consciousness that in
voting for Tyke he should be voting on the side obviously convenient for
himself. But would the end really be his own convenience? Other people would say
so, and would allege that he was currying favour with Bulstrode for the sake of
making himself important and getting on in the world. What then? He for his own
part knew that if his personal prospects simply had been concerned, he would not
have cared a rotten nut for the banker's friendship or enmity. What he really
cared for was a medium for his work, a vehicle for his ideas; and after all, was
he not bound to prefer the object of getting a good hospital, where he could
demonstrate the specific distinctions of fever and test therapeutic results,
before anything else connected with this chaplaincy? For the first time Lydgate
was feeling the hampering threadlike pressure of small social conditions, and
their frustrating complexity. At the end of his inward debate, when he set out
for the hospital, his hope was really in the chance that discussion might
somehow give a new aspect to the question, and make the scale dip so as to
exclude the necessity for voting. I think he trusted a little also to the energy
which is begotten by circumstances - some feeling rushing warmly and making
resolve easy, while debate in cool blood had only made it more difficult.
However it was, he did not distinctly say to himself on which side he would
vote; and all the while he was inwardly resenting the subjection which had been
forced upon him. It would have seemed beforehand like a ridiculous piece of bad
logic that he, with his unmixed resolutions of independence and his select
purposes, would find himself at the very outset in the grasp of petty
alternatives, each of which was repugnant to him. In his student's chambers, he
had prearranged his social action quite differently.
    Lydgate was late in setting out, but Dr. Sprague, the two other surgeons,
and several of the directors had arrived early; Mr. Bulstrode, treasurer and
chairman, being among those who were still absent. The conversation seemed to
imply that the issue was problematical, and that a majority for Tyke was not so
certain as had been generally supposed. The two physicians, for a wonder, turned
out to be unanimous, or rather, though of different minds, they concurred in
action. Dr. Sprague, the rugged and weighty, was, as every one had foreseen, an
adherent of Mr. Farebrother. The Doctor was more than suspected of having no
religion, but somehow Middle-march tolerated this deficiency in him as