m even to frame the idea of appropriating her, and a
sort of blasphemy to suppose that she could possibly give herself to
him."

What would it be for Daniel Deronda to entertain such thoughts? He was
not one who could quite naively introduce himself where he had just
excluded his friend, yet it was undeniable that what had just happened
made a new stage in his feeling toward Mirah. But apart from other
grounds for self-repression, reasons both definite and vague made him
shut away that question as he might have shut up a half-opened writing
that would have carried his imagination too far, and given too much
shape to presentiments. Might there not come a disclosure which would
hold the missing determination of his course? What did he really know
about his origin? Strangely in these latter months when it seemed right
that he should exert his will in the choice of a destination, the
passion of his nature had got more and more locked by this uncertainty.
The disclosure might bring its pain, indeed the likelihood seemed to
him to be all on that side; but if it helped him to make his life a
sequence which would take the form of duty--if it saved him from having
to make an arbitrary selection where he felt no preponderance of
desire? Still more, he wanted to escape standing as a critic outside
the activities of men, stiffened into the ridiculous attitude of
self-assigned superiority. His chief tether was his early inwrought
affection for Sir Hugo, making him gratefully deferential to wishes
with which he had little agreement: but gratitude had been sometimes
disturbed by doubts which were near reducing it to a fear of being
ungrateful. Many of us complain that half our birthright is sharp duty:
Deronda was more inclined to complain that he was robbed of this half;
yet he accused himself, as he would have accused another, of being
weakly self-conscious and wanting in resolve. He was the reverse of
that type painted for us in Faulconbridge and Edmund of Gloster, whose
coarse ambition for personal success is inflamed by a defiance of
accidental disadvantages. To Daniel the words Father and Mother had the
altar-fire in them; and the thought of all closest relations of our
nature held still something of the mystic power which had made his neck
and ears burn in boyhood. The average man may regard this sensibility
on the question of birth as preposterous and hardly credible; but with
the utmost respect for his knowledge as the rock f