MIDDLEMARCH (Completed)

Chapter 75

"Le sentiment de la fausset� des plaisirs pr�sents, et

l'ignorance de la vanit� des plaisirs absents causent

l'inconstance."--PASCAL.

Rosamond had a gleam of returning cheerfulness when the house was freed

from the threatening figure, and when all the disagreeable creditors

were paid. But she was not joyous: her married life had fulfilled

none of her hopes, and had been quite spoiled for her imagination.

In this brief interval of calm, Lydgate, remembering that he had

often been stormy in his hours of perturbation, and mindful of the

pain Rosamond had had to bear, was carefully gentle towards her;

but he, too, had lost some of his old spirit, and he still felt it

necessary to refer to an economical change in their way of living

as a matter of course, trying to reconcile her to it gradually,

and repressing his anger when she answered by wishing that he

would go to live in London. When she did not make this answer,

she listened languidly, and wondered what she had that was worth

living for. The hard and contemptuous words which had fallen from

her husband in his anger had deeply offended that vanity which he

had at first called into active enjoyment; and what she regarded

as his perverse way of looking at things, kept up a secret repulsion,

which made her receive all his tenderness as a poor substitute

for the happiness he had failed to give her. They were at a

disadvantage with their neighbors, and there was no longer any

outlook towards Quallingham--there was no outlook anywhere except

in an occasional letter from Will Ladislaw. She had felt stung and

disappointed by Will's resolution to quit Middlemarch, for in spite

of what she knew and guessed about his admiration for Dorothea,

she secretly cherished the belief that he had, or would necessarily

come to have, much more admiration for herself; Rosamond being one

of those women who live much in the idea that each man they meet

would have preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.

Mrs. Casaubon was all very well; but Will's interest in her dated before

he knew Mrs. Lydgate. Rosamond took his way of talking to herself,

which was a mixture of playful fault-finding and hyperbolical gallantry,

as the disguise of a deeper feeling; and in his presence she felt

that agreeable titillation of vanity and sense of romantic drama

which Lydgate's presence had no longer the magic to create.

She even fancied--what will not men and women fancy in these matters?--