Lydgate than the turn of Miss Brooke's mind, or to Miss Brooke than
the qualities of the woman who had attracted this young surgeon.
But any one watching keenly the stealthy convergence of human lots,
sees a slow preparation of effects from one life on another,
which tells like a calculated irony on the indifference or the
frozen stare with which we look at our unintroduced neighbor.
Destiny stands by sarcastic with our dramatis personae folded
in her hand.

Old provincial society had its share of this subtle movement: had
not only its striking downfalls, its brilliant young professional
dandies who ended by living up an entry with a drab and six children
for their establishment, but also those less marked vicissitudes
which are constantly shifting the boundaries of social intercourse,
and begetting new consciousness of interdependence. Some slipped
a little downward, some got higher footing: people denied aspirates,
gained wealth, and fastidious gentlemen stood for boroughs;
some were caught in political currents, some in ecclesiastical,
and perhaps found themselves surprisingly grouped in consequence;
while a few personages or families that stood with rocky firmness
amid all this fluctuation, were slowly presenting new aspects
in spite of solidity, and altering with the double change of self
and beholder. Municipal town and rural parish gradually made fresh
threads of connection--gradually, as the old stocking gave way to the
savings-bank, and the worship of the solar guinea became extinct;
while squires and baronets, and even lords who had once lived
blamelessly afar from the civic mind, gathered the faultiness of
closer acquaintanceship. Settlers, too, came from distant counties,
some with an alarming novelty of skill, others with an offensive
advantage in cunning. In fact, much the same sort of movement