 he was assailed by the vulgar hateful trials of a man who has bought
and used a great many things which might have been done without, and which he is
unable to pay for, though the demand for payment has become pressing.
    How this came about may be easily seen without much arithmetic or knowledge
of prices. When a man in setting up a house and preparing for marriage finds
that his furniture and other initial expenses come to between four and five
hundred pounds more than he has capital to pay for; when at the end of a year it
appears that his house-hold expenses, horses and et cæteras, amount to nearly a
thousand, while the proceeds of the practice reckoned from the old books to be
worth eight hundred per annum have sunk like a summer pond and make hardly five
hundred chiefly in unpaid entries, the plain inference is that, whether he minds
it or not, he is in debt. Those were less expensive times than our own, and
provincial life was comparatively modest; but the ease with which a medical man
who had lately bought a practice, who thought that he was obliged to keep two
horses, whose table was supplied without stint, and who paid an insurance on his
life and a high rent for house and garden, might find his expenses doubling his
receipts, can be conceived by any one who does not think these details beneath
his consideration. Rosamond, accustomed from her childhood to an extravagant
household, thought that good housekeeping consisted simply in ordering the best
of everything - nothing else »answered;« and Lydgate supposed that »if things
were done at all, they must be done properly« - he did not see how they were to
live otherwise. If each head of household expenditure had been mentioned to him
beforehand, he would have probably observed that »it could hardly come to much,«
and if any one had suggested a saving on a particular article - for example, the
substitution of cheap fish for dear - it would have appeared to him simply a
penny-wise, mean notion. Rosamond, even without such an occasion as Captain
Lydgate's visit, was fond of giving invitations, and Lydgate, though he often
thought the guests tiresome, did not interfere. This sociability seemed a
necessary part of professional prudence, and the entertainment must be suitable.
It is true Lydgate was constantly visiting the homes of the poor and adjusting
his prescriptions of diet to their small means; but, dear me! has it not by this
time ceased to be remarkable - is it not rather what we expect in men, that they
should have numerous
