Middlemarch; almost Spring

Some quotes I have particularly enjoyed

Of Brother and sister- and flute playing

“I suppose you are not going to ride out today?”   Said Rosamond.  Lingering a little after her mamma was gone. 

“No why?”

“Papa says I may have the chestnut to ride now.”

“You can go tomorrow, if you like.  Only I am going to Stone Court, remember.”

“I want the ride so much, it is indifferent to me where we go.”  Rosamond really wished to go Stone Court, of all other places. 

“Oh, I say Rosy,” said Fred, as she was passing out of the room.  “If you are going to the piano, let me come and play some airs with you.”  

“Pray do not ask me this morning.”

“Why not this morning?”

“Really Fred, I wish you would leave off playing the flute.  A man looks very silly playing the flute.  And you play so out of tune.”

“When next any one makes love to you, Miss Rosamond, I will tell him how obliging you are.”

“Why should you expect me to oblige you by hearing you play the flute any more than I should expect you to oblige me by not playing it?”

“And why should you expect me to take you out riding?”

This question led to an adjustment, for Rosamond has set her mind on that particular ride.

So Fred was gratified with nearly an hour’s practice of ‘Ar hyd y nos’, ‘Ye banks and braes’, and other favourite airs from his ‘Instructor on the Flute’, a wheezy performance, into which he threw much ambition and an irrepressible hopefulness.

Of the male 'premiership' division versus the female 'championship'.

Why not? A man's mind- what there is of it - has always the advantage of being masculine - as the smallest birch-tree is of higher kind than the most soaring palm - and even his ignorance is of a sounder quality. Sir James might not have originated this estimate; but a kind Providence furnishes the limpest personality with a little gum or starch in the form of tradition.

First impressions - and then after further examination.

Even with a microscope directed on a water-drop we find ourselves making interpretations which turn out to be rather coarse; for whereas a weak lens you may seem to see a creature exhibiting an active voracity into which other smaller creatures actively play as if they were so many animated tax-pennies (magnetized coins), a stronger lens reveals to you certain tiniest hairlets which make vortices for these victims while the swallower waits passively at his receipt of custom. In this way, metaphorically speaking, a strong lens applied to Mrs Cadwallader's matchmaking will show a play of minute causes producing what may be called thought and speech vortices to bring her the sort of food she needed.

Lydgate gets a bit of a Shock
"I came because I could not live without trying to see you.  You are lonely; I love you; I want you to consent to be my wife: I will wait, but I want you to promise that you will marry me- no one else."

Laure looked at him in silence with a melancholy radiance from under her grand eyelids, until he was full of rapturous certainty, and knelt close to her knee.
"I will tell you something," she said, in her cooing way, keeping her arms folded.  "My foot really slipped."
"I know, I know," said Lydgate, deprecatingly.  "It was a fatal accident - a dreadful stroke of calamity that bound me to you the more."
Again Laure paused a little and then said, slowly, "I meant to do it."
Lydgate, strong man as he was, turned pale and trembled: moments seemed to pass before before he rose and stood at a distance from her.
"There was a secret, then," he said at last, even vehemently.  "he was brutal to you: you hated him."
"No! he wearied me; he was too fond: he would live in Paris, and not in my country; that was not agreeable to me."
"Great God" said Lydgate, in a groan of horror.  "And you planned to murder him?"
"I did not plan: it came to me in the play - I meant to do it."
Lydgate stood mute, and unconsciously pressed his hat on while he looked at her.  He saw this woman - the first to whom he had given his adoration - amid the throng of stupid criminals.
"You are a good young man, " she said.  "But I do not like husbands.  I will never have another."