ually alienating influences, even without
the fact of his having placed himself at a disadvantage in the town,
and without that first shock of revelation about Dover's debt, would
have made his presence dull to her. There was another presence which
ever since the early days of her marriage, until four months ago, had
been an agreeable excitement, but that was gone: Rosamond would not
confess to herself how much the consequent blank had to do with her
utter ennui; and it seemed to her (perhaps she was right) that an
invitation to Quallingham, and an opening for Lydgate to settle
elsewhere than in Middlemarch--in London, or somewhere likely to be
free from unpleasantness--would satisfy her quite well, and make her
indifferent to the absence of Will Ladislaw, towards whom she felt some
resentment for his exaltation of Mrs. Casaubon.

That was the state of things with Lydgate and Rosamond on the New
Year's Day when they dined at her father's, she looking mildly neutral
towards him in remembrance of his ill-tempered behavior at breakfast,
and he carrying a much deeper effect from the inward conflict in which
that morning scene was only one of many epochs. His flushed effort
while talking to Mr. Farebrother--his effort after the cynical pretence
that all ways of getting money are essentially the same, and that
chance has an empire which reduces choice to a fool's illusion--was but
the symptom of a wavering resolve, a benumbed response to the old
stimuli of enthusiasm.

What was he to do? He saw even more keenly than Rosamond did the
dreariness of taking her into the small house in Bride Street, where
she would have scanty furniture around her and discontent within: a
life of privation and life with Rosamond were two images which had
become more and more irreconcilable ever since the threat of privation
had disclosed itself. But even if his resolves had forced the two
images into combination, the useful preliminaries to that hard change
were not visibly within reach. And though he had not given the promise
which his wife had asked for, he did not go again to Trumbull. He even
began to think of taking a rapid journey to the North and seeing Sir
Godwin. He had once believed that nothing would urge him into making
an application for money to his uncle, but he had not then known the
full pressure of alternatives yet more disagreeable. He could not
depend on the effect of a letter; it was only in an interview, however
dis