 for a heaven.
    Certainly nothing at present could seem much less important to Lydgate than
the turn of Miss Brooke's mind, or to Miss Brooke than the qualities of the
woman who had attracted this young surgeon. But any one watching keenly the
stealthy convergence of human lots, sees a slow preparation of effects from one
life on another, which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the
frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbour. Destiny stands by
sarcastic with our dramatis personæ folded in her hand.
    Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had not only
its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional dandies who ended by
living up an entry with a drab and six children for their establishment, but
also those less marked vicissitudes which are constantly shifting the boundaries
of social intercourse, and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some
slipped a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates,
gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs; some were caught in
political currents, some in ecclesiastical, and perhaps found themselves
surprisingly grouped in consequence; while a few personages or families that
stood with rocky firmness amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new
aspects in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self and
beholder. Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh threads of
connection - gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the savings-bank, and
the worship of the solar guinea became extinct; while squires and baronets, and
even lords who had once lived blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the
faultiness of closer acquaintanceship. Settlers, too, came from distant
counties, some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive
advantage in cunning. In fact, much the same sort of movement and mixture went
on in old England as we find in older Herodotus, who also, in telling what had
been, thought it well to take a woman's lot for his starting-point; though Io,
as a maiden apparently beguiled by attractive merchandise, was the reverse of
Miss Brooke, and in this respect perhaps bore more resemblance to Rosamond
Vincy, who had excellent taste in costume, with that nymph-like figure and pure
blondness which give the largest range to choice in the flow and colour of
drapery. But these things made only part of her charm. She was admitted to be
the flower of Mrs. Lemon's school, the chief school in the county, where the
teaching included all that was demanded in the accomplished female - even to
extras, such as the getting in and out of
