prompt:
Chapter: "To mercy, pity, peace, and love
         All pray in their distress,
     And to these virtues of delight,
         Return their thankfulness.
           .   .   .   .   .   .
     For Mercy has a human heart,
         Pity a human face;
     And Love, the human form divine;
         And Peace, the human dress.
                       --WILLIAM BLAKE: Songs of Innocence.

Some days later, Lydgate was riding to Lowick Manor, in consequence of
a summons from Dorothea.  The summons had not been unexpected, since it
had followed a letter from Mr. Bulstrode, in which he stated that he
had resumed his arrangements for quitting Middlemarch, and must remind
Lydgate of his previous communications about the Hospital, to the
purport of which he still adhered.  It had been his duty, before taking
further steps, to reopen the subject with Mrs. Casaubon, who now
wished, as before, to discuss the question with Lydgate.  "Your views
may possibly have undergone some change," wrote Mr. Bulstrode; "but, in
that case also, it is desirable that you should lay them before her."

Dorothea awaited his arrival with eager interest.  Though, in deference
to her masculine advisers, she had refrained from what Sir James had
called "interfering in this Bulstrode business," the hardship of
Lydgate's position was continually in her mind, and when Bulstrode
applied to her again about the hospital, she felt that the opportunity
was come to her which she had been hindered from hastening.  In her
luxurious home, wandering under the boughs of her own great trees, her
thought was going out over the lot of others, and her emotions were
imprisoned.  The idea of some active good within her reach, "haunted
her like a passion," and another's need having once come to her as a
distinct image, preoccupied her desire with the yearning to give
relief, and made her own ease tasteless.  She was full of confident
hope about this interview with Lydgate, never heeding what was said of
his personal reserve; never heeding that she was a very young woman.
Nothing could have seemed more irrelevant to Dorothea than insistence
on her youth and sex when she was moved to show her human fellowship.

As she sat waiting in the library, she could do nothing but live
through again all the past scenes which had brought Lydgate into her
memories.  They all owed their significance to her marriage and its
troubles--but no; there were two occasions in which the image of
Lydgate had come painfully in connection with his wife and some one
else.  The pain had been allayed for Dorothea, but it had left in her
an awakened conjecture as to what Lydgate's marriage might be to him, a
susceptibility to the slightest hint about Mrs. Lydgate.  These
thoughts were like a drama to her, and made her eyes bright, and gave
an attitude of suspense to her whole frame, though she was only looking
out from the brown library on to the turf and the bright green buds
which stood in relief against the dark evergreens.

When Lydgate came in, she was almost shocked at the change in his face,
which was strikingly perceptible to her who had not seen him for two
months.  It was not the change of emaciation, but that effect which
even young faces will very soon show from the persistent presence of
resentment and despondency.  Her cordial look, when she put out her
hand to him, softened his expression, but only with melancholy.

"I have wished very much to see you for a long while, Mr. Lydgate,"
said Dorothea when they were seated opposite each other; "but I put off
asking you to come until Mr. Bulstrode applied to me again about the
Hospital.  I know that the advantage of keeping the management of it
separate from that of the Infirmary depends on you, or, at least, on
the good which you are encouraged to hope for from having it under your
control.  And I am sure you will not refuse to tell me exactly what you
think."

"You want to decide whether you should give a generous support to the
Hospital," said Lydgate.  "I cannot conscientiously advise you to do it
in dependence on any activity of mine.  I may be obliged to leave the
town."

He spoke curtly, feeling the ache of despair as to his being able to
carry out any purpose that Rosamond had set her mind against.

"Not because there is no one to believe in you?" said Dorothea, pouring
out her words in clearness from a full heart.  "I know the unhappy
mistakes about you.  I knew them from the first moment to be mistakes.
You have never done anything vile.  You would not do anything
dishonorable."

It was the first assurance of belief in him that had fallen on
Lydgate's ears.  He drew a deep breath, and said, "Thank you." He could
say no more: it was something very new and strange in his life that
these few words of trust from a woman should be so much to him.

"I beseech you to tell me how everything was," said Dorothea,
fearlessly.  "I am sure that the truth would clear you."

Lydgate started up from his chair and went towards the window,
forgetting where he was.  He had so often gone over in his mind the
possibility of explaining everything without aggravating appearances
that would tell, perhaps unfairly, against Bulstrode, and had so often
decided against it--he had so often said to himself that his assertions
would not change people's impressions--that Dorothea's words sounded
like a temptation to do something which in his soberness he had
pronounced to be unreasonable.

"Tell me, pray," said Dorothea, with simple earnestness; "then we can
consult together.  It is wicked to let people think evil of any one
falsely, when it can be hindered."

Lydgate turned, remembering where he was, and saw Dorothea's face
looking up at him with a sweet trustful gravity.  The presence of a
noble nature, generous in its wishes, ardent in its charity, changes
the lights for us: we begin to see things again in their larger,
quieter masses, and to believe that we too can be seen and judged in
the wholeness of our character.  That influence was beginning to act on
Lydgate, who had for many days been seeing all life as one who is
dragged and struggling amid the throng.  He sat down again, and felt
that he was recovering his old self in the consciousness that he was
with one who believed in it.

"I don't want," he said, "to bear hard on Bulstrode, who has lent me
money of which I was in need--though I would rather have gone without
it now.  He is hunted down and miserable, and has only a poor thread of
life in him.  But I should like to tell you everything.  It will be a
comfort to me to speak where belief has gone beforehand, and where I
shall not seem to be offering assertions of my own honesty.  You will
feel what is fair to another, as you feel what is fair to me."

"Do trust me," said Dorothea; "I will not repeat anything without your
leave.  But at the very least, I could say that you have made all the
circumstances clear to me, and that I know you are not in any way
guilty.  Mr. Farebrother would believe me, and my uncle, and Sir James
Chettam.  Nay, there are persons in Middlemarch to whom I could go;
although they don't know much of me, they would believe me.  They would
know that I could have no other motive than truth and justice.  I would
take any pains to clear you.  I have very little to do.  There is
nothing better that I can do in the world."

Dorothea's voice, as she made this childlike picture of what she would
do, might have been almost taken as a proof that she could do it
effectively.  The searching tenderness of her woman's tones seemed made
for a defence against ready accusers.  Lydgate did not stay to think
that she was Quixotic: he gave himself up, for the first time in his
life, to the exquisite sense of leaning entirely on a generous
sympathy, without any check of proud reserve.  And he told her
everything, from the time when, under the pressure of his difficulties,
he unwillingly made his first application to Bulstrode; gradually, in
the relief of speaking, getting into a more thorough utterance of what
had gone on in his mind--entering fully into the fact that his
treatment of the patient was opposed to the dominant practice, into his
doubts at the last, his ideal of medical duty, and his uneasy
consciousness that the acceptance of the money had made some difference
in his private inclination and professional behavior, though not in his
fulfilment of any publicly recognized obligation.

"It has come to my knowledge since," he added, "that Hawley sent some
one to examine the housekeeper at Stone Court, and she said that she
gave the patient all the opium in the phial I left, as well as a good
deal of brandy.  But that would not have been opposed to ordinary
prescriptions, even of first-rate men.  The suspicions against me had
no hold there: they are grounded on the knowledge that I took money,
that Bulstrode had strong motives for wishing the man to die, and that
he gave me the money as a bribe to concur in some malpractices or other
against the patient--that in any case I accepted a bribe to hold my
tongue.  They are just the suspicions that cling the most obstinately,
because they lie in people's inclination and can never be disproved.
How my orders came to be disobeyed is a question to which I don't know
the answer.  It is still possible that Bulstrode was innocent of any
criminal intention--even possible that he had nothing to do with the
disobedience, and merely abstained from mentioning it.  But all that
has nothing to do with the public belief.  It is one of those cases on
which a man is condemned on the ground of his character--it is
believed that he has committed a crime in some undefined way, because
he had the motive for doing it; and Bulstrode's character has enveloped
me, because I took his money.  I am simply blighted--like a damaged
ear of corn--the business is done and can't be undone."

"Oh, it is hard!" said Dorothea.  "I understand the difficulty there is
in your vindicating yourself.  And that all this should have come to
you who had meant to lead a higher life than the common, and to find
out better ways--I cannot bear to rest in this as unchangeable.  I know
you meant that.  I remember what you said to me when you first spoke to
me about the hospital.  There is no sorrow I have thought more about
than that--to love what is great, and try to reach it, and yet to fail."

"Yes," said Lydgate, feeling that here he had found room for the full
meaning of his grief.  "I had some ambition.  I meant everything to be
different with me.  I thought I had more strength and mastery.  But the
most terrible obstacles are such as nobody can see except oneself."

"Suppose," said Dorothea, meditatively,--"suppose we kept on the
Hospital according to the present plan, and you stayed here though only
with the friendship and support of a few, the evil feeling towards you
would gradually die out; there would come opportunities in which people
would be forced to acknowledge that they had been unjust to you,
because they would see that your purposes were pure.  You may still win
a great fame like the Louis and Laennec I have heard you speak of, and
we shall all be proud of you," she ended, with a smile.

"That might do if I had my old trust in myself," said Lydgate,
mournfully.  "Nothing galls me more than the notion of turning round
and running away before this slander, leaving it unchecked behind me.
Still, I can't ask any one to put a great deal of money into a plan
which depends on me."

"It would be quite worth my while," said Dorothea, simply.  "Only
think.  I am very uncomfortable with my money, because they tell me I
have too little for any great scheme of the sort I like best, and yet I
have too much.  I don't know what to do.  I have seven hundred a-year
of my own fortune, and nineteen hundred a-year that Mr. Casaubon left
me, and between three and four thousand of ready money in the bank.  I
wished to raise money and pay it off gradually out of my income which I
don't want, to buy land with and found a village which should be a
school of industry; but Sir James and my uncle have convinced me that
the risk would be too great.  So you see that what I should most
rejoice at would be to have something good to do with my money: I
should like it to make other people's lives better to them.  It makes
me very uneasy--coming all to me who don't want it."

A smile broke through the gloom of Lydgate's face.  The childlike
grave-eyed earnestness with which Dorothea said all this was
irresistible--blent into an adorable whole with her ready understanding
of high experience.  (Of lower experience such as plays a great part in
the world, poor Mrs. Casaubon had a very blurred shortsighted
knowledge, little helped by her imagination.) But she took the smile as
encouragement of her plan.

"I think you see now that you spoke too scrupulously," she said, in a
tone of persuasion.  "The hospital would be one good; and making your
life quite whole and well again would be another."

Lydgate's smile had died away.  "You have the goodness as well as the
money to do all that; if it could be done," he said.  "But--"

He hesitated a little while, looking vaguely towards the window; and
she sat in silent expectation.  At last he turned towards her and said
impetuously--

"Why should I not tell you?--you know what sort of bond marriage is.
You will understand everything."

Dorothea felt her heart beginning to beat faster.  Had he that sorrow
too?  But she feared to say any word, and he went on immediately.

"It is impossible for me now to do anything--to take any step without
considering my wife's happiness.  The thing that I might like to do if
I were alone, is become impossible to me.  I can't see her miserable.
She married me without knowing what she was going into, and it might
have been better for her if she had not married me."

"I know, I know--you could not give her pain, if you were not obliged
to do it," said Dorothea, with keen memory of her own life.

"And she has set her mind against staying.  She wishes to go.  The
troubles she has had here have wearied her," said Lydgate, breaking off
again, lest he should say too much.

"But when she saw the good that might come of staying--" said Dorothea,
remonstrantly, looking at Lydgate as if he had forgotten the reasons
which had just been considered.  He did not speak immediately.

"She would not see it," he said at last, curtly, feeling at first that
this statement must do without explanation.  "And, indeed, I have lost
all spirit about carrying on my life here."  He paused a moment and
then, following the impulse to let Dorothea see deeper into the
difficulty of his life, he said, "The fact is, this trouble has come
upon her confusedly.  We have not been able to speak to each other
about it.  I am not sure what is in her mind about it: she may fear
that I have really done something base.  It is my fault; I ought to be
more open.  But I have been suffering cruelly."

"May I go and see her?" said Dorothea, eagerly.  "Would she accept my
sympathy?  I would tell her that you have not been blamable before any
one's judgment but your own.  I would tell her that you shall be
cleared in every fair mind.  I would cheer her heart.  Will you ask her
if I may go to see her?  I did see her once."

"I am sure you may," said Lydgate, seizing the proposition with some
hope.  "She would feel honored--cheered, I think, by the proof that you
at least have some respect for me.  I will not speak to her about your
coming--that she may not connect it with my wishes at all.  I know very
well that I ought not to have left anything to be told her by others,
but--"

He broke off, and there was a moment's silence.  Dorothea refrained
from saying what was in her mind--how well she knew that there might be
invisible barriers to speech between husband and wife.  This was a
point on which even sympathy might make a wound.  She returned to the
more outward aspect of Lydgate's position, saying cheerfully--

"And if Mrs. Lydgate knew that there were friends who would believe in
you and support you, she might then be glad that you should stay in
your place and recover your hopes--and do what you meant to do.
Perhaps then you would see that it was right to agree with what I
proposed about your continuing at the Hospital.  Surely you would, if
you still have faith in it as a means of making your knowledge useful?"

Lydgate did not answer, and she saw that he was debating with himself.

"You need not decide immediately," she said, gently.  "A few days hence
it will be early enough for me to send my answer to Mr. Bulstrode."

Lydgate still waited, but at last turned to speak in his most decisive
tones.

"No; I prefer that there should be no interval left for wavering.  I am
no longer sure enough of myself--I mean of what it would be possible
for me to do under the changed circumstances of my life.  It would be
dishonorable to let others engage themselves to anything serious in
dependence on me.  I might be obliged to go away after all; I see
little chance of anything else.  The whole thing is too problematic; I
cannot consent to be the cause of your goodness being wasted.  No--let
the new Hospital be joined with the old Infirmary, and everything go on
as it might have done if I had never come.  I have kept a valuable
register since I have been there; I shall send it to a man who will
make use of it," he ended bitterly.  "I can think of nothing for a long
while but getting an income."

"It hurts me very much to hear you speak so hopelessly," said Dorothea.
"It would be a happiness to your friends, who believe in your future,
in your power to do great things, if you would let them save you from
that.  Think how much money I have; it would be like taking a burthen
from me if you took some of it every year till you got free from this
fettering want of income.  Why should not people do these things?  It
is so difficult to make shares at all even.  This is one way."

"God bless you, Mrs. Casaubon!" said Lydgate, rising as if with the
same impulse that made his words energetic, and resting his arm on the
back of the great leather chair he had been sitting in.  "It is good
that you should have such feelings.  But I am not the man who ought to
allow himself to benefit by them.  I have not given guarantees enough.
I must not at least sink into the degradation of being pensioned for
work that I never achieved.  It is very clear to me that I must not
count on anything else than getting away from Middlemarch as soon as I
can manage it.  I should not be able for a long while, at the very
best, to get an income here, and--and it is easier to make necessary
changes in a new place.  I must do as other men do, and think what will
please the world and bring in money; look for a little opening in the
London crowd, and push myself; set up in a watering-place, or go to
some southern town where there are plenty of idle English, and get
myself puffed,--that is the sort of shell I must creep into and try to
keep my soul alive in."

"Now that is not brave," said Dorothea,--"to give up the fight."

"No, it is not brave," said Lydgate, "but if a man is afraid of
creeping paralysis?"  Then, in another tone, "Yet you have made a great
difference in my courage by believing in me.  Everything seems more
bearable since I have talked to you; and if you can clear me in a few
other minds, especially in Farebrother's, I shall be deeply grateful.
The point I wish you not to mention is the fact of disobedience to my
orders.  That would soon get distorted.  After all, there is no
evidence for me but people's opinion of me beforehand.  You can only
repeat my own report of myself."

"Mr. Farebrother will believe--others will believe," said Dorothea.  "I
can say of you what will make it stupidity to suppose that you would be
bribed to do a wickedness."

"I don't know," said Lydgate, with something like a groan in his voice.
"I have not taken a bribe yet.  But there is a pale shade of bribery
which is sometimes called prosperity.  You will do me another great
kindness, then, and come to see my wife?"

"Yes, I will.  I remember how pretty she is," said Dorothea, into whose
mind every impression about Rosamond had cut deep.  "I hope she will
like me."

As Lydgate rode away, he thought, "This young creature has a heart
large enough for the Virgin Mary.  She evidently thinks nothing of her
own future, and would pledge away half her income at once, as if she
wanted nothing for herself but a chair to sit in from which she can
look down with those clear eyes at the poor mortals who pray to her.
She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before--a fountain of
friendship towards men--a man can make a friend of her.  Casaubon must
have raised some heroic hallucination in her.  I wonder if she could
have any other sort of passion for a man?  Ladislaw?--there was
certainly an unusual feeling between them.  And Casaubon must have had
a notion of it.  Well--her love might help a man more than her money."

Dorothea on her side had immediately formed a plan of relieving Lydgate
from his obligation to Bulstrode, which she felt sure was a part,
though small, of the galling pressure he had to bear.  She sat down at
once under the inspiration of their interview, and wrote a brief note,
in which she pleaded that she had more claim than Mr. Bulstrode had to
the satisfaction of providing the money which had been serviceable to
Lydgate--that it would be unkind in Lydgate not to grant her the
position of being his helper in this small matter, the favor being
entirely to her who had so little that was plainly marked out for her
to do with her superfluous money.  He might call her a creditor or by
any other name if it did but imply that he granted her request.  She
enclosed a check for a thousand pounds, and determined to take the
letter with her the next day when she went to see Rosamond.

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

completion: Dorothea summons Lydgate to Lowick, apparently in connection with Bulstrodes withdrawal of support from the new hospital. Now that she has an opportunity she is determined to back Lydgate fully and find out the facts from him. She does not allow her own inexperience or the talk of his personal reserve to come in her way. She is also sympathetic to him, as she fear his marriage may be as unsatisfactory as her own has been. Dorothea announces her intention to take on all of Bulstrodes commitments to the new hospital. At this Lydgate warns her he may be obliged to leave the town. This gives Dorothea an opening and she overwhelms him with her sympathy and faith in him. He gives up his reserve for the first person, who has offered him unconditional loyalty since the scandal broke, and gets relief form telling her of the unvarnished facts and doubts. Dorothea accepts his account. She is sure that Farebrother, Chettam, Brooke will accept his innocence in the matter. She maintains her offer to the new hospital and offers him financial support while he needs it. Lydgate refuses the last, saying he is unworthy of it. But he still hesitates to commit himself to staying on, on account of his wifes welfare. Dorothea then insists she will meet his wife and reassure her about her support for him. Lydgate leaves, feeling Dorothea "has a heart large enough for the Virgin Mary. She seems to have what I never saw in any woman before-a fountain of friendship toward men." Dorothea decides, on his departure to relieve him of his debt to Bulstrode. She writes out a check for one thousand pounds.


prompt:
Chapter: "And thus thy fall hath left a kind of blot,
     To mark the full-fraught man and best indued
     With some suspicion."
                                         --Henry V.

The next day Lydgate had to go to Brassing, and told Rosamond that he
should be away until the evening.  Of late she had never gone beyond
her own house and garden, except to church, and once to see her papa,
to whom she said, "If Tertius goes away, you will help us to move, will
you not, papa?  I suppose we shall have very little money.  I am sure I
hope some one will help us." And Mr. Vincy had said, "Yes, child, I
don't mind a hundred or two.  I can see the end of that."  With these
exceptions she had sat at home in languid melancholy and suspense,
fixing her mind on Will Ladislaw's coming as the one point of hope and
interest, and associating this with some new urgency on Lydgate to make
immediate arrangements for leaving Middlemarch and going to London,
till she felt assured that the coming would be a potent cause of the
going, without at all seeing how.  This way of establishing sequences
is too common to be fairly regarded as a peculiar folly in Rosamond.
And it is precisely this sort of sequence which causes the greatest
shock when it is sundered: for to see how an effect may be produced is
often to see possible missings and checks; but to see nothing except
the desirable cause, and close upon it the desirable effect, rids us of
doubt and makes our minds strongly intuitive.  That was the process
going on in poor Rosamond, while she arranged all objects around her
with the same nicety as ever, only with more slowness--or sat down to
the piano, meaning to play, and then desisting, yet lingering on the
music stool with her white fingers suspended on the wooden front, and
looking before her in dreamy ennui.  Her melancholy had become so
marked that Lydgate felt a strange timidity before it, as a perpetual
silent reproach, and the strong man, mastered by his keen sensibilities
towards this fair fragile creature whose life he seemed somehow to have
bruised, shrank from her look, and sometimes started at her approach,
fear of her and fear for her rushing in only the more forcibly after it
had been momentarily expelled by exasperation.

But this morning Rosamond descended from her room upstairs--where she
sometimes sat the whole day when Lydgate was out--equipped for a walk
in the town.  She had a letter to post--a letter addressed to Mr.
Ladislaw and written with charming discretion, but intended to hasten
his arrival by a hint of trouble.  The servant-maid, their sole
house-servant now, noticed her coming down-stairs in her walking dress,
and thought "there never did anybody look so pretty in a bonnet poor
thing."

Meanwhile Dorothea's mind was filled with her project of going to
Rosamond, and with the many thoughts, both of the past and the probable
future, which gathered round the idea of that visit.  Until yesterday
when Lydgate had opened to her a glimpse of some trouble in his married
life, the image of Mrs. Lydgate had always been associated for her with
that of Will Ladislaw.  Even in her most uneasy moments--even when she
had been agitated by Mrs. Cadwallader's painfully graphic report of
gossip--her effort, nay, her strongest impulsive prompting, had been
towards the vindication of Will from any sullying surmises; and when,
in her meeting with him afterwards, she had at first interpreted his
words as a probable allusion to a feeling towards Mrs. Lydgate which he
was determined to cut himself off from indulging, she had had a quick,
sad, excusing vision of the charm there might be in his constant
opportunities of companionship with that fair creature, who most likely
shared his other tastes as she evidently did his delight in music.  But
there had followed his parting words--the few passionate words in
which he had implied that she herself was the object of whom his love
held him in dread, that it was his love for her only which he was
resolved not to declare but to carry away into banishment.  From the
time of that parting, Dorothea, believing in Will's love for her,
believing with a proud delight in his delicate sense of honor and his
determination that no one should impeach him justly, felt her heart
quite at rest as to the regard he might have for Mrs. Lydgate.  She was
sure that the regard was blameless.

There are natures in which, if they love us, we are conscious of having
a sort of baptism and consecration: they bind us over to rectitude and
purity by their pure belief about us; and our sins become that worst
kind of sacrilege which tears down the invisible altar of trust.  "If
you are not good, none is good"--those little words may give a
terrific meaning to responsibility, may hold a vitriolic intensity for
remorse.

Dorothea's nature was of that kind: her own passionate faults lay along
the easily counted open channels of her ardent character; and while she
was full of pity for the visible mistakes of others, she had not yet
any material within her experience for subtle constructions and
suspicions of hidden wrong.  But that simplicity of hers, holding up an
ideal for others in her believing conception of them, was one of the
great powers of her womanhood.  And it had from the first acted
strongly on Will Ladislaw.  He felt, when he parted from her, that the
brief words by which he had tried to convey to her his feeling about
herself and the division which her fortune made between them, would
only profit by their brevity when Dorothea had to interpret them: he
felt that in her mind he had found his highest estimate.

And he was right there.  In the months since their parting Dorothea had
felt a delicious though sad repose in their relation to each other, as
one which was inwardly whole and without blemish.  She had an active
force of antagonism within her, when the antagonism turned on the
defence either of plans or persons that she believed in; and the wrongs
which she felt that Will had received from her husband, and the
external conditions which to others were grounds for slighting him,
only gave the more tenacity to her affection and admiring judgment.
And now with the disclosures about Bulstrode had come another fact
affecting Will's social position, which roused afresh Dorothea's inward
resistance to what was said about him in that part of her world which
lay within park palings.

"Young Ladislaw the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker" was a phrase
which had entered emphatically into the dialogues about the Bulstrode
business, at Lowick, Tipton, and Freshitt, and was a worse kind of
placard on poor Will's back than the "Italian with white mice."
Upright Sir James Chettam was convinced that his own satisfaction was
righteous when he thought with some complacency that here was an added
league to that mountainous distance between Ladislaw and Dorothea,
which enabled him to dismiss any anxiety in that direction as too
absurd.  And perhaps there had been some pleasure in pointing Mr.
Brooke's attention to this ugly bit of Ladislaw's genealogy, as a fresh
candle for him to see his own folly by.  Dorothea had observed the
animus with which Will's part in the painful story had been recalled
more than once; but she had uttered no word, being checked now, as she
had not been formerly in speaking of Will, by the consciousness of a
deeper relation between them which must always remain in consecrated
secrecy.  But her silence shrouded her resistant emotion into a more
thorough glow; and this misfortune in Will's lot which, it seemed,
others were wishing to fling at his back as an opprobrium, only gave
something more of enthusiasm to her clinging thought.

She entertained no visions of their ever coming into nearer union, and
yet she had taken no posture of renunciation.  She had accepted her
whole relation to Will very simply as part of her marriage sorrows, and
would have thought it very sinful in her to keep up an inward wail
because she was not completely happy, being rather disposed to dwell on
the superfluities of her lot.  She could bear that the chief pleasures
of her tenderness should lie in memory, and the idea of marriage came
to her solely as a repulsive proposition from some suitor of whom she
at present knew nothing, but whose merits, as seen by her friends,
would be a source of torment to her:--"somebody who will manage your
property for you, my dear," was Mr. Brooke's attractive suggestion of
suitable characteristics.  "I should like to manage it myself, if I
knew what to do with it," said Dorothea.  No--she adhered to her
declaration that she would never be married again, and in the long
valley of her life which looked so flat and empty of waymarks, guidance
would come as she walked along the road, and saw her fellow-passengers
by the way.

This habitual state of feeling about Will Ladislaw had been strong in
all her waking hours since she had proposed to pay a visit to Mrs.
Lydgate, making a sort of background against which she saw Rosamond's
figure presented to her without hindrances to her interest and
compassion.  There was evidently some mental separation, some barrier
to complete confidence which had arisen between this wife and the
husband who had yet made her happiness a law to him.  That was a
trouble which no third person must directly touch.  But Dorothea
thought with deep pity of the loneliness which must have come upon
Rosamond from the suspicions cast on her husband; and there would
surely be help in the manifestation of respect for Lydgate and sympathy
with her.

"I shall talk to her about her husband," thought Dorothea, as she was
being driven towards the town.  The clear spring morning, the scent of
the moist earth, the fresh leaves just showing their creased-up wealth
of greenery from out their half-opened sheaths, seemed part of the
cheerfulness she was feeling from a long conversation with Mr.
Farebrother, who had joyfully accepted the justifying explanation of
Lydgate's conduct.  "I shall take Mrs. Lydgate good news, and perhaps
she will like to talk to me and make a friend of me."

Dorothea had another errand in Lowick Gate: it was about a new
fine-toned bell for the school-house, and as she had to get out of her
carriage very near to Lydgate's, she walked thither across the street,
having told the coachman to wait for some packages.  The street door
was open, and the servant was taking the opportunity of looking out at
the carriage which was pausing within sight when it became apparent to
her that the lady who "belonged to it" was coming towards her.

"Is Mrs. Lydgate at home?" said Dorothea.

"I'm not sure, my lady; I'll see, if you'll please to walk in," said
Martha, a little confused on the score of her kitchen apron, but
collected enough to be sure that "mum" was not the right title for this
queenly young widow with a carriage and pair.  "Will you please to walk
in, and I'll go and see."

"Say that I am Mrs. Casaubon," said Dorothea, as Martha moved forward
intending to show her into the drawing-room and then to go up-stairs to
see if Rosamond had returned from her walk.

They crossed the broader part of the entrance-hall, and turned up the
passage which led to the garden.  The drawing-room door was unlatched,
and Martha, pushing it without looking into the room, waited for Mrs.
Casaubon to enter and then turned away, the door having swung open and
swung back again without noise.

Dorothea had less of outward vision than usual this morning, being
filled with images of things as they had been and were going to be.
She found herself on the other side of the door without seeing anything
remarkable, but immediately she heard a voice speaking in low tones
which startled her as with a sense of dreaming in daylight, and
advancing unconsciously a step or two beyond the projecting slab of a
bookcase, she saw, in the terrible illumination of a certainty which
filled up all outlines, something which made her pause, motionless,
without self-possession enough to speak.

Seated with his back towards her on a sofa which stood against the wall
on a line with the door by which she had entered, she saw Will
Ladislaw: close by him and turned towards him with a flushed
tearfulness which gave a new brilliancy to her face sat Rosamond, her
bonnet hanging back, while Will leaning towards her clasped both her
upraised hands in his and spoke with low-toned fervor.

Rosamond in her agitated absorption had not noticed the silently
advancing figure; but when Dorothea, after the first immeasurable
instant of this vision, moved confusedly backward and found herself
impeded by some piece of furniture, Rosamond was suddenly aware of her
presence, and with a spasmodic movement snatched away her hands and
rose, looking at Dorothea who was necessarily arrested.  Will Ladislaw,
starting up, looked round also, and meeting Dorothea's eyes with a new
lightning in them, seemed changing to marble: But she immediately
turned them away from him to Rosamond and said in a firm voice--

"Excuse me, Mrs. Lydgate, the servant did not know that you were here.
I called to deliver an important letter for Mr. Lydgate, which I wished
to put into your own hands."

She laid down the letter on the small table which had checked her
retreat, and then including Rosamond and Will in one distant glance and
bow, she went quickly out of the room, meeting in the passage the
surprised Martha, who said she was sorry the mistress was not at home,
and then showed the strange lady out with an inward reflection that
grand people were probably more impatient than others.

Dorothea walked across the street with her most elastic step and was
quickly in her carriage again.

"Drive on to Freshitt Hall," she said to the coachman, and any one
looking at her might have thought that though she was paler than usual
she was never animated by a more self-possessed energy.  And that was
really her experience.  It was as if she had drunk a great draught of
scorn that stimulated her beyond the susceptibility to other feelings.
She had seen something so far below her belief, that her emotions
rushed back from it and made an excited throng without an object.  She
needed something active to turn her excitement out upon.  She felt
power to walk and work for a day, without meat or drink.  And she would
carry out the purpose with which she had started in the morning, of
going to Freshitt and Tipton to tell Sir James and her uncle all that
she wished them to know about Lydgate, whose married loneliness under
his trial now presented itself to her with new significance, and made
her more ardent in readiness to be his champion.  She had never felt
anything like this triumphant power of indignation in the struggle of
her married life, in which there had always been a quickly subduing
pang; and she took it as a sign of new strength.

"Dodo, how very bright your eyes are!" said Celia, when Sir James was
gone out of the room.  "And you don't see anything you look at, Arthur
or anything.  You are going to do something uncomfortable, I know.  Is
it all about Mr. Lydgate, or has something else happened?" Celia had
been used to watch her sister with expectation.

"Yes, dear, a great many things have happened," said Dodo, in her full
tones.

"I wonder what," said Celia, folding her arms cozily and leaning
forward upon them.

"Oh, all the troubles of all people on the face of the earth," said
Dorothea, lifting her arms to the back of her head.

"Dear me, Dodo, are you going to have a scheme for them?" said Celia, a
little uneasy at this Hamlet-like raving.

But Sir James came in again, ready to accompany Dorothea to the Grange,
and she finished her expedition well, not swerving in her resolution
until she descended at her own door.

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

completion: Rosamond is steeped in melancholy, gentle, and abstracted, so that Lydgate feared her. The only cheerful thing in her life seemed to be the arrival of Ladislaw. Somehow she linked his arrival with an attachment to herself personally. She is also hopeful that after he came, she could persuade her husband to quit Middlemarch, and get her fathers help in resettling in the city. Dorothea also thought of Ladislaw, more so since Bulstrodes scandal, when people began to speak of him, as "the grandson of a thieving Jew pawnbroker." Since his last angry statement when leaving her, she has been confident of his love for her. She cherishes that, though with no thought of marriage, and the public disapproval arouses her sympathy afresh. That morning, she calls on Rosamond as promised, taking along the check for Lydgate. The maid shows her into the drawing room. Leaving Rosamond there, the maid goes in search of her mistress. She stumbles in a weeping Rosamond, with Will Ladislaw clasping her hands and speaking to her in a low tone. Stunned, Dorothea formally hands over the check and hurries away, leaving the other two frozen with shock.


prompt:
Chapter: "Would it were yesterday and I i' the grave,
     With her sweet faith above for monument"

Rosamond and Will stood motionless--they did not know how long--he
looking towards the spot where Dorothea had stood, and she looking
towards him with doubt.  It seemed an endless time to Rosamond, in
whose inmost soul there was hardly so much annoyance as gratification
from what had just happened.  Shallow natures dream of an easy sway
over the emotions of others, trusting implicitly in their own petty
magic to turn the deepest streams, and confident, by pretty gestures
and remarks, of making the thing that is not as though it were.  She
knew that Will had received a severe blow, but she had been little used
to imagining other people's states of mind except as a material cut
into shape by her own wishes; and she believed in her own power to
soothe or subdue.  Even Tertius, that most perverse of men, was always
subdued in the long-run: events had been obstinate, but still Rosamond
would have said now, as she did before her marriage, that she never
gave up what she had set her mind on.

She put out her arm and laid the tips of her fingers on Will's
coat-sleeve.

"Don't touch me!" he said, with an utterance like the cut of a lash,
darting from her, and changing from pink to white and back again, as if
his whole frame were tingling with the pain of the sting.  He wheeled
round to the other side of the room and stood opposite to her, with the
tips of his fingers in his pockets and his head thrown back, looking
fiercely not at Rosamond but at a point a few inches away from her.

She was keenly offended, but the Signs she made of this were such as
only Lydgate was used to interpret.  She became suddenly quiet and
seated herself, untying her hanging bonnet and laying it down with her
shawl.  Her little hands which she folded before her were very cold.

It would have been safer for Will in the first instance to have taken
up his hat and gone away; but he had felt no impulse to do this; on the
contrary, he had a horrible inclination to stay and shatter Rosamond
with his anger.  It seemed as impossible to bear the fatality she had
drawn down on him without venting his fury as it would be to a panther
to bear the javelin-wound without springing and biting.  And yet--how
could he tell a woman that he was ready to curse her?  He was fuming
under a repressive law which he was forced to acknowledge: he was
dangerously poised, and Rosamond's voice now brought the decisive
vibration.  In flute-like tones of sarcasm she said--

"You can easily go after Mrs. Casaubon and explain your preference."

"Go after her!" he burst out, with a sharp edge in his voice.  "Do you
think she would turn to look at me, or value any word I ever uttered to
her again at more than a dirty feather?--Explain!  How can a man
explain at the expense of a woman?"

"You can tell her what you please," said Rosamond with more tremor.

"Do you suppose she would like me better for sacrificing you?  She is
not a woman to be flattered because I made myself despicable--to
believe that I must be true to her because I was a dastard to you."

He began to move about with the restlessness of a wild animal that sees
prey but cannot reach it.  Presently he burst out again--

"I had no hope before--not much--of anything better to come.  But I had
one certainty--that she believed in me.  Whatever people had said or
done about me, she believed in me.--That's gone!  She'll never again
think me anything but a paltry pretence--too nice to take heaven
except upon flattering conditions, and yet selling myself for any
devil's change by the sly.  She'll think of me as an incarnate insult
to her, from the first moment we--"

Will stopped as if he had found himself grasping something that must
not be thrown and shattered.  He found another vent for his rage by
snatching up Rosamond's words again, as if they were reptiles to be
throttled and flung off.

"Explain!  Tell a man to explain how he dropped into hell!  Explain my
preference!  I never had a _preference_ for her, any more than I have a
preference for breathing.  No other woman exists by the side of her.  I
would rather touch her hand if it were dead, than I would touch any
other woman's living."

Rosamond, while these poisoned weapons were being hurled at her, was
almost losing the sense of her identity, and seemed to be waking into
some new terrible existence.  She had no sense of chill resolute
repulsion, of reticent self-justification such as she had known under
Lydgate's most stormy displeasure: all her sensibility was turned into
a bewildering novelty of pain; she felt a new terrified recoil under a
lash never experienced before.  What another nature felt in opposition
to her own was being burnt and bitten into her consciousness.  When
Will had ceased to speak she had become an image of sickened misery:
her lips were pale, and her eyes had a tearless dismay in them.  If it
had been Tertius who stood opposite to her, that look of misery would
have been a pang to him, and he would have sunk by her side to comfort
her, with that strong-armed comfort which, she had often held very
cheap.

Let it be forgiven to Will that he had no such movement of pity.  He
had felt no bond beforehand to this woman who had spoiled the ideal
treasure of his life, and he held himself blameless.  He knew that he
was cruel, but he had no relenting in him yet.

After he had done speaking, he still moved about, half in absence of
mind, and Rosamond sat perfectly still.  At length Will, seeming to
bethink himself, took up his hat, yet stood some moments irresolute.
He had spoken to her in a way that made a phrase of common politeness
difficult to utter; and yet, now that he had come to the point of going
away from her without further speech, he shrank from it as a brutality;
he felt checked and stultified in his anger.  He walked towards the
mantel-piece and leaned his arm on it, and waited in silence for--he
hardly knew what.  The vindictive fire was still burning in him, and he
could utter no word of retractation; but it was nevertheless in his
mind that having come back to this hearth where he had enjoyed a
caressing friendship he had found calamity seated there--he had had
suddenly revealed to him a trouble that lay outside the home as well as
within it.  And what seemed a foreboding was pressing upon him as with
slow pincers:--that his life might come to be enslaved by this helpless
woman who had thrown herself upon him in the dreary sadness of her
heart.  But he was in gloomy rebellion against the fact that his quick
apprehensiveness foreshadowed to him, and when his eyes fell on
Rosamond's blighted face it seemed to him that he was the more pitiable
of the two; for pain must enter into its glorified life of memory
before it can turn into compassion.

And so they remained for many minutes, opposite each other, far apart,
in silence; Will's face still possessed by a mute rage, and Rosamond's
by a mute misery.  The poor thing had no force to fling out any passion
in return; the terrible collapse of the illusion towards which all her
hope had been strained was a stroke which had too thoroughly shaken
her: her little world was in ruins, and she felt herself tottering in
the midst as a lonely bewildered consciousness.

Will wished that she would speak and bring some mitigating shadow
across his own cruel speech, which seemed to stand staring at them both
in mockery of any attempt at revived fellowship.  But she said nothing,
and at last with a desperate effort over himself, he asked, "Shall I
come in and see Lydgate this evening?"

"If you like," Rosamond answered, just audibly.

And then Will went out of the house, Martha never knowing that he had
been in.

After he was gone, Rosamond tried to get up from her seat, but fell
back fainting.  When she came to herself again, she felt too ill to
make the exertion of rising to ring the bell, and she remained helpless
until the girl, surprised at her long absence, thought for the first
time of looking for her in all the down-stairs rooms.  Rosamond said
that she had felt suddenly sick and faint, and wanted to be helped
up-stairs. When there she threw herself on the bed with her clothes on,
and lay in apparent torpor, as she had done once before on a memorable
day of grief.

Lydgate came home earlier than he had expected, about half-past five,
and found her there.  The perception that she was ill threw every other
thought into the background.  When he felt her pulse, her eyes rested
on him with more persistence than they had done for a long while, as if
she felt some content that he was there.  He perceived the difference
in a moment, and seating himself by her put his arm gently under her,
and bending over her said, "My poor Rosamond! has something agitated
you?"  Clinging to him she fell into hysterical sobbings and cries, and
for the next hour he did nothing but soothe and tend her.  He imagined
that Dorothea had been to see her, and that all this effect on her
nervous system, which evidently involved some new turning towards
himself, was due to the excitement of the new impressions which that
visit had raised.

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

completion: Will looks at Rosamond angrily, who by throwing herself at him in her misery, ended all his long-held hopes. He lashes out at her, oblivious to her hurt and shock. She feels his remark about Dorothea "No other woman exists by the side of her" to be a "poisoned weapon" hurled at her. For the first time, she is made to feel the strong emotions of another person beside herself. After his forceful outburst, Will is unable to make polite remarks and walks out, after saying he will call on Lydgate. When Lydgate returns, he finds her pathetic and ill in bed. He assumes that Dorotheas visit has stirred her emotionally and made her turn towards him.


prompt:
Chapter: "Now, I saw in my dream, that just as they had ended their
    talk, they drew nigh to a very miry slough, that was in the
    midst of the plain; and they, being heedless, did both fall
    suddenly into the bog. The name of the slough was
    Despond."--BUNYAN.

When Rosamond was quiet, and Lydgate had left her, hoping that she
might soon sleep under the effect of an anodyne, he went into the
drawing-room to fetch a book which he had left there, meaning to spend
the evening in his work-room, and he saw on the table Dorothea's letter
addressed to him.  He had not ventured to ask Rosamond if Mrs. Casaubon
had called, but the reading of this letter assured him of the fact, for
Dorothea mentioned that it was to be carried by herself.

When Will Ladislaw came in a little later Lydgate met him with a
surprise which made it clear that he had not been told of the earlier
visit, and Will could not say, "Did not Mrs. Lydgate tell you that I
came this morning?"

"Poor Rosamond is ill," Lydgate added immediately on his greeting.

"Not seriously, I hope," said Will.

"No--only a slight nervous shock--the effect of some agitation.  She
has been overwrought lately.  The truth is, Ladislaw, I am an unlucky
devil.  We have gone through several rounds of purgatory since you
left, and I have lately got on to a worse ledge of it than ever.  I
suppose you are only just come down--you look rather battered--you
have not been long enough in the town to hear anything?"

"I travelled all night and got to the White Hart at eight o'clock this
morning. I have been shutting myself up and resting," said Will,
feeling himself a sneak, but seeing no alternative to this evasion.

And then he heard Lydgate's account of the troubles which Rosamond had
already depicted to him in her way.  She had not mentioned the fact of
Will's name being connected with the public story--this detail not
immediately affecting her--and he now heard it for the first time.

"I thought it better to tell you that your name is mixed up with the
disclosures," said Lydgate, who could understand better than most men
how Ladislaw might be stung by the revelation.  "You will be sure to
hear it as soon as you turn out into the town.  I suppose it is true
that Raffles spoke to you."

"Yes," said Will, sardonically.  "I shall be fortunate if gossip does
not make me the most disreputable person in the whole affair.  I should
think the latest version must be, that I plotted with Raffles to murder
Bulstrode, and ran away from Middlemarch for the purpose."

He was thinking "Here is a new ring in the sound of my name to
recommend it in her hearing; however--what does it signify now?"

But he said nothing of Bulstrode's offer to him.  Will was very open
and careless about his personal affairs, but it was among the more
exquisite touches in nature's modelling of him that he had a delicate
generosity which warned him into reticence here.  He shrank from saying
that he had rejected Bulstrode's money, in the moment when he was
learning that it was Lydgate's misfortune to have accepted it.

Lydgate too was reticent in the midst of his confidence.  He made no
allusion to Rosamond's feeling under their trouble, and of Dorothea he
only said, "Mrs. Casaubon has been the one person to come forward and
say that she had no belief in any of the suspicions against me."
Observing a change in Will's face, he avoided any further mention of
her, feeling himself too ignorant of their relation to each other not
to fear that his words might have some hidden painful bearing on it.
And it occurred to him that Dorothea was the real cause of the present
visit to Middlemarch.

The two men were pitying each other, but it was only Will who guessed
the extent of his companion's trouble.  When Lydgate spoke with
desperate resignation of going to settle in London, and said with a
faint smile, "We shall have you again, old fellow." Will felt
inexpressibly mournful, and said nothing.  Rosamond had that morning
entreated him to urge this step on Lydgate; and it seemed to him as if
he were beholding in a magic panorama a future where he himself was
sliding into that pleasureless yielding to the small solicitations of
circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single
momentous bargain.

We are on a perilous margin when we begin to look passively at our
future selves, and see our own figures led with dull consent into
insipid misdoing and shabby achievement.  Poor Lydgate was inwardly
groaning on that margin, and Will was arriving at it.  It seemed to him
this evening as if the cruelty of his outburst to Rosamond had made an
obligation for him, and he dreaded the obligation: he dreaded Lydgate's
unsuspecting good-will: he dreaded his own distaste for his spoiled
life, which would leave him in motiveless levity.

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

completion: Will arrives later, to find Lydgate unaware of his earlier visit. He is told that Rosamond is ill, having been worried about their problems Lydgate explains the nature of their problems to him and cautions him about being included in the sordid story. Will jokes bitterly about it, thinking that here was one more addition to the barriers between himself and Dorothea. He does not speak of Bulstrodes offer of money, being sensitive to Lydgates own acceptance of money, and the consequences. Lydgate tells him of Dorotheas loyal support and help, but admits sadly that he sees no alternative to settling in London. Both are dejected, feeling themselves "yielding to the small solicitations of circumstance, which is a commoner history of perdition than any single momentous bargain."


prompt:
Chapter: "Stern lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
        The Godhead's most benignant grace;
        Nor know we anything so fair
        As is the smile upon thy face;
        Flowers laugh before thee on their beds,
        And fragrance in thy footing treads;
        Thou dost preserve the Stars from wrong;
    And the most ancient Heavens, through thee, are fresh and strong.
                                        --WORDSWORTH: Ode to Duty.

When Dorothea had seen Mr. Farebrother in the morning, she had promised
to go and dine at the parsonage on her return from Freshitt.  There was
a frequent interchange of visits between her and the Farebrother
family, which enabled her to say that she was not at all lonely at the
Manor, and to resist for the present the severe prescription of a lady
companion.  When she reached home and remembered her engagement, she
was glad of it; and finding that she had still an hour before she could
dress for dinner, she walked straight to the schoolhouse and entered
into a conversation with the master and mistress about the new bell,
giving eager attention to their small details and repetitions, and
getting up a dramatic sense that her life was very busy.  She paused on
her way back to talk to old Master Bunney who was putting in some
garden-seeds, and discoursed wisely with that rural sage about the
crops that would make the most return on a perch of ground, and the
result of sixty years' experience as to soils--namely, that if your
soil was pretty mellow it would do, but if there came wet, wet, wet to
make it all of a mummy, why then--

Finding that the social spirit had beguiled her into being rather late,
she dressed hastily and went over to the parsonage rather earlier than
was necessary.  That house was never dull, Mr. Farebrother, like
another White of Selborne, having continually something new to tell of
his inarticulate guests and proteges, whom he was teaching the boys not
to torment; and he had just set up a pair of beautiful goats to be pets
of the village in general, and to walk at large as sacred animals.  The
evening went by cheerfully till after tea, Dorothea talking more than
usual and dilating with Mr. Farebrother on the possible histories of
creatures that converse compendiously with their antennae, and for
aught we know may hold reformed parliaments; when suddenly some
inarticulate little sounds were heard which called everybody's
attention.

"Henrietta Noble," said Mrs. Farebrother, seeing her small sister
moving about the furniture-legs distressfully, "what is the matter?"

"I have lost my tortoise-shell lozenge-box. I fear the kitten has
rolled it away," said the tiny old lady, involuntarily continuing her
beaver-like notes.

"Is it a great treasure, aunt?" said Mr. Farebrother, putting up his
glasses and looking at the carpet.

"Mr. Ladislaw gave it me," said Miss Noble.  "A German box--very
pretty, but if it falls it always spins away as far as it can."

"Oh, if it is Ladislaw's present," said Mr. Farebrother, in a deep tone
of comprehension, getting up and hunting.  The box was found at last
under a chiffonier, and Miss Noble grasped it with delight, saying, "it
was under a fender the last time."

"That is an affair of the heart with my aunt," said Mr. Farebrother,
smiling at Dorothea, as he reseated himself.

"If Henrietta Noble forms an attachment to any one, Mrs. Casaubon,"
said his mother, emphatically,--"she is like a dog--she would take
their shoes for a pillow and sleep the better."

"Mr. Ladislaw's shoes, I would," said Henrietta Noble.

Dorothea made an attempt at smiling in return.  She was surprised and
annoyed to find that her heart was palpitating violently, and that it
was quite useless to try after a recovery of her former animation.
Alarmed at herself--fearing some further betrayal of a change so marked
in its occasion, she rose and said in a low voice with undisguised
anxiety, "I must go; I have overtired myself."

Mr. Farebrother, quick in perception, rose and said, "It is true; you
must have half-exhausted yourself in talking about Lydgate.  That sort
of work tells upon one after the excitement is over."

He gave her his arm back to the Manor, but Dorothea did not attempt to
speak, even when he said good-night.

The limit of resistance was reached, and she had sunk back helpless
within the clutch of inescapable anguish.  Dismissing Tantripp with a
few faint words, she locked her door, and turning away from it towards
the vacant room she pressed her hands hard on the top of her head, and
moaned out--

"Oh, I did love him!"

Then came the hour in which the waves of suffering shook her too
thoroughly to leave any power of thought.  She could only cry in loud
whispers, between her sobs, after her lost belief which she had planted
and kept alive from a very little seed since the days in Rome--after
her lost joy of clinging with silent love and faith to one who,
misprized by others, was worthy in her thought--after her lost woman's
pride of reigning in his memory--after her sweet dim perspective of
hope, that along some pathway they should meet with unchanged
recognition and take up the backward years as a yesterday.

In that hour she repeated what the merciful eyes of solitude have
looked on for ages in the spiritual struggles of man--she besought
hardness and coldness and aching weariness to bring her relief from the
mysterious incorporeal might of her anguish: she lay on the bare floor
and let the night grow cold around her; while her grand woman's frame
was shaken by sobs as if she had been a despairing child.

There were two images--two living forms that tore her heart in two, as
if it had been the heart of a mother who seems to see her child divided
by the sword, and presses one bleeding half to her breast while her
gaze goes forth in agony towards the half which is carried away by the
lying woman that has never known the mother's pang.

Here, with the nearness of an answering smile, here within the
vibrating bond of mutual speech, was the bright creature whom she had
trusted--who had come to her like the spirit of morning visiting the
dim vault where she sat as the bride of a worn-out life; and now, with
a full consciousness which had never awakened before, she stretched out
her arms towards him and cried with bitter cries that their nearness
was a parting vision: she discovered her passion to herself in the
unshrinking utterance of despair.

And there, aloof, yet persistently with her, moving wherever she moved,
was the Will Ladislaw who was a changed belief exhausted of hope, a
detected illusion--no, a living man towards whom there could not yet
struggle any wail of regretful pity, from the midst of scorn and
indignation and jealous offended pride.  The fire of Dorothea's anger
was not easily spent, and it flamed out in fitful returns of spurning
reproach.  Why had he come obtruding his life into hers, hers that
might have been whole enough without him?  Why had he brought his cheap
regard and his lip-born words to her who had nothing paltry to give in
exchange?  He knew that he was deluding her--wished, in the very moment
of farewell, to make her believe that he gave her the whole price of
her heart, and knew that he had spent it half before.  Why had he not
stayed among the crowd of whom she asked nothing--but only prayed that
they might be less contemptible?

But she lost energy at last even for her loud-whispered cries and
moans: she subsided into helpless sobs, and on the cold floor she
sobbed herself to sleep.

In the chill hours of the morning twilight, when all was dim around
her, she awoke--not with any amazed wondering where she was or what had
happened, but with the clearest consciousness that she was looking into
the eyes of sorrow.  She rose, and wrapped warm things around her, and
seated herself in a great chair where she had often watched before.
She was vigorous enough to have borne that hard night without feeling
ill in body, beyond some aching and fatigue; but she had waked to a new
condition: she felt as if her soul had been liberated from its terrible
conflict; she was no longer wrestling with her grief, but could sit
down with it as a lasting companion and make it a sharer in her
thoughts.  For now the thoughts came thickly.  It was not in Dorothea's
nature, for longer than the duration of a paroxysm, to sit in the
narrow cell of her calamity, in the besotted misery of a consciousness
that only sees another's lot as an accident of its own.

She began now to live through that yesterday morning deliberately
again, forcing herself to dwell on every detail and its possible
meaning.  Was she alone in that scene?  Was it her event only?  She
forced herself to think of it as bound up with another woman's life--a
woman towards whom she had set out with a longing to carry some
clearness and comfort into her beclouded youth.  In her first outleap
of jealous indignation and disgust, when quitting the hateful room, she
had flung away all the mercy with which she had undertaken that visit.
She had enveloped both Will and Rosamond in her burning scorn, and it
seemed to her as if Rosamond were burned out of her sight forever.  But
that base prompting which makes a women more cruel to a rival than to a
faithless lover, could have no strength of recurrence in Dorothea when
the dominant spirit of justice within her had once overcome the tumult
and had once shown her the truer measure of things.  All the active
thought with which she had before been representing to herself the
trials of Lydgate's lot, and this young marriage union which, like her
own, seemed to have its hidden as well as evident troubles--all this
vivid sympathetic experience returned to her now as a power: it
asserted itself as acquired knowledge asserts itself and will not let
us see as we saw in the day of our ignorance.  She said to her own
irremediable grief, that it should make her more helpful, instead of
driving her back from effort.

And what sort of crisis might not this be in three lives whose contact
with hers laid an obligation on her as if they had been suppliants
bearing the sacred branch?  The objects of her rescue were not to be
sought out by her fancy: they were chosen for her.  She yearned towards
the perfect Right, that it might make a throne within her, and rule her
errant will.  "What should I do--how should I act now, this very day,
if I could clutch my own pain, and compel it to silence, and think of
those three?"

It had taken long for her to come to that question, and there was light
piercing into the room.  She opened her curtains, and looked out
towards the bit of road that lay in view, with fields beyond outside
the entrance-gates. On the road there was a man with a bundle on his
back and a woman carrying her baby; in the field she could see figures
moving--perhaps the shepherd with his dog.  Far off in the bending sky
was the pearly light; and she felt the largeness of the world and the
manifold wakings of men to labor and endurance.  She was a part of that
involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from
her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor hide her eyes in selfish
complaining.

What she would resolve to do that day did not yet seem quite clear, but
something that she could achieve stirred her as with an approaching
murmur which would soon gather distinctness.  She took off the clothes
which seemed to have some of the weariness of a hard watching in them,
and began to make her toilet.  Presently she rang for Tantripp, who
came in her dressing-gown.

"Why, madam, you've never been in bed this blessed night," burst out
Tantripp, looking first at the bed and then at Dorothea's face, which
in spite of bathing had the pale cheeks and pink eyelids of a mater
dolorosa. "You'll kill yourself, you _will_.  Anybody might think now
you had a right to give yourself a little comfort."

"Don't be alarmed, Tantripp," said Dorothea, smiling.  "I have slept; I
am not ill.  I shall be glad of a cup of coffee as soon as possible.
And I want you to bring me my new dress; and most likely I shall want
my new bonnet to-day."

"They've lain there a month and more ready for you, madam, and most
thankful I shall be to see you with a couple o' pounds' worth less of
crape," said Tantripp, stooping to light the fire.  "There's a reason
in mourning, as I've always said; and three folds at the bottom of your
skirt and a plain quilling in your bonnet--and if ever anybody looked
like an angel, it's you in a net quilling--is what's consistent for a
second year.  At least, that's _my_ thinking," ended Tantripp, looking
anxiously at the fire; "and if anybody was to marry me flattering
himself I should wear those hijeous weepers two years for him, he'd be
deceived by his own vanity, that's all."

"The fire will do, my good Tan," said Dorothea, speaking as she used to
do in the old Lausanne days, only with a very low voice; "get me the
coffee."

She folded herself in the large chair, and leaned her head against it
in fatigued quiescence, while Tantripp went away wondering at this
strange contrariness in her young mistress--that just the morning when
she had more of a widow's face than ever, she should have asked for her
lighter mourning which she had waived before.  Tantripp would never
have found the clew to this mystery.  Dorothea wished to acknowledge
that she had not the less an active life before her because she had
buried a private joy; and the tradition that fresh garments belonged to
all initiation, haunting her mind, made her grasp after even that
slight outward help towards calm resolve.  For the resolve was not easy.

Nevertheless at eleven o'clock she was walking towards Middlemarch,
having made up her mind that she would make as quietly and unnoticeably
as possible her second attempt to see and save Rosamond.

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

completion: Dorothea keeps herself busy with visits to the school she has set up, to her gardener, and then to dinner at the Farebrothers. A small incident there brings up Farebrothers aunts devoted friendship with Ladislaw. Listening to talk about him, Dorothea can not longer control herself. She rushes home, and breaks down in the privacy of her bedroom. The secret joy, which had comforted her through all her recent loneliness, is lost. She realizes now that she had loved Ladislaw all along. She is unable to separate his image as "the bright creature, which she trusted" from the faithless wrecker of marriages she now sees him as. After a night of torment, she composes herself and asks her maid for a fresh set of clothes, not her usual deep mourning. Her maid is gratified, but to Dorothea the new clothes represent an attempt to forget her earlier joy and live for others. She has decided not to assume the worst about Rosamond. She will fulfill her promise to Lydgate and try to comfort Rosamond.


prompt:
Chapter: "Du Erde warst auch diese Nacht bestandig,
     Und athmest neu erquickt zu meinen Fussen,
     Beginnest schon mit Lust mich zu umgeben,
     Zum regst und ruhrst ein kraftiges Reschliessen
     Zum hochsten Dasein immerfort zu streben.
                                   --Faust: 2r Theil.

When Dorothea was again at Lydgate's door speaking to Martha, he was in
the room close by with the door ajar, preparing to go out.  He heard
her voice, and immediately came to her.

"Do you think that Mrs. Lydgate can receive me this morning?" she said,
having reflected that it would be better to leave out all allusion to
her previous visit.

"I have no doubt she will," said Lydgate, suppressing his thought about
Dorothea's looks, which were as much changed as Rosamond's, "if you
will be kind enough to come in and let me tell her that you are here.
She has not been very well since you were here yesterday, but she is
better this morning, and I think it is very likely that she will be
cheered by seeing you again."

It was plain that Lydgate, as Dorothea had expected, knew nothing about
the circumstances of her yesterday's visit; nay, he appeared to imagine
that she had carried it out according to her intention.  She had
prepared a little note asking Rosamond to see her, which she would have
given to the servant if he had not been in the way, but now she was in
much anxiety as to the result of his announcement.

After leading her into the drawing-room, he paused to take a letter
from his pocket and put it into her hands, saying, "I wrote this last
night, and was going to carry it to Lowick in my ride.  When one is
grateful for something too good for common thanks, writing is less
unsatisfactory than speech--one does not at least _hear_ how inadequate
the words are."

Dorothea's face brightened.  "It is I who have most to thank for, since
you have let me take that place.  You _have_ consented?" she said,
suddenly doubting.

"Yes, the check is going to Bulstrode to-day."

He said no more, but went up-stairs to Rosamond, who had but lately
finished dressing herself, and sat languidly wondering what she should
do next, her habitual industry in small things, even in the days of her
sadness, prompting her to begin some kind of occupation, which she
dragged through slowly or paused in from lack of interest.  She looked
ill, but had recovered her usual quietude of manner, and Lydgate had
feared to disturb her by any questions.  He had told her of Dorothea's
letter containing the check, and afterwards he had said, "Ladislaw is
come, Rosy; he sat with me last night; I dare say he will be here again
to-day. I thought he looked rather battered and depressed."  And
Rosamond had made no reply.

Now, when he came up, he said to her very gently, "Rosy, dear, Mrs.
Casaubon is come to see you again; you would like to see her, would you
not?"  That she colored and gave rather a startled movement did not
surprise him after the agitation produced by the interview yesterday--a
beneficent agitation, he thought, since it seemed to have made her turn
to him again.

Rosamond dared not say no.  She dared not with a tone of her voice
touch the facts of yesterday.  Why had Mrs. Casaubon come again?  The
answer was a blank which Rosamond could only fill up with dread, for
Will Ladislaw's lacerating words had made every thought of Dorothea a
fresh smart to her.  Nevertheless, in her new humiliating uncertainty
she dared do nothing but comply.  She did not say yes, but she rose and
let Lydgate put a light shawl over her shoulders, while he said, "I am
going out immediately." Then something crossed her mind which prompted
her to say, "Pray tell Martha not to bring any one else into the
drawing-room." And Lydgate assented, thinking that he fully understood
this wish.  He led her down to the drawing-room door, and then turned
away, observing to himself that he was rather a blundering husband to
be dependent for his wife's trust in him on the influence of another
woman.

Rosamond, wrapping her soft shawl around her as she walked towards
Dorothea, was inwardly wrapping her soul in cold reserve.  Had Mrs.
Casaubon come to say anything to her about Will?  If so, it was a
liberty that Rosamond resented; and she prepared herself to meet every
word with polite impassibility.  Will had bruised her pride too sorely
for her to feel any compunction towards him and Dorothea: her own
injury seemed much the greater.  Dorothea was not only the "preferred"
woman, but had also a formidable advantage in being Lydgate's
benefactor; and to poor Rosamond's pained confused vision it seemed
that this Mrs. Casaubon--this woman who predominated in all things
concerning her--must have come now with the sense of having the
advantage, and with animosity prompting her to use it.  Indeed, not
Rosamond only, but any one else, knowing the outer facts of the case,
and not the simple inspiration on which Dorothea acted, might well have
wondered why she came.

Looking like the lovely ghost of herself, her graceful slimness wrapped
in her soft white shawl, the rounded infantine mouth and cheek
inevitably suggesting mildness and innocence, Rosamond paused at three
yards' distance from her visitor and bowed.  But Dorothea, who had
taken off her gloves, from an impulse which she could never resist when
she wanted a sense of freedom, came forward, and with her face full of
a sad yet sweet openness, put out her hand.  Rosamond could not avoid
meeting her glance, could not avoid putting her small hand into
Dorothea's, which clasped it with gentle motherliness; and immediately
a doubt of her own prepossessions began to stir within her.  Rosamond's
eye was quick for faces; she saw that Mrs. Casaubon's face looked pale
and changed since yesterday, yet gentle, and like the firm softness of
her hand.  But Dorothea had counted a little too much on her own
strength: the clearness and intensity of her mental action this morning
were the continuance of a nervous exaltation which made her frame as
dangerously responsive as a bit of finest Venetian crystal; and in
looking at Rosamond, she suddenly found her heart swelling, and was
unable to speak--all her effort was required to keep back tears.  She
succeeded in that, and the emotion only passed over her face like the
spirit of a sob; but it added to Rosamond's impression that Mrs.
Casaubon's state of mind must be something quite different from what
she had imagined.

So they sat down without a word of preface on the two chairs that
happened to be nearest, and happened also to be close together; though
Rosamond's notion when she first bowed was that she should stay a long
way off from Mrs. Casaubon.  But she ceased thinking how anything would
turn out--merely wondering what would come.  And Dorothea began to
speak quite simply, gathering firmness as she went on.

"I had an errand yesterday which I did not finish; that is why I am
here again so soon.  You will not think me too troublesome when I tell
you that I came to talk to you about the injustice that has been shown
towards Mr. Lydgate.  It will cheer you--will it not?--to know a great
deal about him, that he may not like to speak about himself just
because it is in his own vindication and to his own honor.  You will
like to know that your husband has warm friends, who have not left off
believing in his high character?  You will let me speak of this without
thinking that I take a liberty?"

The cordial, pleading tones which seemed to flow with generous
heedlessness above all the facts which had filled Rosamond's mind as
grounds of obstruction and hatred between her and this woman, came as
soothingly as a warm stream over her shrinking fears.  Of course Mrs.
Casaubon had the facts in her mind, but she was not going to speak of
anything connected with them.  That relief was too great for Rosamond
to feel much else at the moment.  She answered prettily, in the new
ease of her soul--

"I know you have been very good.  I shall like to hear anything you
will say to me about Tertius."

"The day before yesterday," said Dorothea, "when I had asked him to
come to Lowick to give me his opinion on the affairs of the Hospital,
he told me everything about his conduct and feelings in this sad event
which has made ignorant people cast suspicions on him.  The reason he
told me was because I was very bold and asked him.  I believed that he
had never acted dishonorably, and I begged him to tell me the history.
He confessed to me that he had never told it before, not even to you,
because he had a great dislike to say, 'I was not wrong,' as if that
were proof, when there are guilty people who will say so.  The truth
is, he knew nothing of this man Raffles, or that there were any bad
secrets about him; and he thought that Mr. Bulstrode offered him the
money because he repented, out of kindness, of having refused it
before.  All his anxiety about his patient was to treat him rightly,
and he was a little uncomfortable that the case did not end as he had
expected; but he thought then and still thinks that there may have been
no wrong in it on any one's part.  And I have told Mr. Farebrother, and
Mr. Brooke, and Sir James Chettam: they all believe in your husband.
That will cheer you, will it not?  That will give you courage?"

Dorothea's face had become animated, and as it beamed on Rosamond very
close to her, she felt something like bashful timidity before a
superior, in the presence of this self-forgetful ardor.  She said, with
blushing embarrassment, "Thank you: you are very kind."

"And he felt that he had been so wrong not to pour out everything about
this to you.  But you will forgive him.  It was because he feels so
much more about your happiness than anything else--he feels his life
bound into one with yours, and it hurts him more than anything, that
his misfortunes must hurt you.  He could speak to me because I am an
indifferent person.  And then I asked him if I might come to see you;
because I felt so much for his trouble and yours.  That is why I came
yesterday, and why I am come to-day. Trouble is so hard to bear, is it
not?--  How can we live and think that any one has trouble--piercing
trouble--and we could help them, and never try?"

Dorothea, completely swayed by the feeling that she was uttering,
forgot everything but that she was speaking from out the heart of her
own trial to Rosamond's. The emotion had wrought itself more and more
into her utterance, till the tones might have gone to one's very
marrow, like a low cry from some suffering creature in the darkness.
And she had unconsciously laid her hand again on the little hand that
she had pressed before.

Rosamond, with an overmastering pang, as if a wound within her had been
probed, burst into hysterical crying as she had done the day before
when she clung to her husband.  Poor Dorothea was feeling a great wave
of her own sorrow returning over her--her thought being drawn to the
possible share that Will Ladislaw might have in Rosamond's mental
tumult.  She was beginning to fear that she should not be able to
suppress herself enough to the end of this meeting, and while her hand
was still resting on Rosamond's lap, though the hand underneath it was
withdrawn, she was struggling against her own rising sobs.  She tried
to master herself with the thought that this might be a turning-point
in three lives--not in her own; no, there the irrevocable had
happened, but--in those three lives which were touching hers with the
solemn neighborhood of danger and distress.  The fragile creature who
was crying close to her--there might still be time to rescue her from
the misery of false incompatible bonds; and this moment was unlike any
other: she and Rosamond could never be together again with the same
thrilling consciousness of yesterday within them both.  She felt the
relation between them to be peculiar enough to give her a peculiar
influence, though she had no conception that the way in which her own
feelings were involved was fully known to Mrs. Lydgate.

It was a newer crisis in Rosamond's experience than even Dorothea could
imagine: she was under the first great shock that had shattered her
dream-world in which she had been easily confident of herself and
critical of others; and this strange unexpected manifestation of
feeling in a woman whom she had approached with a shrinking aversion
and dread, as one who must necessarily have a jealous hatred towards
her, made her soul totter all the more with a sense that she had been
walking in an unknown world which had just broken in upon her.

When Rosamond's convulsed throat was subsiding into calm, and she
withdrew the handkerchief with which she had been hiding her face, her
eyes met Dorothea's as helplessly as if they had been blue flowers.
What was the use of thinking about behavior after this crying?  And
Dorothea looked almost as childish, with the neglected trace of a
silent tear.  Pride was broken down between these two.

"We were talking about your husband," Dorothea said, with some
timidity.  "I thought his looks were sadly changed with suffering the
other day.  I had not seen him for many weeks before.  He said he had
been feeling very lonely in his trial; but I think he would have borne
it all better if he had been able to be quite open with you."

"Tertius is so angry and impatient if I say anything," said Rosamond,
imagining that he had been complaining of her to Dorothea.  "He ought
not to wonder that I object to speak to him on painful subjects."

"It was himself he blamed for not speaking," said Dorothea.  "What he
said of you was, that he could not be happy in doing anything which
made you unhappy--that his marriage was of course a bond which must
affect his choice about everything; and for that reason he refused my
proposal that he should keep his position at the Hospital, because that
would bind him to stay in Middlemarch, and he would not undertake to do
anything which would be painful to you.  He could say that to me,
because he knows that I had much trial in my marriage, from my
husband's illness, which hindered his plans and saddened him; and he
knows that I have felt how hard it is to walk always in fear of hurting
another who is tied to us."

Dorothea waited a little; she had discerned a faint pleasure stealing
over Rosamond's face.  But there was no answer, and she went on, with a
gathering tremor, "Marriage is so unlike everything else.  There is
something even awful in the nearness it brings.  Even if we loved some
one else better than--than those we were married to, it would be no
use"--poor Dorothea, in her palpitating anxiety, could only seize her
language brokenly--"I mean, marriage drinks up all our power of giving
or getting any blessedness in that sort of love.  I know it may be very
dear--but it murders our marriage--and then the marriage stays with us
like a murder--and everything else is gone.  And then our husband--if
he loved and trusted us, and we have not helped him, but made a curse
in his life--"

Her voice had sunk very low: there was a dread upon her of presuming
too far, and of speaking as if she herself were perfection addressing
error.  She was too much preoccupied with her own anxiety, to be aware
that Rosamond was trembling too; and filled with the need to express
pitying fellowship rather than rebuke, she put her hands on Rosamond's,
and said with more agitated rapidity,--"I know, I know that the feeling
may be very dear--it has taken hold of us unawares--it is so hard, it
may seem like death to part with it--and we are weak--I am weak--"

The waves of her own sorrow, from out of which she was struggling to
save another, rushed over Dorothea with conquering force.  She stopped
in speechless agitation, not crying, but feeling as if she were being
inwardly grappled.  Her face had become of a deathlier paleness, her
lips trembled, and she pressed her hands helplessly on the hands that
lay under them.

Rosamond, taken hold of by an emotion stronger than her own--hurried
along in a new movement which gave all things some new, awful,
undefined aspect--could find no words, but involuntarily she put her
lips to Dorothea's forehead which was very near her, and then for a
minute the two women clasped each other as if they had been in a
shipwreck.

"You are thinking what is not true," said Rosamond, in an eager
half-whisper, while she was still feeling Dorothea's arms round
her--urged by a mysterious necessity to free herself from something
that oppressed her as if it were blood guiltiness.

They moved apart, looking at each other.

"When you came in yesterday--it was not as you thought," said Rosamond
in the same tone.

There was a movement of surprised attention in Dorothea.  She expected
a vindication of Rosamond herself.

"He was telling me how he loved another woman, that I might know he
could never love me," said Rosamond, getting more and more hurried as
she went on.  "And now I think he hates me because--because you
mistook him yesterday.  He says it is through me that you will think
ill of him--think that he is a false person.  But it shall not be
through me.  He has never had any love for me--I know he has not--he
has always thought slightly of me.  He said yesterday that no other
woman existed for him beside you.  The blame of what happened is
entirely mine.  He said he could never explain to you--because of me.
He said you could never think well of him again.  But now I have told
you, and he cannot reproach me any more."

Rosamond had delivered her soul under impulses which she had not known
before.  She had begun her confession under the subduing influence of
Dorothea's emotion; and as she went on she had gathered the sense that
she was repelling Will's reproaches, which were still like a
knife-wound within her.

The revulsion of feeling in Dorothea was too strong to be called joy.
It was a tumult in which the terrible strain of the night and morning
made a resistant pain:--she could only perceive that this would be joy
when she had recovered her power of feeling it.  Her immediate
consciousness was one of immense sympathy without check; she cared for
Rosamond without struggle now, and responded earnestly to her last
words--

"No, he cannot reproach you any more."

With her usual tendency to over-estimate the good in others, she felt a
great outgoing of her heart towards Rosamond, for the generous effort
which had redeemed her from suffering, not counting that the effort was
a reflex of her own energy.  After they had been silent a little, she
said--

"You are not sorry that I came this morning?"

"No, you have been very good to me," said Rosamond.  "I did not think
that you would be so good.  I was very unhappy.  I am not happy now.
Everything is so sad."

"But better days will come.  Your husband will be rightly valued.  And
he depends on you for comfort.  He loves you best.  The worst loss
would be to lose that--and you have not lost it," said Dorothea.

She tried to thrust away the too overpowering thought of her own
relief, lest she should fail to win some sign that Rosamond's affection
was yearning back towards her husband.

"Tertius did not find fault with me, then?" said Rosamond,
understanding now that Lydgate might have said anything to Mrs.
Casaubon, and that she certainly was different from other women.
Perhaps there was a faint taste of jealousy in the question.  A smile
began to play over Dorothea's face as she said--

"No, indeed!  How could you imagine it?"  But here the door opened, and
Lydgate entered.

"I am come back in my quality of doctor," he said.  "After I went away,
I was haunted by two pale faces: Mrs. Casaubon looked as much in need
of care as you, Rosy.  And I thought that I had not done my duty in
leaving you together; so when I had been to Coleman's I came home
again.  I noticed that you were walking, Mrs. Casaubon, and the sky has
changed--I think we may have rain.  May I send some one to order your
carriage to come for you?"

"Oh, no!  I am strong: I need the walk," said Dorothea, rising with
animation in her face.  "Mrs. Lydgate and I have chatted a great deal,
and it is time for me to go.  I have always been accused of being
immoderate and saying too much."

She put out her hand to Rosamond, and they said an earnest, quiet
good-by without kiss or other show of effusion: there had been between
them too much serious emotion for them to use the signs of it
superficially.

As Lydgate took her to the door she said nothing of Rosamond, but told
him of Mr. Farebrother and the other friends who had listened with
belief to his story.

When he came back to Rosamond, she had already thrown herself on the
sofa, in resigned fatigue.

"Well, Rosy," he said, standing over her, and touching her hair, "what
do you think of Mrs. Casaubon now you have seen so much of her?"

"I think she must be better than any one," said Rosamond, "and she is
very beautiful.  If you go to talk to her so often, you will be more
discontented with me than ever!"

Lydgate laughed at the "so often."  "But has she made you any less
discontented with me?"

"I think she has," said Rosamond, looking up in his face.  "How heavy
your eyes are, Tertius--and do push your hair back." He lifted up his
large white hand to obey her, and felt thankful for this little mark of
interest in him.  Poor Rosamond's vagrant fancy had come back terribly
scourged--meek enough to nestle under the old despised shelter.  And
the shelter was still there: Lydgate had accepted his narrowed lot with
sad resignation.  He had chosen this fragile creature, and had taken
the burthen of her life upon his arms.  He must walk as he could,
carrying that burthen pitifully.

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

completion: Dorothea arrives looking depressed at Lydgates and is met by him. He gives her a letter acknowledging her loan and thanking her. He then fetches a listless Rosamond to meet her. Rosamond is filled with dread after the painful incident of the previous day, but she cannot avoid meeting Dorothea. Both are uneasy and unhappy but Dorothea overcomes her doubts and launches into the reason for her call. She speaks with enthusiasm of Lydgate and narrates the facts, which he hesitated to tell his wife. Her sympathy breaks through Rosamonds touchy reserve, and she breaks down, weeping. Dorothea touches hesitantly on how false attachments could ruin trust in a marriage. Her emotional drive is suddenly reflected in Rosamonds own mind, and she informs Dorothea that what she suspected is not true. She reveals the truth of the incident the day before, feeling she is freeing herself of guilt towards the other two. After these revelations both are exhausted. When Lydgate returns, they part silently but with sympathy. After that Rosamond comments on Dorotheas goodness and beauty, complaining that she will make Lydgate discontented with herself. He is grateful for this mark of interest, and consoles himself with it.