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Will Ladislaw, meanwhile, was h His chances ofDorothea were rare; and here

for the first time there had coe It was not only, as it had been hitherto, that she was

not supremely occupied with him, but that she had seen hiht appear not to be supremely occupied

with her He felt thrust to a new distance frost the

circles of Middlemarchers who made no part of her life But that was

not his fault: of course, since he had taken his lodgings in the town,

he had beenasthat he should know everybody and everything Lydgate was

really better worth knowing than any one else in the neighborhood, and

he happened to have a as

upon Here was the whole history of the situation in which Diana had

descended too unexpectedly on her worshipper It wasWill

was conscious that he should not have been at Middlemarch but for

Dorothea; and yet his position there was threatening to divide him from

her with those barriers of habitual sentiment which are more fatal to

the persistence of mutual interest than all the distance between Rome

and Britain Prejudices about rank and status were easy enough to defy

in the form of a tyrannical letter from Mr Casaubon; but prejudices,

like odorous bodies, have a double existence both solid and subtle--solid