"Has anything worried you?" she said. "Did that man come to you at the
Bank?"
"Yes; it was as I had supposed. He is a man who at one time might have
done better. But he has sunk into a drunken debauched creature."
"Is he quite gone away?" said Mrs. Bulstrode, anxiously but for certain
reasons she refrained from adding, "It was very disagreeable to hear
him calling himself a friend of yours." At that moment she would not
have liked to say anything which implied her habitual consciousness
that her husband's earlier connections were not quite on a level with
her own. Not that she knew much about them. That her husband had at
first been employed in a bank, that he had afterwards entered into what
he called city business and gained a fortune before he was
three-and-thirty, that he had married a widow who was much older than
himself--a Dissenter, and in other ways probably of that
disadvantageous quality usually perceptible in a first wife if inquired
into with the dispassionate judgment of a second--was almost as much as
she had cared to learn beyond the glimpses which Mr. Bulstrode's
narrative occasionally gave of his early bent towards religion, his
inclination to be a preacher, and his association with missionary and
philanthropic efforts. She believed in him as an excellent man whose
piety carried a peculiar eminence in belonging to a layman, whose
influence had turned her own mind toward seriousness, and whose share
of perishable good had been the means of raising her own position. But
she also liked to think that it was well in every sense for Mr.
Bulstrode to have won the hand of Harriet Vincy; whose family was
undeniable in a Middlemarch light--a better light surely than any
thrown in London thoroughfares or dissenting chapel-yards. The
unreformed provincial mind distrusted London; and while true religion
was everywhere saving, honest Mrs. Bulstrode was convinced that to be
saved in the Church was more respectable. She so much wished to ignore
towards others that her husband had ever been a London Dissenter, that
she liked to keep it out of sight even in talking to him. He was quite
aware of this; indeed in some respects he was rather afraid of this
ingenuous wife, whose imitative piety and native worldliness were
equally sincere, who had nothing to be ashamed of, and whom he had
married out of a thorough inclination still subsisting. But his fears
were such as belong to a man who cares to maintain his recognized
supremacy: the loss of high consideration from his wife, as from every
one else who did not clearly hate him out of enmity to the truth, would
be as the beginning of death to him. When she said--