 seemed to
her almost perfect: if he had known his notes so that his enchantment under her
music had been less like an emotional elephant's, and if he had been able to
discriminate better the refinements of her taste in dress, she could hardly have
mentioned a deficiency in him. How different he was from young Plymdale or Mr.
Caius Larcher! Those young men had not a notion of French, and could speak on no
subject with striking knowledge, except perhaps the dyeing and carrying trades,
which of course they were ashamed to mention; they were Middlemarch gentry,
elated with their silver-headed whips and satin stocks, but embarrassed in their
manners, and timidly jocose: even Fred was above them, having at least the
accent and manner of a university man. Whereas Lydgate was always listened to,
bore himself with the careless politeness of conscious superiority, and seemed
to have the right clothes on by a certain natural affinity, without ever having
to think about them. Rosamond was proud when he entered the room, and when he
approached her with a distinguishing smile, she had a delicious sense that she
was the object of enviable homage. If Lydgate had been aware of all the pride he
excited in that delicate bosom, he might have been just as well pleased as any
other man, even the most densely ignorant of humoral pathology or fibrous
tissue: he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of the feminine mind to adore
a man's pre-eminence without too precise a knowledge of what it consisted in.
    But Rosamond was not one of those helpless girls who betray themselves
unawares, and whose behaviour is awkwardly driven by their impulses, instead of
being steered by wary grace and propriety. Do you imagine that her rapid
forecast and rumination concerning house-furniture and society were ever
discernible in her conversation, even with her mamma! On the contrary, she would
have expressed the prettiest surprise and disapprobation if she had heard that
another young lady had been detected in that immodest prematureness - indeed,
would probably have disbelieved in its possibility. For Rosamond never showed
any unbecoming knowledge, and was always that combination of correct sentiments,
music, dancing, drawing, elegant note-writing, private album for extracted
verse, and perfect blond loveliness, which made the irresistible woman for the
doomed man of that date. Think no unfair evil of her, pray: she had no wicked
plots, nothing sordid or mercenary; in fact, she never thought of money except
as something necessary which other people would always provide. She was not in
the habit of devising falsehoods, and if her statements
