strikingly different from Miss Brooke: he did not in the least suppose
that he had lost his balance and fallen in love, but he had said of
that particular woman, "She is grace itself; she is perfectly lovely
and accomplished. That is what a woman ought to be: she ought to
produce the effect of exquisite music." Plain women he regarded as he
did the other severe facts of life, to be faced with philosophy and
investigated by science. But Rosamond Vincy seemed to have the true
melodic charm; and when a man has seen the woman whom he would have
chosen if he had intended to marry speedily, his remaining a bachelor
will usually depend on her resolution rather than on his. Lydgate
believed that he should not marry for several years: not marry until he
had trodden out a good clear path for himself away from the broad road
which was quite ready made. He had seen Miss Vincy above his horizon
almost as long as it had taken Mr. Casaubon to become engaged and
married: but this learned gentleman was possessed of a fortune; he had
assembled his voluminous notes, and had made that sort of reputation
which precedes performance,--often the larger part of a man's fame. He
took a wife, as we have seen, to adorn the remaining quadrant of his
course, and be a little moon that would cause hardly a calculable
perturbation. But Lydgate was young, poor, ambitious. He had his
half-century before him instead of behind him, and he had come to
Middlemarch bent on doing many things that were not directly fitted to
make his fortune or even secure him a good income. To a man under such
circumstances, taking a wife is something more than a question of
adornment, however highly he may rate this; and Lydgate was disposed to
give it the first place among wifely functions. To his taste, guided
by a single conversation, here was the point on which Miss Brooke would
be found wanting, notwithstanding her undeniable beauty. She did not
look at things from the proper feminine angle. The society of such
women was about as relaxing as going from your work to teach the second
form, instead of reclining in a paradise with sweet laughs for
bird-notes, and blue eyes for a heaven.

Certainly nothing at present could seem much less important to Lydgate
than the turn of Miss Brooke's mind, or to Miss Brooke than the
qualities of the woman who had attracted this young surgeon. But any
one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow
pr