But she was not joyous: her married life had fulfilled
none of her hopes, and had been quite spoiled for her imagination.
In this brief interval of calm, Lydgate, remembering that he had
often been stormy in his hours of perturbation, and mindful of the
pain Rosamond had had to bear, was carefully gentle towards her;
but he, too, had lost some of his old spirit, and he still felt it
necessary to refer to an economical change in their way of living
as a matter of course, trying to reconcile her to it gradually,
and repressing his anger when she answered by wishing that he
would go to live in London. When she did not make this answer,
she listened languidly, and wondered what she had that was worth
living for. The hard and contemptuous words which had fallen from
her husband in his anger had deeply offended that vanity which he
had at first called into active enjoyment; and what she regarded
as his perverse way of looking at things, kept up a secret repulsion,
which made her receive all his tenderness as a poor substitute
for the happiness he had failed to give her. They were at a
disadvantage with their neighbors, and there was no longer any
outlook towards Quallingham--there was no outlook anywhere except
in an occasional letter from Will Ladislaw. She had felt stung and
disappointed by Will's resolution to quit Middlemarch, for in spite
of what she knew and guessed about his admiration for Dorothea,
she secretly cherished the belief that he had, or would necessarily
come to have, much more admiration for herself; Rosamond being one
of those women who live much in the idea that each man they meet
would have preferred them if the preference had not been hopeless.
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