Page:Eliot - Middlemarch, vol. IV, 1872.djvu/15

Rh "Ay, by God! and the best too," said Mr Standish.

"My friend Vincy didn't half like the marriage, I know that," said Mr Chichely. "He wouldn't do much. How the relations on the other side may have come down I can't say." There was an emphatic kind of reticence in Mr Chichely's manner of speaking.

"Oh, I shouldn't think Lydgate ever looked to practice for a living," said Mr Toller, with a slight touch of sarcasm, and there the subject was dropped.

This was not the first time that Mr Farebrother had heard hints of Lydgate's expenses being obviously too great to be met by his practice, but he thought it not unlikely that there were resources or expectations which excused the large outlay at the time of Lydgate's marriage, and which might hinder any bad consequences from the disappointment in his practice. One evening, when he took the pains to go to Middlemarch on purpose to have a chat with Lydgate as of old, he noticed in him an air of excited effort quite unlike his usual easy way of keeping silence or breaking it with abrupt energy whenever he had anything to say. Lydgate talked persistently when they were in his work-room, putting arguments for and against the probability of certain biological views; but he had