result of
her marriage that she should in any way make a spectacle of herself;
and her humiliation was lightened by her thinking that only Mrs.
Glasher was aware of the fact which caused it. For Gwendolen had never
referred the interview at the Whispering Stones to Lush's agency; her
disposition to vague terror investing with shadowy omnipresence any
threat of fatal power over her, and so hindering her from imagining
plans and channels by which news had been conveyed to the woman who had
the poisoning skill of a sorceress. To Gwendolen's mind the secret lay
with Mrs. Glasher, and there were words in the horrible letter which
implied that Mrs. Glasher would dread disclosure to the husband, as
much as the usurping Mrs. Grandcourt.

Something else, too, she thought of as more of a secret from her
husband than it really was--namely that suppressed struggle of
desperate rebellion which she herself dreaded. Grandcourt could not
indeed fully imagine how things affected Gwendolen: he had no
imagination of anything in her but what affected the gratification of
his own will; but on this point he had the sensibility which seems like
divination. What we see exclusively we are apt to see with some mistake
of proportions; and Grandcourt was not likely to be infallible in his
judgments concerning this wife who was governed by many shadowy powers,
to him nonexistent. He magnified her inward resistance, but that did
not lessen his satisfaction in the mastery of it.

CHAPTER XLV.

Behold my lady's carriage stop the way.
With powdered lacquey and with charming bay;
She sweeps the matting, treads the crimson stair.
Her arduous function solely "to be there."
Like Sirius rising o'er the silent sea.
She hides her heart in lustre loftily.

So the Grandcourts were in Grosvenor Square in time to receive a card
for the musical party at Lady Mallinger's, there being reasons of
business which made Sir Hugo know beforehand that his ill-beloved
nephew was coming up. It was only the third evening after their
arrival, and Gwendolen made rather an absent-minded acquaintance with
her new ceilings and furniture, preoccupied with the certainty that she
was going to speak to Deronda again, and also to see the Miss Lapidoth
who had gone through so much, and was "capable of submitting to
anything in the form of duty." For Gwendolen had remembered nearly
every word that Deronda had said about Mirah, and especially that
phrase, which