Mrs. Cadwallader, who
already knew the gossip, and would think it no compromise of herself to
repeat it as often as required.

Dorothea was detained on the good pretext that Mr. Garth, whom she
wanted to see, was expected at the hall within the hour, and she was
still talking to Caleb on the gravel when Sir James, on the watch for
the rector's wife, saw her coming and met her with the needful hints.

"Enough!  I understand,"--said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "You shall be
innocent.  I am such a blackamoor that I cannot smirch myself."

"I don't mean that it's of any consequence," said Sir James, disliking
that Mrs. Cadwallader should understand too much.  "Only it is
desirable that Dorothea should know there are reasons why she should
not receive him again; and I really can't say so to her.  It will come
lightly from you."

It came very lightly indeed.  When Dorothea quitted Caleb and turned to
meet them, it appeared that Mrs. Cadwallader had stepped across the
park by the merest chance in the world, just to chat with Celia in a
matronly way about the baby.  And so Mr. Brooke was coming back?
Delightful!--coming back, it was to be hoped, quite cured of
Parliamentary fever and pioneering.  Apropos of the "Pioneer"--somebody
had prophesied that it would soon be like a dying dolphin, and turn all
colors for want of knowing how to help itself, because Mr. Brooke's
protege, the brilliant young Ladislaw, was gone or going.  Had Sir
James heard that?

The three were walking along the gravel slowly, and Sir James, turning
aside to whip a shrub, said he had heard something of that sort.

"All false!" said Mrs. Cadwallader.  "He is not gone, or going,
apparently; the 'Pioneer' keeps its color, and Mr. Orlando Ladislaw is
making a sad dark-blue scandal by warbling continually with your Mr.
Lydgate's wife, who they tell me is as pretty as pretty can be.  It
seems nobody ever goes into the house without finding this young
gentleman lying on the rug or warbling at the piano.  But the people in
manufacturing towns are always disreputable."

"You began by saying that one report was false, Mrs. Cadwallader, and I
believe this is false too," said Dorothea, with indignant energy; "at
least, I feel sure it is a misrepresentation.  I will not hear any evil
spoken of Mr. Ladislaw; he has already suffered too much injustice."

Dorothea when thoroughly moved cared little what any one thought of her
feelings; and even if she had been able to reflect, she would have held
it petty to keep silence at injurious words about Will from fear of
being herself misunderstood.  Her face was flushed and her lip trembled.

Sir James, glancing at her, repented of his stratagem; but Mrs.
Cadwallader, equal to all occasions, spread the palms of her hands
outward and said--"Heaven grant it, my dear!--I mean that all bad tales
about anybody may be false.  But it is a pity that young Lydgate should
have married one of these Middlemarch girls.  Considering he's a son of
somebody, he might have got a woman with good blood in her veins, and
not too young, who would have put up with his profession.  There's
Clara Harfager, for instance, whose friends don't know what to do with
her; and she has a portion.  Then we might have had her among us.
However!--it's no use being wise for other people.  Where is Celia?
Pray let us go in."

"I am going on immediately to Tipton," said Dorothea, rather haughtily.
"Good-by."

Sir James could say nothing as he accompanied her to the carriage.  He
was altogether discontented with the result of a contrivance which had
cost him some secret humiliation beforehand.

Dorothea drove along between the berried hedgerows and the shorn
corn-fields, not seeing or hearing anything around.  The tears came and
rolled down her cheeks, but she did not know it.  The world, it seemed,
was turning ugly and hateful, and there was no place for her
trustfulness.  "It is not true--it is not true!" was the voice within
her that she listened to; but all the while a remembrance to which
there had always clung a vague uneasiness would thrust itself on her
attention--the remembrance of that day when she had found Will Ladislaw
with Mrs. Lydgate, and had heard his voice accompanied by the piano.

"He said he would never do anything that I disapproved--I wish I could
have told him that I disapproved of that," said poor Dorothea,
inwardly, feeling a strange alternation between anger with Will and the
passionate defence of him.  "They all try to blacken him before me; but
I will care for no pain, if he is not to blame.  I always believed he
was good."--These were her last thoughts before she felt that the
carriage was passing under the archway of the lodge-gate at the Grange,
when she hurriedly pressed her handkerchief to her face and began to
think of her errands.  The coachman begged leave to take out the horses
for half an hour as there was something wrong with a shoe; and
Dorothea, having the sense that she was going to rest, took off her
gloves and bonnet, while she was leaning against a statue in the
entrance-hall, and talking to the housekeeper.  At last she said--

"I must stay here a little, Mrs. Kell.  I will go into the library and
write you some memoranda from my uncle's letter, if you will open the
shutters for me."

"The shutters are open, madam," said Mrs. Kell, following Dorothea, who
had walked along as she spoke.  "Mr. Ladislaw is there, looking for
something."

(Will had come to fetch a portfolio of his own sketches which he had
missed in the act of packing his movables, and did not choose to leave
behind.)

Dorothea's heart seemed to turn over as if it had had a blow, but she
was not perceptibly checked: in truth, the sense that Will was there
was for the moment all-satisfying to her, like the sight of something
precious that one has lost.  When she reached the door she said to Mrs.
Kell--

"Go in first, and tell him that I am here."

Will had found his portfolio, and had laid it on the table at the far
end of the room, to turn over the sketches and please himself by
looking at the memorable piece of art which had a relation to nature
too mysterious for Dorothea.  He was smiling at it still, and shaking
the sketches into order with the thought that he might find a letter
from her awaiting him at Middlemarch, when Mrs. Kell close to his elbow
said--

"Mrs. Casaubon is coming in, sir."

Will turned round quickly, and the next moment Dorothea was entering.
As Mrs. Kell closed the door behind her they met: each was looking at
the other, and consciousness was overflowed by something that
suppressed utterance.  It was not confusion that kept them silent, for
they both felt that parting was near, and there is no shamefacedness in
a sad parting.

She moved automatically towards her uncle's chair against the
writing-table, and Will, after drawing it out a little for her, went a
few paces off and stood opposite to her.

"Pray sit down," said Dorothea, crossing her hands on her lap; "I am
very glad you were here."  Will thought that her face looked just as it
did when she first shook hands with him in Rome; for her widow's cap,
fixed in her bonnet, had gone off with it, and he could see that she
had lately been shedding tears.  But the mixture of anger in her
agitation had vanished at the sight of him; she had been used, when
they were face to face, always to feel confidence and the happy freedom
which comes with mutual understanding, and how could other people's
words hinder that effect on a sudden?  Let the music which can take
possession of our frame and fill the air with joy for us, sound once
more--what does it signify that we heard it found fault with in its
absence?

"I have sent a letter to Lowick Manor to-day, asking leave to see you,"
said Will, seating himself opposite to her.  "I am going away
immediately, and I could not go without speaking to you again."

"I thought we had parted when you came to Lowick many weeks ago--you
thought you were going then," said Dorothea, her voice trembling a
little.

"Yes; but I was in ignorance then of things which I know now--things
which have altered my feelings about the future.  When I saw you
before, I was dreaming that I might come back some day.  I don't think
I ever shall--now."  Will paused here.

"You wished me to know the reasons?" said Dorothea, timidly.

"Yes," said Will, impetuously, shaking his head backward, and looking
away from her with irritation in his face.  "Of course I must wish it.
I have been grossly insulted in your eyes and in the eyes of others.
There has been a mean implication against my character.  I wish you to
know that under no circumstances would I have lowered myself by--under
no circumstances would I have given men the chance of saying that I
sought money under the pretext of seeking--something else.  There was
no need of other safeguard against me--the safeguard of wealth was
enough."

Will rose from his chair with the last word and went--he hardly knew
where; but it was to the projecting window nearest him, which had been
open as now about the same season a year ago, when he and Dorothea had
stood within it and talked together.  Her whole heart was going out at
this moment in sympathy with Will's indignation: she only wanted to
convince him that she had never done him injustice, and he seemed to
have turned away from her as if she too had been part of the unfriendly
world.

"It would be very unkind of you to suppose that I ever attributed any
meanness to you," she began.  Then in her ardent way, wanting to plead
with him, she moved from her chair and went in front of him to her old
place in the window, saying, "Do you suppose that I ever disbelieved in
you?"

When Will saw her there, he gave a start and moved backward out of the
window, without meeting her glance.  Dorothea was hurt by this movement
following up the previous anger of his tone.  She was ready to say that
it was as hard on her as on him, and that she was helpless; but those
strange particulars of their relation which neither of them could
explicitly mention kept her always in dread of saying too much.  At
this moment she had no belief that Will would in any case have wanted
to marry her, and she feared using words which might imply such a
belief.  She only said earnestly, recurring to his last word--

"I am sure no safeguard was ever needed against you."

Will did not answer.  In the stormy fluctuation of his feelings these
words of hers seemed to him cruelly neutral, and he looked pale and
miserable after his angry outburst.  He went to the table and fastened
up his portfolio, while Dorothea looked at him from the distance.  They
were wasting these last moments together in wretched silence.  What
could he say, since what had got obstinately uppermost in his mind was
the passionate love for her which he forbade himself to utter?  What
could she say, since she might offer him no help--since she was forced
to keep the money that ought to have been his?--since to-day he seemed
not to respond as he used to do to her thorough trust and liking?

But Will at last turned away from his portfolio and approached the
window again.

"I must go," he said, with that peculiar look of the eyes which
sometimes accompanies bitter feeling, as if they had been tired and
burned with gazing too close at a light.

"What shall you do in life?" said Dorothea, timidly.  "Have your
intentions remained just the same as when we said good-by before?"

"Yes," said Will, in a tone that seemed to waive the subject as
uninteresting.  "I shall work away at the first thing that offers.  I
suppose one gets a habit of doing without happiness or hope."

"Oh, what sad words!" said Dorothea, with a dangerous tendency to sob.
Then trying to smile, she added, "We used to agree that we were alike
in speaking too strongly."

"I have not spoken too strongly now," said Will, leaning back against
the angle of the wall.  "There are certain things which a man can only
go through once in his life; and he must know some time or other that
the best is over with him.  This experience has happened to me while I
am very young--that is all.  What I care more for than I can ever care
for anything else is absolutely forbidden to me--I don't mean merely
by being out of my reach, but forbidden me, even if it were within my
reach, by my own pride and honor--by everything I respect myself for.
Of course I shall go on living as a man might do who had seen heaven in
a trance."

Will paused, imagining that it would be impossible for Dorothea to
misunderstand this; indeed he felt that he was contradicting himself
and offending against his self-approval in speaking to her so plainly;
but still--it could not be fairly called wooing a woman to tell her
that he would never woo her.  It must be admitted to be a ghostly kind
of wooing.

But Dorothea's mind was rapidly going over the past with quite another
vision than his.  The thought that she herself might be what Will most
cared for did throb through her an instant, but then came doubt: the
memory of the little they had lived through together turned pale and
shrank before the memory which suggested how much fuller might have
been the intercourse between Will and some one else with whom he had
had constant companionship.  Everything he had said might refer to that
other relation, and whatever had passed between him and herself was
thoroughly explained by what she had always regarded as their simple
friendship and the cruel obstruction thrust upon it by her husband's
injurious act.  Dorothea stood silent, with her eyes cast down
dreamily, while images crowded upon her which left the sickening
certainty that Will was referring to Mrs. Lydgate.  But why sickening?
He wanted her to know that here too his conduct should be above
suspicion.

Will was not surprised at her silence.  His mind also was tumultuously
busy while he watched her, and he was feeling rather wildly that
something must happen to hinder their parting--some miracle, clearly
nothing in their own deliberate speech.  Yet, after all, had she any
love for him?--he could not pretend to himself that he would rather
believe her to be without that pain.  He could not deny that a secret
longing for the assurance that she loved him was at the root of all his
words.

Neither of them knew how long they stood in that way.  Dorothea was
raising her eyes, and was about to speak, when the door opened and her
footman came to say--

"The horses are ready, madam, whenever you like to start."

"Presently," said Dorothea.  Then turning to Will, she said, "I have
some memoranda to write for the housekeeper."

"I must go," said Will, when the door had closed again--advancing
towards her.  "The day after to-morrow I shall leave Middlemarch."

"You have acted in every way rightly," said Dorothea, in a low tone,
feeling a pressure at her heart which made it difficult to speak.

She put out her hand, and Will took it for an instant without speaking,
for her words had seemed to him cruelly cold and unlike herself.  Their
eyes met, but there was discontent in his, and in hers there was only
sadness.  He turned away and took his portfolio under his arm.

"I have never done you injustice.  Please remember me," said Dorothea,
repressing a rising sob.

"Why should you say that?" said Will, with irritation.  "As if I were
not in danger of forgetting everything else."

He had really a movement of anger against her at that moment, and it
impelled him to go away without pause.  It was all one flash to
Dorothea--his last words--his distant bow to her as he reached the
door--the sense that he was no longer there.  She sank into the chair,
and for a few moments sat like a statue, while images and emotions were
hurrying upon her.  Joy came first, in spite of the threatening train
behind it--joy in the impression that it was really herself whom Will
loved and was renouncing, that there was really no other love less
permissible, more blameworthy, which honor was hurrying him away from.
They were parted all the same, but--Dorothea drew a deep breath and
felt her strength return--she could think of him unrestrainedly.  At
that moment the parting was easy to bear: the first sense of loving and
being loved excluded sorrow.  It was as if some hard icy pressure had
melted, and her consciousness had room to expand: her past was come
back to her with larger interpretation.  The joy was not the
less--perhaps it was the more complete just then--because of the
irrevocable parting; for there was no reproach, no contemptuous wonder
to imagine in any eye or from any lips.  He had acted so as to defy
reproach, and make wonder respectful.

Any one watching her might have seen that there was a fortifying
thought within her.  Just as when inventive power is working with glad
ease some small claim on the attention is fully met as if it were only
a cranny opened to the sunlight, it was easy now for Dorothea to write
her memoranda.  She spoke her last words to the housekeeper in cheerful
tones, and when she seated herself in the carriage her eyes were bright
and her cheeks blooming under the dismal bonnet.  She threw back the
heavy "weepers," and looked before her, wondering which road Will had
taken.  It was in her nature to be proud that he was blameless, and
through all her feelings there ran this vein--"I was right to defend
him."

The coachman was used to drive his grays at a good pace, Mr. Casaubon
being unenjoying and impatient in everything away from his desk, and
wanting to get to the end of all journeys; and Dorothea was now bowled
along quickly.  Driving was pleasant, for rain in the night had laid
the dust, and the blue sky looked far off, away from the region of the
great clouds that sailed in masses.  The earth looked like a happy
place under the vast heavens, and Dorothea was wishing that she might
overtake Will and see him once more.

After a turn of the road, there he was with the portfolio under his
arm; but the next moment she was passing him while he raised his hat,
and she felt a pang at being seated there in a sort of exaltation,
leaving him behind.  She could not look back at him.  It was as if a
crowd of indifferent objects had thrust them asunder, and forced them
along different paths, taking them farther and farther away from each
other, and making it useless to look back.  She could no more make any
sign that would seem to say, "Need we part?" than she could stop the
carriage to wait for him.  Nay, what a world of reasons crowded upon
her against any movement of her thought towards a future that might
reverse the decision of this day!

"I only wish I had known before--I wish he knew--then we could be quite
happy in thinking of each other, though we are forever parted.  And if
I could but have given him the money, and made things easier for
him!"--were the longings that came back the most persistently.  And
yet, so heavily did the world weigh on her in spite of her independent
energy, that with this idea of Will as in need of such help and at a
disadvantage with the world, there came always the vision of that
unfittingness of any closer relation between them which lay in the
opinion of every one connected with her.  She felt to the full all the
imperativeness of the motives which urged Will's conduct.  How could he
dream of her defying the barrier that her husband had placed between
them?--how could she ever say to herself that she would defy it?

Will's certainty as the carriage grew smaller in the distance, had much
more bitterness in it.  Very slight matters were enough to gall him in
his sensitive mood, and the sight of Dorothea driving past him while he
felt himself plodding along as a poor devil seeking a position in a
world which in his present temper offered him little that he coveted,
made his conduct seem a mere matter of necessity, and took away the
sustainment of resolve.  After all, he had no assurance that she loved
him: could any man pretend that he was simply glad in such a case to
have the suffering all on his own side?

That evening Will spent with the Lydgates; the next evening he was gone.

BOOK VII.

TWO TEMPTATIONS.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: Will is determined to see Dorothea one last time before he leaves Middlemarch, even though he already said his "final" farewell the last time he saw her. But her well-meaning brother-in-law, Sir James, doesn't like that Will is lingering around Middlemarch, and has heard that he's been spending an awful lot of alone time with Rosamond Lydgate. He wants to warn Dorothea that she really shouldn't see him again, since he's obviously got a thing for married women, and he gets Mrs. Cadwallader to pass on the gossip. Mrs. Cadwallader, of course, is only too happy to oblige. Dorothea doesn't want to believe it, and angrily leaves Fres***t to go to her uncle's at Tipton. When she arrives, Will is there . He tells her he's leaving for real this time, and that it's because of the codicil - it's an insult to his honor, and he can't stick around. She assures him that she never thought badly of him, codicil or no codicil. He comes pretty close to telling her he's in love with her, but only by saying that he'll have to live without hope, because he could never ever act on his feelings. That would make him look like he's only out for her money, and he's too proud and honorable for that. They say goodbye again, and Dorothea's happy, rather than sad - happy that she was right to believe in him, and happy that he loves her. She understands the motives that are driving him to leave, and she's sorry that she can't help him at all. He's less happy about the whole thing, of course, because he's not sure that she loves him.


prompt:
Chapter: These little things are great to little man.--GOLDSMITH.

"Have you seen much of your scientific phoenix, Lydgate, lately?" said
Mr. Toller at one of his Christmas dinner-parties, speaking to Mr.
Farebrother on his right hand.

"Not much, I am sorry to say," answered the Vicar, accustomed to parry
Mr. Toller's banter about his belief in the new medical light.  "I am
out of the way and he is too busy."

"Is he?  I am glad to hear it," said Dr. Minchin, with mingled suavity
and surprise.

"He gives a great deal of time to the New Hospital," said Mr.
Farebrother, who had his reasons for continuing the subject: "I hear of
that from my neighbor, Mrs. Casaubon, who goes there often.  She says
Lydgate is indefatigable, and is making a fine thing of Bulstrode's
institution.  He is preparing a new ward in case of the cholera coming
to us."

"And preparing theories of treatment to try on the patients, I
suppose," said Mr. Toller.

"Come, Toller, be candid," said Mr. Farebrother.  "You are too clever
not to see the good of a bold fresh mind in medicine, as well as in
everything else; and as to cholera, I fancy, none of you are very sure
what you ought to do.  If a man goes a little too far along a new road,
it is usually himself that he harms more than any one else."

"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."

Mr. Farebrother was aware that Lydgate was a proud man, but having very
little corresponding fibre in himself, and perhaps too little care
about personal dignity, except the dignity of not being mean or
foolish, he could hardly allow enough for the way in which Lydgate
shrank, as from a burn, from the utterance of any word about his
private affairs.  And soon after that conversation at Mr. Toller's, the
Vicar learned something which made him watch the more eagerly for an
opportunity of indirectly letting Lydgate know that if he wanted to
open himself about any difficulty there was a friendly ear ready.

The opportunity came at Mr. Vincy's, where, on New Year's Day, there
was a party, to which Mr. Farebrother was irresistibly invited, on the
plea that he must not forsake his old friends on the first new year of
his being a greater man, and Rector as well as Vicar.  And this party
was thoroughly friendly: all the ladies of the Farebrother family were
present; the Vincy children all dined at the table, and Fred had
persuaded his mother that if she did not invite Mary Garth, the
Farebrothers would regard it as a slight to themselves, Mary being
their particular friend.  Mary came, and Fred was in high spirits,
though his enjoyment was of a checkered kind--triumph that his mother
should see Mary's importance with the chief personages in the party
being much streaked with jealousy when Mr. Farebrother sat down by her.
Fred used to be much more easy about his own accomplishments in the
days when he had not begun to dread being "bowled out by Farebrother,"
and this terror was still before him.  Mrs. Vincy, in her fullest
matronly bloom, looked at Mary's little figure, rough wavy hair, and
visage quite without lilies and roses, and wondered; trying
unsuccessfully to fancy herself caring about Mary's appearance in
wedding clothes, or feeling complacency in grandchildren who would
"feature" the Garths.  However, the party was a merry one, and Mary was
particularly bright; being glad, for Fred's sake, that his friends were
getting kinder to her, and being also quite willing that they should
see how much she was valued by others whom they must admit to be judges.

Mr. Farebrother noticed that Lydgate seemed bored, and that Mr. Vincy
spoke as little as possible to his son-in-law. Rosamond was perfectly
graceful and calm, and only a subtle observation such as the Vicar had
not been roused to bestow on her would have perceived the total absence
of that interest in her husband's presence which a loving wife is sure
to betray, even if etiquette keeps her aloof from him.  When Lydgate
was taking part in the conversation, she never looked towards him any
more than if she had been a sculptured Psyche modelled to look another
way: and when, after being called out for an hour or two, he re-entered
the room, she seemed unconscious of the fact, which eighteen months
before would have had the effect of a numeral before ciphers.  In
reality, however, she was intensely aware of Lydgate's voice and
movements; and her pretty good-tempered air of unconsciousness was a
studied negation by which she satisfied her inward opposition to him
without compromise of propriety.  When the ladies were in the
drawing-room after Lydgate had been called away from the dessert, Mrs.
Farebrother, when Rosamond happened to be near her, said--"You have to
give up a great deal of your husband's society, Mrs. Lydgate."

"Yes, the life of a medical man is very arduous: especially when he is
so devoted to his profession as Mr. Lydgate is," said Rosamond, who was
standing, and moved easily away at the end of this correct little
speech.

"It is dreadfully dull for her when there is no company," said Mrs.
Vincy, who was seated at the old lady's side.  "I am sure I thought so
when Rosamond was ill, and I was staying with her.  You know, Mrs.
Farebrother, ours is a cheerful house.  I am of a cheerful disposition
myself, and Mr. Vincy always likes something to be going on.  That is
what Rosamond has been used to.  Very different from a husband out at
odd hours, and never knowing when he will come home, and of a close,
proud disposition, _I_ think"--indiscreet Mrs. Vincy did lower her tone
slightly with this parenthesis.  "But Rosamond always had an angel of a
temper; her brothers used very often not to please her, but she was
never the girl to show temper; from a baby she was always as good as
good, and with a complexion beyond anything.  But my children are all
good-tempered, thank God."

This was easily credible to any one looking at Mrs. Vincy as she threw
back her broad cap-strings, and smiled towards her three little girls,
aged from seven to eleven.  But in that smiling glance she was obliged
to include Mary Garth, whom the three girls had got into a corner to
make her tell them stories.  Mary was just finishing the delicious tale
of Rumpelstiltskin, which she had well by heart, because Letty was
never tired of communicating it to her ignorant elders from a favorite
red volume.  Louisa, Mrs. Vincy's darling, now ran to her with
wide-eyed serious excitement, crying, "Oh mamma, mamma, the little man
stamped so hard on the floor he couldn't get his leg out again!"

"Bless you, my cherub!" said mamma; "you shall tell me all about it
to-morrow. Go and listen!" and then, as her eyes followed Louisa back
towards the attractive corner, she thought that if Fred wished her to
invite Mary again she would make no objection, the children being so
pleased with her.

But presently the corner became still more animated, for Mr.
Farebrother came in, and seating himself behind Louisa, took her on his
lap; whereupon the girls all insisted that he must hear
Rumpelstiltskin, and Mary must tell it over again.  He insisted too,
and Mary, without fuss, began again in her neat fashion, with precisely
the same words as before.  Fred, who had also seated himself near,
would have felt unmixed triumph in Mary's effectiveness if Mr.
Farebrother had not been looking at her with evident admiration, while
he dramatized an intense interest in the tale to please the children.

"You will never care any more about my one-eyed giant, Loo," said Fred
at the end.

"Yes, I shall.  Tell about him now," said Louisa.

"Oh, I dare say; I am quite cut out.  Ask Mr. Farebrother."

"Yes," added Mary; "ask Mr. Farebrother to tell you about the ants
whose beautiful house was knocked down by a giant named Tom, and he
thought they didn't mind because he couldn't hear them cry, or see them
use their pocket-handkerchiefs."

"Please," said Louisa, looking up at the Vicar.

"No, no, I am a grave old parson.  If I try to draw a story out of my
bag a sermon comes instead.  Shall I preach you a sermon?" said he,
putting on his short-sighted glasses, and pursing up his lips.

"Yes," said Louisa, falteringly.

"Let me see, then.  Against cakes: how cakes are bad things, especially
if they are sweet and have plums in them."

Louisa took the affair rather seriously, and got down from the Vicar's
knee to go to Fred.

"Ah, I see it will not do to preach on New Year's Day," said Mr.
Farebrother, rising and walking away.  He had discovered of late that
Fred had become jealous of him, and also that he himself was not losing
his preference for Mary above all other women.

"A delightful young person is Miss Garth," said Mrs. Farebrother, who
had been watching her son's movements.

"Yes," said Mrs. Vincy, obliged to reply, as the old lady turned to her
expectantly.  "It is a pity she is not better-looking."

"I cannot say that," said Mrs. Farebrother, decisively.  "I like her
countenance.  We must not always ask for beauty, when a good God has
seen fit to make an excellent young woman without it.  I put good
manners first, and Miss Garth will know how to conduct herself in any
station."

The old lady was a little sharp in her tone, having a prospective
reference to Mary's becoming her daughter-in-law; for there was this
inconvenience in Mary's position with regard to Fred, that it was not
suitable to be made public, and hence the three ladies at Lowick
Parsonage were still hoping that Camden would choose Miss Garth.

New visitors entered, and the drawing-room was given up to music and
games, while whist-tables were prepared in the quiet room on the other
side of the hall.  Mr. Farebrother played a rubber to satisfy his
mother, who regarded her occasional whist as a protest against scandal
and novelty of opinion, in which light even a revoke had its dignity.
But at the end he got Mr. Chichely to take his place, and left the
room.  As he crossed the hall, Lydgate had just come in and was taking
off his great-coat.

"You are the man I was going to look for," said the Vicar; and instead
of entering the drawing-room, they walked along the hall and stood
against the fireplace, where the frosty air helped to make a glowing
bank.  "You see, I can leave the whist-table easily enough," he went
on, smiling at Lydgate, "now I don't play for money.  I owe that to
you, Mrs. Casaubon says."

"How?" said Lydgate, coldly.

"Ah, you didn't mean me to know it; I call that ungenerous reticence.
You should let a man have the pleasure of feeling that you have done
him a good turn.  I don't enter into some people's dislike of being
under an obligation: upon my word, I prefer being under an obligation
to everybody for behaving well to me."

"I can't tell what you mean," said Lydgate, "unless it is that I once
spoke of you to Mrs. Casaubon.  But I did not think that she would
break her promise not to mention that I had done so," said Lydgate,
leaning his back against the corner of the mantel-piece, and showing no
radiance in his face.

"It was Brooke who let it out, only the other day.  He paid me the
compliment of saying that he was very glad I had the living though you
had come across his tactics, and had praised me up as a lien and a
Tillotson, and that sort of thing, till Mrs. Casaubon would hear of no
one else."

"Oh, Brooke is such a leaky-minded fool," said Lydgate, contemptuously.

"Well, I was glad of the leakiness then.  I don't see why you shouldn't
like me to know that you wished to do me a service, my dear fellow.
And you certainly have done me one.  It's rather a strong check to
one's self-complacency to find how much of one's right doing depends on
not being in want of money.  A man will not be tempted to say the
Lord's Prayer backward to please the devil, if he doesn't want the
devil's services.  I have no need to hang on the smiles of chance now."

"I don't see that there's any money-getting without chance," said
Lydgate; "if a man gets it in a profession, it's pretty sure to come by
chance."

Mr. Farebrother thought he could account for this speech, in striking
contrast with Lydgate's former way of talking, as the perversity which
will often spring from the moodiness of a man ill at ease in his
affairs.  He answered in a tone of good-humored admission--

"Ah, there's enormous patience wanted with the way of the world.  But
it is the easier for a man to wait patiently when he has friends who
love him, and ask for nothing better than to help him through, so far
as it lies in their power."

"Oh yes," said Lydgate, in a careless tone, changing his attitude and
looking at his watch.  "People make much more of their difficulties
than they need to do."

He knew as distinctly as possible that this was an offer of help to
himself from Mr. Farebrother, and he could not bear it.  So strangely
determined are we mortals, that, after having been long gratified with
the sense that he had privately done the Vicar a service, the
suggestion that the Vicar discerned his need of a service in return
made him shrink into unconquerable reticence.  Besides, behind all
making of such offers what else must come?--that he should "mention his
case," imply that he wanted specific things.  At that moment, suicide
seemed easier.

Mr. Farebrother was too keen a man not to know the meaning of that
reply, and there was a certain massiveness in Lydgate's manner and
tone, corresponding with his physique, which if he repelled your
advances in the first instance seemed to put persuasive devices out of
question.

"What time are you?" said the Vicar, devouring his wounded feeling.

"After eleven," said Lydgate.  And they went into the drawing-room.

Q: Can you write an appropriate summary of the above paragraphs?
A:

completion: A group of Middlemarchers is at a dinner party, and the subject of Lydgate comes up . Minchin and Toller make snide remarks about how Lydgate uses his patients as guinea pigs for his new theories, and the other men grumble about how Lydgate "carried off" the prettiest girl in Middlemarch. The medical men hint that there's no way Lydgate's medical practice could support his style of life, and Farebrother begins to worry again about Lydgate's expenses. He goes to Middlemarch . Lydgate seems to be in an odd mood, but Farebrother can't get him to open up about his personal affairs. They are both invited to a New Year's Eve party at the Vincys' house, though, so Farebrother figures he'll get another chance to talk to his friend there. Even Mary Garth is invited, so Fred is in a great mood. Mary even impresses Mrs. Vincy by entertaining all the youngest Vincys with stories by the fire. Meanwhile, Mr. Farebrother goes to have a chat with Lydgate at the far end of the room. He opens by thanking Lydgate for recommending him to Dorothea, and then, as delicately as possible, hints that he'd be happy to help Lydgate in any way possible. But Lydgate's too proud to ask for financial help from anyone, and brushes Farebrother off almost rudely.