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