was
not his fault: of course, since he had taken his lodgings in the town,
he had been making as many acquaintances as he could, his position
requiring that he should know everybody and everything. Lydgate was
really better worth knowing than any one else in the neighborhood, and
he happened to have a wife who was musical and altogether worth calling
upon. Here was the whole history of the situation in which Diana had
descended too unexpectedly on her worshipper. It was mortifying. Will
was conscious that he should not have been at Middlemarch but for
Dorothea; and yet his position there was threatening to divide him from
her with those barriers of habitual sentiment which are more fatal to
the persistence of mutual interest than all the distance between Rome
and Britain. Prejudices about rank and status were easy enough to defy
in the form of a tyrannical letter from Mr. Casaubon; but prejudices,
like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle--solid
as the pyramids, subtle as the twentieth echo of an echo, or as
the memory of hyacinths which once scented the darkness. And Will was
of a temperament to feel keenly the presence of subtleties: a man of
clumsier perceptions would not have felt, as he did, that for the first
time some sense of unfitness in perfect freedom with him had sprung up
in Dorothea's mind, and that their silence, as he conducted her to the
carriage, had had a chill in it. Perhaps Casaubon, in his hatred and
jealousy, had been insisting to Dorothea that Will had slid below her
socially. Confound Casaubon!

Will re-entered the drawing-room, took up his hat, and looking
irritated as he advanced towards Mrs. Lydgate, who had seated herself
at her work-table, said--

"It is always fatal to have music or poetry interrupted. May I come
another day and just finish about the rendering of 'Lungi dal caro
bene'?"

"I shall be happy to be taught," said Rosamond. "But I am sure you
admit that the interruption was a very beautiful one. I quite envy
your acquaintance with Mrs. Casaubon. Is she very clever? She looks
as if she were."

"Really, I never thought about it," said Will, sulkily.

"That is just the answer Tertius gave me, when I first asked him if she
were handsome. What is it that you gentlemen are thinking of when you
are with Mrs. Casaubon?"

"Herself," said Will, not indisposed to provoke the charming Mrs.
Lydgate. "When one sees a perfect woman, one never thi