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 “Why, what can a man do when he takes to adoring one of you mermaids? He only neglects his work and runs up bills.”

“I am sure you do not neglect your work. You are always at the Hospital, or seeing poor patients, or thinking about some doctor’s quarrel; and then at home you always want to pore over your microscope and phials. Confess you like those things better than me.”

“Haven’t you ambition enough to wish that your husband should be something better than a Middlemarch doctor?” said Lydgate, letting his hands fall on to his wife’s shoulders, and looking at her with affectionate gravity. “I shall make you learn my favourite bit from an old poet—

What“What [sic] I want, Rosy, is to do worthy the writing,—and to write out myself what I have done. A man must work, to do that, my pet.”

“Of course, I wish you to make discoveries: no one could more wish you to attain a high position in some better place than Middlemarch. You cannot say that I have ever tried to hinder you from working. But we cannot live like hermits. You are not discontented with me, Tertius?”

“No, dear, no. I am too entirely contented.”

“But what did Mrs Casaubon want to say to you?”

“Merely to ask about her husband’s health. But I think she is going to be splendid to our New Hospital: I think she will give us two hundred a-year.”

Dorothea, walking round the laurel-planted plots of the New Hospital with Lydgate, had learned from him that there were no signs of change in Mr Casaubon’s bodily condition beyond the mental sign of anxiety to know the truth about his illness, she was silent for a few moments, wondering whether she had said or done anything to rouse this new anxiety. Lydgate, not willing to let slip an opportunity of furthering a favourite purpose, ventured to say—

“I don’t know whether your or Mr Casaubon’s attention has been drawn to the needs of our New Hospital. Circumstances have made it seem rather egotistic in me to urge the subject; but that is not my fault: it is because there is a fight being made against it by the other medical men. I think you are generally interested in such things, for