"Very good," said Fred, who had his own reasons for not being in the
best spirits, and wanted to get away.
"Miss Vincy is a musician?" said Lydgate, following her with his eyes.
(Every nerve and muscle in Rosamond was adjusted to the consciousness
that she was being looked at. She was by nature an actress of parts
that entered into her physique: she even acted her own character, and
so well, that she did not know it to be precisely her own.)
"The best in Middlemarch, I'll be bound," said Mr. Featherstone, "let
the next be who she will. Eh, Fred? Speak up for your sister."
"I'm afraid I'm out of court, sir. My evidence would be good for
nothing."
"Middlemarch has not a very high standard, uncle," said Rosamond, with
a pretty lightness, going towards her whip, which lay at a distance.
Lydgate was quick in anticipating her. He reached the whip before she
did, and turned to present it to her. She bowed and looked at him: he
of course was looking at her, and their eyes met with that peculiar
meeting which is never arrived at by effort, but seems like a sudden
divine clearance of haze. I think Lydgate turned a little paler than
usual, but Rosamond blushed deeply and felt a certain astonishment.
After that, she was really anxious to go, and did not know what sort of
stupidity her uncle was talking of when she went to shake hands with
him.
Yet this result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called
falling in love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand.
Ever since that important new arrival in Middlemarch she had woven a
little future, of which something like this scene was the necessary
beginning. Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging to a raft, or duly
escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus, have always had a
circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind, against which native
merit has urged itself in vain. And a stranger was absolutely
necessary to Rosamond's social romance, which had always turned on a
lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher, and who had no
connections at all like her own: of late, indeed, the construction
seemed to demand that he should somehow be related to a baronet. Now
that she and the stranger had met, reality proved much more moving than
anticipation, and Rosamond could not doubt that this was the great
epoch of her life. She judged of her own symptoms as those of
awakening love, and she held it still more natural that Mr. Lydgate
should have fallen in love at first sight of her. These things
happened so often at balls, and why not by the morning light, when the
complexion showed all the better for it? Rosamond, though no older
than Mary, was rather used to being fallen in love with; but she, for
her part, had remained indifferent and fastidiously critical towards
both fresh sprig and faded bachelor. And here was Mr. Lydgate suddenly
corresponding to her ideal, being altogether foreign to Middlemarch,
carrying a certain air of distinction congruous with good family, and
possessing connections which offered vistas of that middle-class
heaven, rank; a man of talent, also, whom it would be especially
delightful to enslave: in fact, a man who had touched her nature quite
newly, and brought a vivid interest into her life which was better than
any fancied "might-be" such as she was in the habit of opposing to the
actual.