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He asks Lydgate all sorts of questions and then screws up his face while he hears the answers, as if they were pinching his toes. That's his way. Ah, here comes my grilled bone." "But how came you to stay out so late, my dear? You only said you were going to your uncle's." "Oh, I dined at Plymdale's. We had whist. Lydgate was there too." "And what do you think of him?
"Her back is very large; she seems to have sat for that," said Rosamond, not meaning any satire, but thinking how red young Plymdale's hands were, and wondering why Lydgate did not come. She went on with her tatting all the while. "I did not say she was as beautiful as you are," said Mr. Ned, venturing to look from the portrait to its rival.
"I am sure he is a very deserving, well-principled young man," said Rosamond, with a neat air of patronage in return for Mrs. Plymdale's wholesome corrections. "Oh, he has not the style of a captain in the army, or that sort of carriage as if everybody was beneath him, or that showy kind of talking, and singing, and intellectual talent. But I am thankful he has not.
Lydgate, startled and jarred, looked up in silence for a moment, like a man who has been disturbed in his sleep. Then flushing with an unpleasant consciousness, he asked "How do you know?" "I called at Mrs. Plymdale's this morning, and she told me that he had taken the house in St. Peter's Place, next to Mr. Hackbutt's." Lydgate was silent.
Plymdale's maternal view was, that Rosamond might possibly now have retrospective glimpses of her own folly; and feeling the advantages to be at present all on the side of her son, was too kind a woman not to behave graciously. "Yes, Ned is most happy, I must say. And Sophy Toller is all I could desire in a daughter-in-law.
"I suspect you of being an adroit flatterer," said Rosamond, feeling sure that she should have to reject this young gentleman a second time. But now Lydgate came in; the book was closed before he reached Rosamond's corner, and as he took his seat with easy confidence on the other side of her, young Plymdale's jaw fell like a barometer towards the cheerless side of change.
"It may be for the glory of God, but it is not for the glory of the Middlemarch trade, that Plymdale's house uses those blue and green dyes it gets from the Brassing manufactory; they rot the silk, that's all I know about it. Perhaps if other people knew so much of the profit went to the glory of God, they might like it better.
All this time Lord Arthur Savile had remained standing by the fireplace, with the same feeling of dread over him, the same sickening sense of coming evil. He smiled sadly at his sister, as she swept past him on Lord Plymdale's arm, looking lovely in her pink brocade and pearls, and he hardly heard Lady Windermere when she called to him to follow her.
"How rash you are!" said Rosamond, inwardly delighted. "Do you see that you have given offence?" "What! is it Mr. Plymdale's book? I am sorry. I didn't think about it." "I shall begin to admit what you said of yourself when you first came here that you are a bear, and want teaching by the birds." "Well, there is a bird who can teach me what she will. Don't I listen to her willingly?"
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