 Lydgate to her guests,
she had a placid sense that his rank penetrated them as if it had been an odour.
The satisfaction was enough for the time to melt away some disappointment in the
conditions of marriage with a medical man even of good birth: it seemed now that
her marriage was visibly as well as ideally floating her above the Middlemarch
level, and the future looked bright with letters and visits to and from
Quallingham, and vague advancement in consequence for Tertius. Especially as,
probably at the Captain's suggestion, his married sister, Mrs. Mengan, had come
with her maid, and stayed two nights on her way from town. Hence it was clearly
worth while for Rosamond to take pains with her music and the careful selection
of her lace.
    As to Captain Lydgate himself, his low brow, his aquiline nose bent on one
side, and his rather heavy utterance, might have been disadvantageous in any
young gentleman who had not a military bearing and mustache to give him what is
doated on by some flower-like blond heads as »style.« He had, moreover, that
sort of high-breeding which consists in being free from the petty solicitudes of
middle-class gentility, and he was a great critic of feminine charms. Rosamond
delighted in his admiration now even more than she had done at Quallingham, and
he found it easy to spend several hours of the day in flirting with her. The
visit altogether was one of the pleasantest larks he had ever had, not the less
so perhaps because he suspected that his queer cousin Tertius wished him away:
though Lydgate, who would rather (hyperbolically speaking) have died than have
failed in polite hospitality, suppressed his dislike, and only pretended
generally not to hear what the gallant officer said, consigning the task of
answering him to Rosamond. For he was not at all a jealous husband, and
preferred leaving a feather-headed young gentleman alone with his wife to
bearing him company.
    »I wish you would talk more to the Captain at dinner, Tertius,« said
Rosamond, one evening when the important guest was gone to Loamford to see some
brother officers stationed there. »You really look so absent sometimes - you
seem to be seeing through his head into something behind it, instead of looking
at him.«
    »My dear Rosy, you don't expect me to talk much to such a conceited ass as
that, I hope,« said Lydgate, brusquely. »If he got his head broken, I might look
at it with interest, not before.«
    »I cannot conceive why you
