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 gate, gravely. “And to say that you love me without loving the medical man in me, is the same sort of thing as to say that you like eating a peach but don’t like its flavour. Don’t say that again, dear, it pains me.”

“Very well, Doctor Grave-face,” said Rosy, dimpling, “I will declare in future that I dote on skeletons, and body-snatchers, and bits of things in phials, and quarrels with everybody, that end in your dying miserably.”

“No, no, not so bad as that,” said Lydgate, giving up remonstrance and petting her resignedly.

Lydgate, safely married and with the Hospital under his command, felt himself struggling for Medical Reform against Middlemarch, Middlemarch was becoming more and more conscious of the national struggle for another kind of Reform.

By the time that Lord John Russell’s measure was being debated in the House of Commons, there was a new political animation in Middlemarch, and a new definition of parties which might show a decided change of balance if a new election came. And there were some who already predicted this event, declaring that a Reform Bill would never be carried by the actual Parliament. This was what Will Ladislaw dwelt on to Mr Brooke as a reason for congratulation that he had not yet tried his strength at the hustings.

“Things will grow and ripen as if it were a comet year,” said Will. “The public temper will soon get to a cometary heat, now the question of Reform has set in. There is likely to be another election before long, and by that time Middlemarch will have got more ideas into its head. What we have to work at now is the ‘Pioneer’ and political meetings.”

“Quite right, Ladislaw; we shall make a new thing of opinion here,” said Mr Brooke. “Only I want to keep myself independent about Reform, you know: I don’t want to go too far. I want to take up Wilberforce’s and Romilly’s line, you know, and work at Negro Emancipation, Criminal Law—that kind of thing. But of course I should support Grey.”

“If you go in for the principle of Reform, you must be prepared to take what the situation offers,” said Will. “If everybody pulled for his own bit against everybody else, the whole question would go to tatters.”

“Yes, yes, I agree with you—I quite take that point of view. I