"Middlemarch has not a very high standard, uncle," said Rosamond,
with a pretty lightness, going towards her whip, which lay at
a distance.

Lydgate was quick in anticipating her. He reached the whip
before she did, and turned to present it to her. She bowed
and looked at him: he of course was looking at her, and their
eyes met with that peculiar meeting which is never arrived at
by effort, but seems like a sudden divine clearance of haze.
I think Lydgate turned a little paler than usual, but Rosamond
blushed deeply and felt a certain astonishment. After that,
she was really anxious to go, and did not know what sort of stupidity
her uncle was talking of when she went to shake hands with him.

Yet this result, which she took to be a mutual impression, called
falling in love, was just what Rosamond had contemplated beforehand.
Ever since that important new arrival in Middlemarch she had
woven a little future, of which something like this scene was
the necessary beginning. Strangers, whether wrecked and clinging
to a raft, or duly escorted and accompanied by portmanteaus,
have always had a circumstantial fascination for the virgin mind,
against which native merit has urged itself in vain. And a stranger
was absolutely necessary to Rosamond's social romance, which had
always turned on a lover and bridegroom who was not a Middlemarcher,
and who had no connections at all like her own: of late, indeed,
the construction seemed to demand that he should somehow be
related to a baronet. Now that she and the stranger had met,
reality proved much more moving than anticipation, and Rosamond
could not doubt that this was the great epoch of her life.