Chapter: "All that in woman is adored
       In thy fair self I find--
     For the whole sex can but afford
       The handsome and the kind."
                        --SIR CHARLES SEDLEY.


The question whether Mr. Tyke should be appointed as salaried chaplain
to the hospital was an exciting topic to the Middlemarchers; and
Lydgate heard it discussed in a way that threw much light on the power
exercised in the town by Mr. Bulstrode.  The banker was evidently a
ruler, but there was an opposition party, and even among his supporters
there were some who allowed it to be seen that their support was a
compromise, and who frankly stated their impression that the general
scheme of things, and especially the casualties of trade, required you
to hold a candle to the devil.

Mr. Bulstrode's power was not due simply to his being a country banker,
who knew the financial secrets of most traders in the town and could
touch the springs of their credit; it was fortified by a beneficence
that was at once ready and severe--ready to confer obligations, and
severe in watching the result.  He had gathered, as an industrious man
always at his post, a chief share in administering the town charities,
and his private charities were both minute and abundant.  He would take
a great deal of pains about apprenticing Tegg the shoemaker's son, and
he would watch over Tegg's church-going; he would defend Mrs. Strype
the washerwoman against Stubbs's unjust exaction on the score of her
drying-ground, and he would himself scrutinize a calumny against Mrs.
Strype.  His private minor loans were numerous, but he would inquire
strictly into the circumstances both before and after.  In this way a
man gathers a domain in his neighbors' hope and fear as well as
gratitude; and power, when once it has got into that subtle region,
propagates itself, spreading out of all proportion to its external
means.  It was a principle with Mr. Bulstrode to gain as much power as
possible, that he might use it for the glory of God.  He went through a
great deal of spiritual conflict and inward argument in order to adjust
his motives, and make clear to himself what God's glory required.  But,
as we have seen, his motives were not always rightly appreciated.
There were many crass minds in Middlemarch whose reflective scales
could only weigh things in the lump; and they had a strong suspicion
that since Mr. Bulstrode could not enjoy life in their fashion, eating
and drinking so little as he did, and worreting himself about
everything, he must have a sort of vampire's feast in the sense of
mastery.

The subject of the chaplaincy came up at Mr. Vincy's table when Lydgate
was dining there, and the family connection with Mr. Bulstrode did not,
he observed, prevent some freedom of remark even on the part of the
host himself, though his reasons against the proposed arrangement
turned entirely on his objection to Mr. Tyke's sermons, which were all
doctrine, and his preference for Mr. Farebrother, whose sermons were
free from that taint.  Mr. Vincy liked well enough the notion of the
chaplain's having a salary, supposing it were given to Farebrother, who
was as good a little fellow as ever breathed, and the best preacher
anywhere, and companionable too.

"What line shall you take, then?" said Mr. Chichely, the coroner, a
great coursing comrade of Mr. Vincy's.

"Oh, I'm precious glad I'm not one of the Directors now.  I shall vote
for referring the matter to the Directors and the Medical Board
together.  I shall roll some of my responsibility on your shoulders,
Doctor," said Mr. Vincy, glancing first at Dr. Sprague, the senior
physician of the town, and then at Lydgate who sat opposite.  "You
medical gentlemen must consult which sort of black draught you will
prescribe, eh, Mr. Lydgate?"

"I know little of either," said Lydgate; "but in general, appointments
are apt to be made too much a question of personal liking.  The fittest
man for a particular post is not always the best fellow or the most
agreeable.  Sometimes, if you wanted to get a reform, your only way
would be to pension off the good fellows whom everybody is fond of, and
put them out of the question."

Dr. Sprague, who was considered the physician of most "weight," though
Dr. Minchin was usually said to have more "penetration," divested his
large heavy face of all expression, and looked at his wine-glass while
Lydgate was speaking.  Whatever was not problematical and suspected
about this young man--for example, a certain showiness as to foreign
ideas, and a disposition to unsettle what had been settled and
forgotten by his elders--was positively unwelcome to a physician whose
standing had been fixed thirty years before by a treatise on
Meningitis, of which at least one copy marked "own" was bound in calf.
For my part I have some fellow-feeling with Dr. Sprague: one's
self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very
unpleasant to find deprecated.

Lydgate's remark, however, did not meet the sense of the company.  Mr.
Vincy said, that if he could have _his_ way, he would not put
disagreeable fellows anywhere.

"Hang your reforms!" said Mr. Chichely.  "There's no greater humbug in
the world.  You never hear of a reform, but it means some trick to put
in new men.  I hope you are not one of the 'Lancet's' men, Mr.
Lydgate--wanting to take the coronership out of the hands of the legal
profession: your words appear to point that way."

"I disapprove of Wakley," interposed Dr. Sprague, "no man more: he is
an ill-intentioned fellow, who would sacrifice the respectability of
the profession, which everybody knows depends on the London Colleges,
for the sake of getting some notoriety for himself.  There are men who
don't mind about being kicked blue if they can only get talked about.
But Wakley is right sometimes," the Doctor added, judicially.  "I could
mention one or two points in which Wakley is in the right."

"Oh, well," said Mr. Chichely, "I blame no man for standing up in favor
of his own cloth; but, coming to argument, I should like to know how a
coroner is to judge of evidence if he has not had a legal training?"

"In my opinion," said Lydgate, "legal training only makes a man more
incompetent in questions that require knowledge a of another kind.
People talk about evidence as if it could really be weighed in scales
by a blind Justice.  No man can judge what is good evidence on any
particular subject, unless he knows that subject well.  A lawyer is no
better than an old woman at a post-mortem examination.  How is he to
know the action of a poison?  You might as well say that scanning verse
will teach you to scan the potato crops."

"You are aware, I suppose, that it is not the coroner's business to
conduct the post-mortem, but only to take the evidence of the medical
witness?" said Mr. Chichely, with some scorn.

"Who is often almost as ignorant as the coroner himself," said Lydgate.
"Questions of medical jurisprudence ought not to be left to the chance
of decent knowledge in a medical witness, and the coroner ought not to
be a man who will believe that strychnine will destroy the coats of the
stomach if an ignorant practitioner happens to tell him so."

Lydgate had really lost sight of the fact that Mr. Chichely was his
Majesty's coroner, and ended innocently with the question, "Don't you
agree with me, Dr. Sprague?"

"To a certain extent--with regard to populous districts, and in the
metropolis," said the Doctor.  "But I hope it will be long before this
part of the country loses the services of my friend Chichely, even
though it might get the best man in our profession to succeed him.  I
am sure Vincy will agree with me."

"Yes, yes, give me a coroner who is a good coursing man," said Mr.
Vincy, jovially.  "And in my opinion, you're safest with a lawyer.
Nobody can know everything. Most things are 'visitation of God.' And as
to poisoning, why, what you want to know is the law. Come, shall we
join the ladies?"

Lydgate's private opinion was that Mr. Chichely might be the very
coroner without bias as to the coats of the stomach, but he had not
meant to be personal.  This was one of the difficulties of moving in
good Middlemarch society: it was dangerous to insist on knowledge as a
qualification for any salaried office.  Fred Vincy had called Lydgate a
prig, and now Mr. Chichely was inclined to call him prick-eared;
especially when, in the drawing-room, he seemed to be making himself
eminently agreeable to Rosamond, whom he had easily monopolized in a
tete-a-tete, since Mrs. Vincy herself sat at the tea-table. She
resigned no domestic function to her daughter; and the matron's
blooming good-natured face, with the two volatile pink strings floating
from her fine throat, and her cheery manners to husband and children,
was certainly among the great attractions of the Vincy
house--attractions which made it all the easier to fall in love with
the daughter.  The tinge of unpretentious, inoffensive vulgarity in
Mrs. Vincy gave more effect to Rosamond's refinement, which was beyond
what Lydgate had expected.

Certainly, small feet and perfectly turned shoulders aid the impression
of refined manners, and the right thing said seems quite astonishingly
right when it is accompanied with exquisite curves of lip and eyelid.
And Rosamond could say the right thing; for she was clever with that
sort of cleverness which catches every tone except the humorous.
Happily she never attempted to joke, and this perhaps was the most
decisive mark of her cleverness.

She and Lydgate readily got into conversation.  He regretted that he
had not heard her sing the other day at Stone Court.  The only pleasure
he allowed himself during the latter part of his stay in Paris was to
go and hear music.

"You have studied music, probably?" said Rosamond.

"No, I know the notes of many birds, and I know many melodies by ear;
but the music that I don't know at all, and have no notion about,
delights me--affects me.  How stupid the world is that it does not make
more use of such a pleasure within its reach!"

"Yes, and you will find Middlemarch very tuneless.  There are hardly
any good musicians.  I only know two gentlemen who sing at all well."

"I suppose it is the fashion to sing comic songs in a rhythmic way,
leaving you to fancy the tune--very much as if it were tapped on a
drum?"

"Ah, you have heard Mr. Bowyer," said Rosamond, with one of her rare
smiles.  "But we are speaking very ill of our neighbors."

Lydgate was almost forgetting that he must carry on the conversation,
in thinking how lovely this creature was, her garment seeming to be
made out of the faintest blue sky, herself so immaculately blond, as if
the petals of some gigantic flower had just opened and disclosed her;
and yet with this infantine blondness showing so much ready,
self-possessed grace.  Since he had had the memory of Laure, Lydgate
had lost all taste for large-eyed silence: the divine cow no longer
attracted him, and Rosamond was her very opposite.  But he recalled
himself.

"You will let me hear some music to-night, I hope."

"I will let you hear my attempts, if you like," said Rosamond.  "Papa
is sure to insist on my singing.  But I shall tremble before you, who
have heard the best singers in Paris.  I have heard very little: I have
only once been to London.  But our organist at St. Peter's is a good
musician, and I go on studying with him."

"Tell me what you saw in London."

"Very little."  (A more naive girl would have said, "Oh, everything!"
But Rosamond knew better.) "A few of the ordinary sights, such as raw
country girls are always taken to."

"Do you call yourself a raw country girl?" said Lydgate, looking at her
with an involuntary emphasis of admiration, which made Rosamond blush
with pleasure.  But she remained simply serious, turned her long neck a
little, and put up her hand to touch her wondrous hair-plaits--an
habitual gesture with her as pretty as any movements of a kitten's paw.
Not that Rosamond was in the least like a kitten: she was a sylph
caught young and educated at Mrs. Lemon's.

"I assure you my mind is raw," she said immediately; "I pass at
Middlemarch.  I am not afraid of talking to our old neighbors.  But I
am really afraid of you."

"An accomplished woman almost always knows more than we men, though her
knowledge is of a different sort.  I am sure you could teach me a
thousand things--as an exquisite bird could teach a bear if there were
any common language between them.  Happily, there is a common language
between women and men, and so the bears can get taught."

"Ah, there is Fred beginning to strum!  I must go and hinder him from
jarring all your nerves," said Rosamond, moving to the other side of
the room, where Fred having opened the piano, at his father's desire,
that Rosamond might give them some music, was parenthetically
performing "Cherry Ripe!" with one hand.  Able men who have passed
their examinations will do these things sometimes, not less than the
plucked Fred.

"Fred, pray defer your practising till to-morrow; you will make Mr.
Lydgate ill," said Rosamond.  "He has an ear."

Fred laughed, and went on with his tune to the end.

Rosamond turned to Lydgate, smiling gently, and said, "You perceive,
the bears will not always be taught."

"Now then, Rosy!" said Fred, springing from the stool and twisting it
upward for her, with a hearty expectation of enjoyment.  "Some good
rousing tunes first."

Rosamond played admirably.  Her master at Mrs. Lemon's school (close to
a county town with a memorable history that had its relics in church
and castle) was one of those excellent musicians here and there to be
found in our provinces, worthy to compare with many a noted
Kapellmeister in a country which offers more plentiful conditions of
musical celebrity.  Rosamond, with the executant's instinct, had seized
his manner of playing, and gave forth his large rendering of noble
music with the precision of an echo.  It was almost startling, heard
for the first time.  A hidden soul seemed to be flowing forth from
Rosamond's fingers; and so indeed it was, since souls live on in
perpetual echoes, and to all fine expression there goes somewhere an
originating activity, if it be only that of an interpreter.  Lydgate
was taken possession of, and began to believe in her as something
exceptional.  After all, he thought, one need not be surprised to find
the rare conjunctions of nature under circumstances apparently
unfavorable: come where they may, they always depend on conditions that
are not obvious.  He sat looking at her, and did not rise to pay her
any compliments, leaving that to others, now that his admiration was
deepened.

Her singing was less remarkable, but also well trained, and sweet to
hear as a chime perfectly in tune.  It is true she sang "Meet me by
moonlight," and "I've been roaming"; for mortals must share the
fashions of their time, and none but the ancients can be always
classical.  But Rosamond could also sing "Black-eyed Susan" with
effect, or Haydn's canzonets, or "Voi, che sapete," or "Batti,
batti"--she only wanted to know what her audience liked.

Her father looked round at the company, delighting in their admiration.
Her mother sat, like a Niobe before her troubles, with her youngest
little girl on her lap, softly beating the child's hand up and down in
time to the music.  And Fred, notwithstanding his general scepticism
about Rosy, listened to her music with perfect allegiance, wishing he
could do the same thing on his flute.  It was the pleasantest family
party that Lydgate had seen since he came to Middlemarch.  The Vincys
had the readiness to enjoy, the rejection of all anxiety, and the
belief in life as a merry lot, which made a house exceptional in most
county towns at that time, when Evangelicalism had cast a certain
suspicion as of plague-infection over the few amusements which survived
in the provinces.  At the Vincys' there was always whist, and the
card-tables stood ready now, making some of the company secretly
impatient of the music.  Before it ceased Mr. Farebrother came in--a
handsome, broad-chested but otherwise small man, about forty, whose
black was very threadbare: the brilliancy was all in his quick gray
eyes.  He came like a pleasant change in the light, arresting little
Louisa with fatherly nonsense as she was being led out of the room by
Miss Morgan, greeting everybody with some special word, and seeming to
condense more talk into ten minutes than had been held all through the
evening.  He claimed from Lydgate the fulfilment of a promise to come
and see him.  "I can't let you off, you know, because I have some
beetles to show you.  We collectors feel an interest in every new man
till he has seen all we have to show him."

But soon he swerved to the whist-table, rubbing his hands and saying,
"Come now, let us be serious!  Mr. Lydgate? not play?  Ah! you are too
young and light for this kind of thing."

Lydgate said to himself that the clergyman whose abilities were so
painful to Mr. Bulstrode, appeared to have found an agreeable resort in
this certainly not erudite household.  He could half understand it: the
good-humor, the good looks of elder and younger, and the provision for
passing the time without any labor of intelligence, might make the
house beguiling to people who had no particular use for their odd hours.

Everything looked blooming and joyous except Miss Morgan, who was
brown, dull, and resigned, and altogether, as Mrs. Vincy often said,
just the sort of person for a governess.  Lydgate did not mean to pay
many such visits himself.  They were a wretched waste of the evenings;
and now, when he had talked a little more to Rosamond, he meant to
excuse himself and go.

"You will not like us at Middlemarch, I feel sure," she said, when the
whist-players were settled.  "We are very stupid, and you have been
used to something quite different."

"I suppose all country towns are pretty much alike," said Lydgate.
"But I have noticed that one always believes one's own town to be more
stupid than any other.  I have made up my mind to take Middlemarch as
it comes, and shall be much obliged if the town will take me in the
same way.  I have certainly found some charms in it which are much
greater than I had expected."

"You mean the rides towards Tipton and Lowick; every one is pleased
with those," said Rosamond, with simplicity.

"No, I mean something much nearer to me."

Rosamond rose and reached her netting, and then said, "Do you care
about dancing at all?  I am not quite sure whether clever men ever
dance."

"I would dance with you if you would allow me."

"Oh!" said Rosamond, with a slight deprecatory laugh.  "I was only
going to say that we sometimes have dancing, and I wanted to know
whether you would feel insulted if you were asked to come."

"Not on the condition I mentioned."

After this chat Lydgate thought that he was going, but on moving
towards the whist-tables, he got interested in watching Mr.
Farebrother's play, which was masterly, and also his face, which was a
striking mixture of the shrewd and the mild.  At ten o'clock supper was
brought in (such were the customs of Middlemarch) and there was
punch-drinking; but Mr. Farebrother had only a glass of water.  He was
winning, but there seemed to be no reason why the renewal of rubbers
should end, and Lydgate at last took his leave.

But as it was not eleven o'clock, he chose to walk in the brisk air
towards the tower of St. Botolph's, Mr. Farebrother's church, which
stood out dark, square, and massive against the starlight.  It was the
oldest church in Middlemarch; the living, however, was but a vicarage
worth barely four hundred a-year. Lydgate had heard that, and he
wondered now whether Mr. Farebrother cared about the money he won at
cards; thinking, "He seems a very pleasant fellow, but Bulstrode may
have his good reasons."  Many things would be easier to Lydgate if it
should turn out that Mr. Bulstrode was generally justifiable.  "What is
his religious doctrine to me, if he carries some good notions along
with it?  One must use such brains as are to be found."

These were actually Lydgate's first meditations as he walked away from
Mr. Vincy's, and on this ground I fear that many ladies will consider
him hardly worthy of their attention.  He thought of Rosamond and her
music only in the second place; and though, when her turn came, he
dwelt on the image of her for the rest of his walk, he felt no
agitation, and had no sense that any new current had set into his life.
He could not marry yet; he wished not to marry for several years; and
therefore he was not ready to entertain the notion of being in love
with a girl whom he happened to admire.  He did admire Rosamond
exceedingly; but that madness which had once beset him about Laure was
not, he thought, likely to recur in relation to any other woman.
Certainly, if falling in love had been at all in question, it would
have been quite safe with a creature like this Miss Vincy, who had just
the kind of intelligence one would desire in a woman--polished,
refined, docile, lending itself to finish in all the delicacies of
life, and enshrined in a body which expressed this with a force of
demonstration that excluded the need for other evidence.  Lydgate felt
sure that if ever he married, his wife would have that feminine
radiance, that distinctive womanhood which must be classed with flowers
and music, that sort of beauty which by its very nature was virtuous,
being moulded only for pure and delicate joys.

But since he did not mean to marry for the next five years--his more
pressing business was to look into Louis' new book on Fever, which he
was specially interested in, because he had known Louis in Paris, and
had followed many anatomical demonstrations in order to ascertain the
specific differences of typhus and typhoid.  He went home and read far
into the smallest hour, bringing a much more testing vision of details
and relations into this pathological study than he had ever thought it
necessary to apply to the complexities of love and marriage, these
being subjects on which he felt himself amply informed by literature,
and that traditional wisdom which is handed down in the genial
conversation of men.  Whereas Fever had obscure conditions, and gave
him that delightful labor of the imagination which is not mere
arbitrariness, but the exercise of disciplined power--combining and
constructing with the clearest eye for probabilities and the fullest
obedience to knowledge; and then, in yet more energetic alliance with
impartial Nature, standing aloof to invent tests by which to try its
own work.

Many men have been praised as vividly imaginative on the strength of
their profuseness in indifferent drawing or cheap narration:--reports
of very poor talk going on in distant orbs; or portraits of Lucifer
coming down on his bad errands as a large ugly man with bat's wings and
spurts of phosphorescence; or exaggerations of wantonness that seem to
reflect life in a diseased dream.  But these kinds of inspiration
Lydgate regarded as rather vulgar and vinous compared with the
imagination that reveals subtle actions inaccessible by any sort of
lens, but tracked in that outer darkness through long pathways of
necessary sequence by the inward light which is the last refinement of
Energy, capable of bathing even the ethereal atoms in its ideally
illuminated space.  He for his part had tossed away all cheap
inventions where ignorance finds itself able and at ease: he was
enamoured of that arduous invention which is the very eye of research,
provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more
exactness of relation; he wanted to pierce the obscurity of those
minute processes which prepare human misery and joy, those invisible
thoroughfares which are the first lurking-places of anguish, mania, and
crime, that delicate poise and transition which determine the growth of
happy or unhappy consciousness.

As he threw down his book, stretched his legs towards the embers in the
grate, and clasped his hands at the back of his head, in that agreeable
afterglow of excitement when thought lapses from examination of a
specific object into a suffusive sense of its connections with all the
rest of our existence--seems, as it were, to throw itself on its back
after vigorous swimming and float with the repose of unexhausted
strength--Lydgate felt a triumphant delight in his studies, and
something like pity for those less lucky men who were not of his
profession.

"If I had not taken that turn when I was a lad," he thought, "I might
have got into some stupid draught-horse work or other, and lived always
in blinkers.  I should never have been happy in any profession that did
not call forth the highest intellectual strain, and yet keep me in good
warm contact with my neighbors.  There is nothing like the medical
profession for that: one can have the exclusive scientific life that
touches the distance and befriend the old fogies in the parish too.  It
is rather harder for a clergyman: Farebrother seems to be an anomaly."

This last thought brought back the Vincys and all the pictures of the
evening.  They floated in his mind agreeably enough, and as he took up
his bed-candle his lips were curled with that incipient smile which is
apt to accompany agreeable recollections.  He was an ardent fellow, but
at present his ardor was absorbed in love of his work and in the
ambition of making his life recognized as a factor in the better life
of mankind--like other heroes of science who had nothing but an obscure
country practice to begin with.

Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond!  Each lived in a world of
which the other knew nothing.  It had not occurred to Lydgate that he
had been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any
reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any
pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit,
that inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases, which makes a
large part in the lives of most girls.  He had not meant to look at her
or speak to her with more than the inevitable amount of admiration and
compliment which a man must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, it seemed
to him that his enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, for
he feared falling into the rudeness of telling her his great surprise
at her possession of such accomplishment.  But Rosamond had registered
every look and word, and estimated them as the opening incidents of a
preconceived romance--incidents which gather value from the foreseen
development and climax.  In Rosamond's romance it was not necessary to
imagine much about the inward life of the hero, or of his serious
business in the world: of course, he had a profession and was clever,
as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant fact about Lydgate
was his good birth, which distinguished him from all Middlemarch
admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and
getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which
she would have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last
associate with relatives quite equal to the county people who looked
down on the Middlemarchers.  It was part of Rosamond's cleverness to
discern very subtly the faintest aroma of rank, and once when she had
seen the Miss Brookes accompanying their uncle at the county assizes,
and seated among the aristocracy, she had envied them, notwithstanding
their plain dress.

If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a man of family
could cause thrills of satisfaction which had anything to do with the
sense that she was in love with him, I will ask you to use your power
of comparison a little more effectively, and consider whether red cloth
and epaulets have never had an influence of that sort.  Our passions do
not live apart in locked chambers, but, dressed in their small wardrobe
of notions, bring their provisions to a common table and mess together,
feeding out of the common store according to their appetite.

Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly with Tertius
Lydgate as he was in himself, but with his relation to her; and it was
excusable in a girl who was accustomed to hear that all young men
might, could, would be, or actually were in love with her, to believe
at once that Lydgate could be no exception.  His looks and words meant
more to her than other men's, because she cared more for them: she
thought of them diligently, and diligently attended to that perfection
of appearance, behavior, sentiments, and all other elegancies, which
would find in Lydgate a more adequate admirer than she had yet been
conscious of.

For Rosamond, though she would never do anything that was disagreeable
to her, was industrious; and now more than ever she was active in
sketching her landscapes and market-carts and portraits of friends, in
practising her music, and in being from morning till night her own
standard of a perfect lady, having always an audience in her own
consciousness, with sometimes the not unwelcome addition of a more
variable external audience in the numerous visitors of the house.  She
found time also to read the best novels, and even the second best, and
she knew much poetry by heart.  Her favorite poem was "Lalla Rookh."

"The best girl in the world!  He will be a happy fellow who gets her!"
was the sentiment of the elderly gentlemen who visited the Vincys; and
the rejected young men thought of trying again, as is the fashion in
country towns where the horizon is not thick with coming rivals.  But
Mrs. Plymdale thought that Rosamond had been educated to a ridiculous
pitch, for what was the use of accomplishments which would be all laid
aside as soon as she was married?  While her aunt Bulstrode, who had a
sisterly faithfulness towards her brother's family, had two sincere
wishes for Rosamond--that she might show a more serious turn of mind,
and that she might meet with a husband whose wealth corresponded to her
habits.

 Lydgate and various other Middlemarchers are having dinner at the Vincys' house. The subject of who would be the chaplain of the new fever hospital comes up at dinner. The matter will be decided by a vote from the board of directors, and Lydgate remarks that stuff like that is too often decided by popularity, instead of by who's the best person for the job. After dinner, Rosamond and Lydgate have a chat in the drawing room about music and such, and then Rosamond is called upon to sing to the whole group. Mr. Farebrother arrives just as a lot of the group is about to sit down to play whist . He's a threadbare, unmarried forty-year-old vicar. Lydgate likes him, but doesn't like that he plays whist for money. The truth of the matter, though, is that Mr. Farebrother needs the money that he makes at cards to help support his old mother and aunt, who live with him. Lydgate leaves the dinner party convinced that he's not actually in love with Rosamond - after all, he doesn't have enough money to support a wife, and he has his career to consider. Rosamond, though, is thoroughly convinced that Lydgate must be in love with her , and is obsessed with the idea of marrying him and visiting his fancy relatives.

