, he would not have cared a rotten nut for the
banker's friendship or enmity. What he really cared for was a medium
for his work, a vehicle for his ideas; and after all, was he not bound
to prefer the object of getting a good hospital, where he could
demonstrate the specific distinctions of fever and test therapeutic
results, before anything else connected with this chaplaincy? For the
first time Lydgate was feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of
small social conditions, and their frustrating complexity. At the end
of his inward debate, when he set out for the hospital, his hope was
really in the chance that discussion might somehow give a new aspect to
the question, and make the scale dip so as to exclude the necessity for
voting. I think he trusted a little also to the energy which is
begotten by circumstances--some feeling rushing warmly and making
resolve easy, while debate in cool blood had only made it more
difficult. However it was, he did not distinctly say to himself on
which side he would vote; and all the while he was inwardly resenting
the subjection which had been forced upon him. It would have seemed
beforehand like a ridiculous piece of bad logic that he, with his
unmixed resolutions of independence and his select purposes, would find
himself at the very outset in the grasp of petty alternatives, each of
which was repugnant to him. In his student's chambers, he had
prearranged his social action quite differently.

Lydgate was late in setting out, but Dr. Sprague, the two other
surgeons, and several of the directors had arrived early; Mr.
Bulstrode, treasurer and chairman, being among those who were still
absent. The conversation seemed to imply that the issue was
problematical, and that a majority for Tyke was not so certain as had
been generally supposed. The two physicians, for a wonder, turned out
to be unanimous, or rather, though of different minds, they concurred
in action. Dr. Sprague, the rugged and weighty, was, as every one had
foreseen, an adherent of Mr. Farebrother. The Doctor was more than
suspected of having no religion, but somehow Middlemarch tolerated this
deficiency in him as if he had been a Lord Chancellor; indeed it is
probable that his professional weight was the more believed in, the
world-old association of cleverness with the evil principle being still
potent in the minds even of lady-patients who had the strictest ideas
of frilling and sentiment. It was perhaps