It was a hundred to one that some good chance would fall in his way;
the longer he thought of it, the less possible it seemed that he
should not have a good chance, and the less reasonable that he should
not equip himself with the powder and shot for bringing it down.
He would ride to Houndsley with Bambridge and with Horrock "the vet,"
and without asking them anything expressly, he should virtually get
the benefit of their opinion. Before he set out, Fred got the eighty
pounds from his mother.
Most of those who saw Fred riding out of Middlemarch in company
with Bambridge and Horrock, on his way of course to Houndsley
horse-fair, thought that young Vincy was pleasure-seeking as usual;
and but for an unwonted consciousness of grave matters on hand,
he himself would have had a sense of dissipation, and of doing
what might be expected of a gay young fellow. Considering that Fred
was not at all coarse, that he rather looked down on the manners
and speech of young men who had not been to the university,
and that he had written stanzas as pastoral and unvoluptuous
as his flute-playing, his attraction towards Bambridge and Horrock
was an interesting fact which even the love of horse-flesh would
not wholly account for without that mysterious influence of Naming
which determinates so much of mortal choice. Under any other name
than "pleasure" the society of Messieurs Bambridge and Horrock must
certainly have been regarded as monotonous; and to arrive with them
at Houndsley on a drizzling afternoon, to get down at the Red Lion
in a street shaded with coal-dust, and dine in a room furnished with
a dirt-enamelled map of the county, a bad portrait of an anonymous
horse in a stable, His Majesty George the Fourth with legs and cravat,
and various leaden spittoons, might have seemed a hard business,
but for the sustaining power of nomenclature which determined
that the pursuit of these things was "gay.
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