Lydgate had observed in him from the first a marked coldness about his
marriage and other private circumstances, a coldness which he had
hitherto preferred to any warmth of familiarity between them. He
deferred the intention from day to day, his habit of acting on his
conclusions being made infirm by his repugnance to every possible
conclusion and its consequent act. He saw Mr. Bulstrode often, but he
did not try to use any occasion for his private purpose. At one moment
he thought, "I will write a letter: I prefer that to any circuitous
talk;" at another he thought, "No; if I were talking to him, I could
make a retreat before any signs of disinclination."

Still the days passed and no letter was written, no special interview
sought. In his shrinking from the humiliation of a dependent attitude
towards Bulstrode, he began to familiarize his imagination with another
step even more unlike his remembered self. He began spontaneously to
consider whether it would be possible to carry out that puerile notion
of Rosamond's which had often made him angry, namely, that they should
quit Middlemarch without seeing anything beyond that preface. The
question came--"Would any man buy the practice of me even now, for as
little as it is worth? Then the sale might happen as a necessary
preparation for going away."

But against his taking this step, which he still felt to be a
contemptible relinquishment of present work, a guilty turning aside
from what was a real and might be a widening channel for worthy
activity, to start again without any justified destination, there was
this obstacle, that the purchaser, if procurable at all, might not be
quickly forthcoming. And afterwards? Rosamond in a poor lodging,
though in the largest city or most distant town, would not find the
life that could save her from gloom, and save him from the reproach of
having plunged her into it. For when a man is at the foot of the hill
in his fortunes, he may stay a long while there in spite of
professional accomplishment. In the British climate there is no
incompatibility between scientific insight and furnished lodgings: the
incompatibility is chiefly between scientific ambition and a wife who
objects to that kind of residence.

But in the midst of his hesitation, opportunity came to decide him. A
note from Mr. Bulstrode requested Lydgate to call on him at the Bank.
A hypochondriacal tendency had shown itself in the banker's
constitution of l