Page 835 - middlemarch

husband, was something as good as her dreams before mar-
riage: moreover she was riveting the connection with the
family at Quallingham, which must be a wise thing to do.
But the gentle gray, unprepared for the crash of a tree
that was being felled on the edge of Halsell wood, took
fright, and caused a worse fright to Rosamond, leading fi-
nally to the loss of her baby. Lydgate could not show his
anger towards her, but he was rather bearish to the Captain,
whose visit naturally soon came to an end.
In all future conversations on the subject, Rosamond was
mildly certain that the ride had made no difference, and
that if she had stayed at home the same symptoms would
have come on and would have ended in the same way, be-
cause she had felt something like them before.
Lydgate could only say, ‘Poor, poor darling!’—but he
secretly wondered over the terrible tenacity of this mild
creature. There was gathering within him an amazed sense
of his powerlessness over Rosamond. His superior knowl-
edge and mental force, instead of being, as he had imagined,
a shrine to consult on all occasions, was simply set aside
on every practical question. He had regarded Rosamond’s
cleverness as precisely of the receptive kind which became
a woman. He was now beginning to find out what that clev-
erness was—what was the shape into which it had run as
into a close network aloof and independent. No one quicker
than Rosamond to see causes and effects which lay with-
in the track of her own tastes and interests: she had seen
clearly Lydgate’s preeminence in Middlemarch society, and
could go on imaginatively tracing still more agreeable so-

Middlemarch