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Eliot, George, 1819-1880

"Middlemarch"


He hoped there was his old place on the rug, and a great deal of
music in store for him. But he was quite uncertain as to the time.
While Lydgate was reading the letter to Rosamond, her face looked
like a reviving flower--it grew prettier and more blooming.
There was nothing unendurable now: the debts were paid, Mr. Ladislaw
was coming, and Lydgate would be persuaded to leave Middlemarch
and settle in London, which was "so different from a provincial town."
That was a bright bit of morning. But soon the sky became black
over poor Rosamond. The presence of a new gloom in her husband,
about which he was entirely reserved towards her--for he dreaded
to expose his lacerated feeling to her neutrality and misconception--
soon received a painfully strange explanation, alien to all her
previous notions of what could affect her happiness. In the new
gayety of her spirits, thinking that Lydgate had merely a worse fit
of moodiness than usual, causing him to leave her remarks unanswered,
and evidently to keep out of her way as much as possible, she chose,
a few days after the meeting, and without speaking to him on
the subject, to send out notes of invitation for a small evening party,
feeling convinced that this was a judicious step, since people seemed
to have been keeping aloof from them, and wanted restoring to the
old habit of intercourse.


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