purely personal. Bulstrode had indirectly helped to cause the failure of his practice, and had also been highly gratified by getting a medical partner in his plans:—but who among us ever reduced himself to the sort of dependence in which Lydgate now stood, without trying to believe that he had claims which diminished the humiliation of asking? It was true that of late there had seemed to be a new languor of interest in Bulstrode about the Hospital; but his health had got worse, and showed signs of a deep-seated nervous affection. In other respects he did not appear to be changed: he had always been highly polite, but Lydgate had observed in him from the first a marked coldness about his marriage and other private circumstances, a coldness which he had hitherto preferred to any warmth of familiarity between them. He deferred the intention from day to day, his habit of acting on his conclusions being made infirm by his repugnance to every possible conclusion and its consequent act. He saw Mr. Bulstrode often, but he did not try to use any occasion for his private purpose. At one moment he thought, “I will write a letter: I prefer that to any circuitous talk;” at another he thought, “No; if I were talking to him, I could make a retreat before any signs of disinclination.”
Still the days passed and no letter was written, no special interview sought. In his shrinking from the humiliation of a dependent attitude towards Bulstrode, he began to familiarize his imagination with another step even more unlike his remembered self.
He began spontaneously to consider whether it would be possible to carry out that puerile notion of Rosamond’s which had often made him angry, namely, that they should quit Middlemarch without seeing anything beyond that preface.
The question came—“Would any man buy the practice of me even now, for as little as it is worth? Then the sale might happen as a necessary preparation for going away.”