cleverness,
and amiability.

Lydgate found it more and more agreeable to be with her, and there was
no constraint now, there was a delightful interchange of influence in
their eyes, and what they said had that superfluity of meaning for
them, which is observable with some sense of flatness by a third
person; still they had no interviews or asides from which a third
person need have been excluded. In fact, they flirted; and Lydgate was
secure in the belief that they did nothing else. If a man could not
love and be wise, surely he could flirt and be wise at the same time?
Really, the men in Middlemarch, except Mr. Farebrother, were great
bores, and Lydgate did not care about commercial politics or cards:
what was he to do for relaxation? He was often invited to the
Bulstrodes'; but the girls there were hardly out of the schoolroom; and
Mrs. Bulstrode's _naive_ way of conciliating piety and worldliness, the
nothingness of this life and the desirability of cut glass, the
consciousness at once of filthy rags and the best damask, was not a
sufficient relief from the weight of her husband's invariable
seriousness. The Vincys' house, with all its faults, was the
pleasanter by contrast; besides, it nourished Rosamond--sweet to look
at as a half-opened blush-rose, and adorned with accomplishments for
the refined amusement of man.

But he made some enemies, other than medical, by his success with Miss
Vincy. One evening he came into the drawing-room rather late, when
several other visitors were there. The card-table had drawn off the
elders, and Mr. Ned Plymdale (one of the good matches in Middlemarch,
though not one of its leading minds) was in tete-a-tete with Rosamond.
He had brought the last "Keepsake," the gorgeous watered-silk
publication which marked modern progress at that time; and he
considered himself very fortunate that he could be the first to look
over it with her, dwelling on the ladies and gentlemen with shiny
copper-plate cheeks and copper-plate smiles, and pointing to comic
verses as capital and sentimental stories as interesting. Rosamond was
gracious, and Mr. Ned was satisfied that he had the very best thing in
art and literature as a medium for "paying addresses"--the very thing
to please a nice girl. He had also reasons, deep rather than
ostensible, for being satisfied with his own appearance. To
superficial observers his chin had too vanishing an aspect, looking as
if it were being gradually rea