Let the high Muse chant loves Olympian: We are but mortals, and must sing of man. An eminent philosopher among my friends, who can dignify even your ugly furniture by lifting it into the serene light of science, has shown me this pregnant little fact.
Your pier-glass or extensive surface of polished steel made to be rubbed by a housemaid, will be minutely and multitudinously scratched in all directions; but place now against it a lighted candle as a centre of illumination, and lo!
the scratches will seem to arrange themselves in a fine series of concentric circles round that little sun.
It is demonstrable that the scratches are going everywhere impartially and it is only your candle which produces the flattering illusion of a concentric arrangement, its light falling with an exclusive optical selection. These things are a parable.
The scratches are events, and the candle is the egoism of any person now absent—of Miss Vincy, for example. Rosamond had a Providence of her own who had kindly made her more charming than other girls, and who seemed to have arranged Fred’s illness and Mr.
Wrench’s mistake in order to bring her and Lydgate within effective proximity. It would have been to contravene these arrangements if Rosamond had consented to go away to Stone Court or elsewhere, as her parents wished her to do, especially since Mr. Lydgate thought the precaution needless.
Therefore, while Miss Morgan and the children were sent away to a farmhouse the morning after Fred’s illness had declared itself, Rosamond refused to leave papa and mamma. Poor mamma indeed was an object to touch any creature born of woman; and Mr.
Vincy, who doted on his wife, was more alarmed on her account than on Fred’s. But for his insistence she would have taken no