ambition of making his life recognized as a factor in the better life
of mankind--like other heroes of science who had nothing but an obscure
country practice to begin with.

Poor Lydgate! or shall I say, Poor Rosamond! Each lived in a world of
which the other knew nothing. It had not occurred to Lydgate that he
had been a subject of eager meditation to Rosamond, who had neither any
reason for throwing her marriage into distant perspective, nor any
pathological studies to divert her mind from that ruminating habit,
that inward repetition of looks, words, and phrases, which makes a
large part in the lives of most girls. He had not meant to 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,