ing near her
husband, who, however, turned a shoulder toward him, and was being
understood to listen to Lord Pentreath. How was it that at this moment,
for the first time, there darted through Gwendolen, like a disagreeable
sensation, the idea that this man knew all about her husband's life? He
had been banished from her sight, according to her will, and she had
been satisfied; he had sunk entirely into the background of her
thoughts, screened away from her by the agitating figures that kept up
an inward drama in which Lush had no place. Here suddenly he reappeared
at her husband's elbow, and there sprang up in her, like an
instantaneously fabricated memory in a dream, the sense of his being
connected with the secrets that made her wretched. She was conscious of
effort in turning her head away from him, trying to continue her
wandering survey as if she had seen nothing of more consequence than
the picture on the wall, till she discovered Deronda. But he was not
looking toward her, and she withdrew her eyes from him, without having
got any recognition, consoling herself with the assurance that he must
have seen her come in. In fact, he was not standing far from the door
with Hans Meyrick, whom he had been careful to bring into Lady
Mallinger's list. They were both a little more anxious than was
comfortable lest Mirah should not be heard to advantage. Deronda even
felt himself on the brink of betraying emotion, Mirah's presence now
being linked with crowding images of what had gone before and was to
come after--all centering in the brother he was soon to reveal to her;
and he had escaped as soon as he could from the side of Lady Pentreath,
who had said in her violoncello voice--

"Well, your Jewess is pretty--there's no denying that. But where is her
Jewish impudence? She looks as demure as a nun. I suppose she learned
that on the stage."

He was beginning to feel on Mirah's behalf something of what he had
felt for himself in his seraphic boyish time, when Sir Hugo asked him
if he would like to be a great singer--an indignant dislike to her
being remarked on in a free and easy way, as if she were an imported
commodity disdainfully paid for by the fashionable public, and he
winced the more because Mordecai, he knew, would feel that the name
"Jewess" was taken as a sort of stamp like the lettering of Chinese
silk. In this susceptible mood he saw the Grandcourts enter, and was
immediately appealed to by Hans about "that Va