have expressed their mutual
consciousness, as she would have shrunk from flakes of fire. She could
not say, "How much is only slander and false suspicion?" and he did not
say, "I am innocent."

CHAPTER LXXV.

"Le sentiment de la faussete des plaisirs presents, et
l'ignorance de la vanite des plaisirs absents causent
l'inconstance."--PASCAL.

Rosamond had a gleam of returning cheerfulness when the house was freed
from the threatening figure, and when all the disagreeable creditors
were paid. But she was not joyous: her married life had fulfilled none
of her hopes, and had been quite spoiled for her imagination. In this
brief interval of calm, Lydgate, remembering that he had often been
stormy in his hours of perturbation, and mindful of the pain Rosamond
had had to bear, was carefully gentle towards her; but he, too, had
lost some of his old spirit, and he still felt it necessary to refer to
an economical change in their way of living as a matter of course,
trying to reconcile her to it gradually, and repressing his anger when
she answered by wishing that he would go to live in London. When she
did not make this answer, she listened languidly, and wondered what she
had that was worth living for. The hard and contemptuous words which
had fallen from her husband in his anger had deeply offended that
vanity which he had at first called into active enjoyment; and what she
regarded as his perverse way of looking at things, kept up a secret
repulsion, which made her receive all his tenderness as a poor
substitute for the happiness he had failed to give her. They were at a
disadvantage with their neighbors, and there was no longer any outlook
towards Quallingham--there was no outlook anywhere except in an
occasional letter from Will Ladislaw. She had felt stung and
disappointed by Will's resolution to quit Middlemarch, for in spite of
what she knew and guessed about his admiration for Dorothea, she
secretly cherished the belief that he had, or would necessarily come to
have, much more admiration for herself; Rosamond being one of those
women who live much in the idea that each man they meet would have
preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless. Mrs. Casaubon
was all very well; but Will's interest in her dated before he knew Mrs.
Lydgate. Rosamond took his way of talking to herself, which was a
mixture of playful fault-finding and hyperbolical gallantry, as the
disguise of a deeper feel