look at her or speak to her with more than the inevitable amount of
admiration and compliment which a man must give to a beautiful girl; indeed, it
seemed to him that his enjoyment of her music had remained almost silent, for he
feared falling into the rudeness of telling her his great surprise at her
possession of such accomplishment. But Rosamond had registered every look and
word, and estimated them as the opening incidents of a preconceived romance -
incidents which gather value from the foreseen development and climax. In
Rosamond's romance it was not necessary to imagine much about the inward life of
the hero, or of his serious business in the world: of course, he had a
profession and was clever, as well as sufficiently handsome; but the piquant
fact about Lydgate was his good birth, which distinguished him from all
Middlemarch admirers, and presented marriage as a prospect of rising in rank and
getting a little nearer to that celestial condition on earth in which she would
have nothing to do with vulgar people, and perhaps at last associate with
relatives quite equal to the county people who looked down on the
Middlemarchers. It was part of Rosamond's cleverness to discern very subtly the
faintest aroma of rank, and once when she had seen the Miss Brookes accompanying
their uncle at the county assizes, and seated among the aristocracy, she had
envied them, notwithstanding their plain dress.
    If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a man of family could
cause thrills of satisfaction which had anything to do with the sense that she
was in love with him, I will ask you to use your power of comparison a little
more effectively, and consider whether red cloth and epaulets have never had an
influence of that sort. Our passions do not live apart in locked chambers, but,
dressed in their small wardrobe of notions, bring their provisions to a common
table and mess together, feeding out of the common store according to their
appetite.
    Rosamond, in fact, was entirely occupied not exactly with Tertius Lydgate as
he was in himself, but with his relation to her; and it was excusable in a girl
who was accustomed to hear that all young men might, could, would be, or
actually were in love with her, to believe at once that Lydgate could be no
exception. His looks and words meant more to her than other men's, because she
cared more for them: she thought of them diligently, and diligently attended to
that perfection of appearance, behaviour, sentiments, and all other elegancies,
which would find in Lydgate a more adequate admirer than she had yet been