How different he was from young Plymdale or Mr. Caius Larcher!
Those young men had not a notion of French, and could speak on
no subject with striking knowledge, except perhaps the dyeing
and carrying trades, which of course they were ashamed to mention;
they were Middlemarch gentry, elated with their silver-headed whips
and satin stocks, but embarrassed in their manners, and timidly jocose:
even Fred was above them, having at least the accent and manner
of a university man. Whereas Lydgate was always listened to,
bore himself with the careless politeness of conscious superiority,
and seemed to have the right clothes on by a certain natural affinity,
without ever having to think about them. Rosamond was proud when he
entered the room, and when he approached her with a distinguishing smile,
she had a delicious sense that she was the object of enviable homage.
If Lydgate had been aware of all the pride he excited in that
delicate bosom, he might have been just as well pleased as any
other man, even the most densely ignorant of humoral pathology
or fibrous tissue: he held it one of the prettiest attitudes of
the feminine mind to adore a man's pre-eminence without too precise
a knowledge of what it consisted in. But Rosamond was not one
of those helpless girls who betray themselves unawares, and whose
behavior is awkwardly driven by their impulses, instead of being
steered by wary grace and propriety.
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