 the necessary beginning. Strangers, whether
wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by
portmanteaus, have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind,
against which native merit has urged itself in vain. And a stranger was
absolutely necessary to Rosamond's social romance, which had always turned on a
lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher, and who had no connections at
all like her own: of late, indeed, the construction seemed to demand that he
should somehow be related to a baronet. Now that she and the stranger had met,
reality proved much more moving than anticipation, and Rosamond could not doubt
that this was the great epoch of her life. She judged of her own symptoms as
those of awakening love, and she held it still more natural that Mr. Lydgate
should have fallen in love at first sight of her. These things happened so often
at balls, and why not by the morning light, when the complexion showed all the
better for it? Rosamond, though no older than Mary, was rather used to being
fallen in love with; but she, for her part, had remained indifferent and
fastidiously critical towards both fresh sprig and faded bachelor. And here was
Mr. Lydgate suddenly corresponding to her ideal, being altogether foreign to
Middlemarch, carrying a certain air of distinction congruous with good family,
and possessing connections which offered vistas of that middle-class heaven,
rank: a man of talent, also, whom it would be especially delightful to enslave:
in fact, a man who had touched her nature quite newly, and brought a vivid
interest into her life which was better than any fancied »might-be« such as she
was in the habit of opposing to the actual.
    Thus, in riding home, both the brother and the sister were preoccupied and
inclined to be silent. Rosamond, whose basis for her structure had the usual
airy slightness, was of remarkably detailed and realistic imagination when the
foundation had been once presupposed; and before they had ridden a mile she was
far on in the costume and introductions of her wedded life, having determined on
her house in Middlemarch, and foreseen the visits she would pay to her husband's
high-bred relatives at a distance, whose finished manners she could appropriate
as thoroughly as she had done her school accomplishments, preparing herself thus
for vaguer elevations which might ultimately come. There was nothing financial,
still less sordid, in her previsions: she cared about what were considered
refinements, and not about the money that was to pay for them.
    Fred's mind,
