Page 165 - middlemarch

‘Oh, blameless people are always the most exasperating.
There is the bell—I think we must go down.’
‘I did not mean to quarrel,’ said Rosamond, putting on
her hat.
‘Quarrel? Nonsense; we have not quarrelled. If one is
not to get into a rage sometimes, what is the good of being
friends?’
‘Am I to repeat what you have said?’ ‘Just as you please.
I never say what I am afraid of having repeated. But let us
go down.’
Mr. Lydgate was rather late this morning, but the visitors
stayed long enough to see him; for Mr. Featherstone asked
Rosamond to sing to him, and she herself was-so kind as to
propose a second favorite song of his—‘Flow on, thou shin-
ing river’—after she had sung ‘Home, sweet home’ (which
she detested). This hard-headed old Overreach approved of
the sentimental song, as the suitable garnish for girls, and
also as fundamentally fine, sentiment being the right thing
for a song.
Mr. Featherstone was still applauding the last perfor-
mance, and assuring missy that her voice was as clear as a
blackbird’s, when Mr. Lydgate’s horse passed the window.
His dull expectation of the usual disagreeable routine
with an aged patient—who can hardly believe that medi-
cine would not ‘set him up’ if the doctor were only clever
enough—added to his general disbelief in Middlemarch
charms, made a doubly effective background to this vision
of Rosamond, whom old Featherstone made haste osten-
tatiously to introduce as his niece, though he had never

1 Middlemarch