I am sure you and Wrench ought to be obliged to him," said Dr.
Minchin, looking towards Toller, "for he has sent you the cream of
Peacock's patients."

"Lydgate has been living at a great rate for a young beginner," said
Mr. Harry Toller, the brewer. "I suppose his relations in the North
back him up."

"I hope so," said Mr. Chichely, "else he ought not to have married that
nice girl we were all so fond of. Hang it, one has a grudge against a
man who carries off the prettiest girl in the town."

"Ay, by God! and the best too," said Mr. Standish.

"My friend Vincy didn't half like the marriage, I know that," said Mr.
Chichely. "_He_ wouldn't do much. How the relations on the other side
may have come down I can't say." There was an emphatic kind of
reticence in Mr. Chichely's manner of speaking.

"Oh, I shouldn't think Lydgate ever looked to practice for a living,"
said Mr. Toller, with a slight touch of sarcasm, and there the subject
was dropped.

This was not the first time that Mr. Farebrother had heard hints of
Lydgate's expenses being obviously too great to be met by his practice,
but he thought it not unlikely that there were resources or
expectations which excused the large outlay at the time of Lydgate's
marriage, and which might hinder any bad consequences from the
disappointment in his practice. One evening, when he took the pains to
go to Middlemarch on purpose to have a chat with Lydgate as of old, he
noticed in him an air of excited effort quite unlike his usual easy way
of keeping silence or breaking it with abrupt energy whenever he had
anything to say. Lydgate talked persistently when they were in his
work-room, putting arguments for and against the probability of certain
biological views; but he had none of those definite things to say or to
show which give the waymarks of a patient uninterrupted pursuit, such
as he used himself to insist on, saying that "there must be a systole
and diastole in all inquiry," and that "a man's mind must be
continually expanding and shrinking between the whole human horizon and
the horizon of an object-glass." That evening he seemed to be talking
widely for the sake of resisting any personal bearing; and before long
they went into the drawing room, where Lydgate, having asked Rosamond
to give them music, sank back in his chair in silence, but with a
strange light in his eyes. "He may have been taking an opiate," was a
thought that crossed Mr. Farebrother's min