misfortunes would in different ways be likely to call forth more of this moral activity than Rosamond and her aunt Bulstrode. Mrs Bulstrode was not an object of dislike, and had never consciously injured any human being. Men had always thought her a handsome comfortable woman, and had reckoned it among the signs of Bulstrode’s hypocrisy that he had chosen a red-blooded Vincy, instead of a ghastly and melancholy person suited to his low esteem for earthly pleasure. When the scandal about her husband was disclosed they remarked of her—“Ah, poor woman! She’s as honest as the day—she never suspected anything wrong in him, you may depend on it.” Women, who were intimate with her, talked together much of “poor Harriet,” imagined what her feelings must be when she came to know everything, and conjectured how much she had already come to know. There was no spiteful disposition towards her; rather, there was a busy benevolence anxious to ascertain what it would be well for her to feel and do under the circumstances, which of course kept the imagination occupied with her character and history from the times when she was Harriet Vincy till now. With the review of Mrs Bulstrode and her position it was inevitable to associate Rosamond, whose prospects were under the same blight with her aunt’s. Rosamond was more severely criticised and less pitied, though she too, as one of the good old Vincy family who had always been known in Middlemarch, was regarded as a victim to marriage with an interloper. The Vincys had their weaknesses, but then they lay on the surface: there was never anything bad to be “found out” concerning them. Mrs Bulstrode was vindicated from any resemblance to her husband. Harriet’s faults were her own.
“She has always been showy,” said Mrs Hackbutt, making tea for a small party, “though she has got into the way of putting her religion forward, to conform to her husband; she has tried to hold her head up above Middlemarch by making it known that she invites clergymen and heaven-knows-who from Riverston and those places.”
“We can hardly blame her for that,” said Mrs Sprague; “because few of the best people in the town cared to associate with Bulstrode, and she must have somebody to sit down at her table.”
“Mr Thesiger has always countenanced him,” said Mrs Hackbutt. “I think he must be sorry now.”
“But he was never fond of him in his heart—that every one knows,” said Mrs Tom Toller. “Mr Thesiger never goes into extremes. He keeps to the truth in what is evangelical. It is only clergymen like Mr Tyke, who want to use Dissenting hymn-books and that low kind of religion, who ever found Bulstrode to their taste.”
“I understand, Mr Tyke is in great distress about him,” said Mrs Hackbutt. “And well he may be: they say the Bulstrodes have half kept the Tyke family.”
“And of course it is a discredit to his doctrines,” said Mrs Sprague,
