Ware's abundant experience
in America, as to the right way of treating cases of alcoholic
poisoning such as this. Lydgate, when abroad, had already been
interested in this question: he was strongly convinced against the
prevalent practice of allowing alcohol and persistently administering
large doses of opium; and he had repeatedly acted on this conviction
with a favorable result.

"The man is in a diseased state," he thought, "but there's a good deal
of wear in him still. I suppose he is an object of charity to
Bulstrode. It is curious what patches of hardness and tenderness lie
side by side in men's dispositions. Bulstrode seems the most
unsympathetic fellow I ever saw about some people, and yet he has taken
no end of trouble, and spent a great deal of money, on benevolent
objects. I suppose he has some test by which he finds out whom Heaven
cares for--he has made up his mind that it doesn't care for me."

This streak of bitterness came from a plenteous source, and kept
widening in the current of his thought as he neared Lowick Gate. He
had not been there since his first interview with Bulstrode in the
morning, having been found at the Hospital by the banker's messenger;
and for the first time he was returning to his home without the vision
of any expedient in the background which left him a hope of raising
money enough to deliver him from the coming destitution of everything
which made his married life tolerable--everything which saved him and
Rosamond from that bare isolation in which they would be forced to
recognize how little of a comfort they could be to each other. It was
more bearable to do without tenderness for himself than to see that his
own tenderness could make no amends for the lack of other things to
her. The sufferings of his own pride from humiliations past and to
come were keen enough, yet they were hardly distinguishable to himself
from that more acute pain which dominated them--the pain of foreseeing
that Rosamond would come to regard him chiefly as the cause of
disappointment and unhappiness to her. He had never liked the
makeshifts of poverty, and they had never before entered into his
prospects for himself; but he was beginning now to imagine how two
creatures who loved each other, and had a stock of thoughts in common,
might laugh over their shabby furniture, and their calculations how far
they could afford butter and eggs. But the glimpse of that poetry
seemed as far off from him