"If you think I could teach you, I shall be very glad. I am anxious to
teach, but I have only just begun. If I do it well, it must be by
remembering how my master taught me."

Gwendolen was in reality too uncertain about herself to be prepared for
this simple promptitude of Mirah's, and in her wish to change the
subject, said, with some lapse from the good taste of her first
address--

"You have not been long in London, I think?--but you were perhaps
introduced to Mr. Deronda abroad?"

"No," said Mirah; "I never saw him before I came to England in the
summer."

"But he has seen you often and heard you sing a great deal, has he
not?" said Gwendolen, led on partly by the wish to hear anything about
Deronda, and partly by the awkwardness which besets the readiest
person, in carrying on a dialogue when empty of matter. "He spoke of
you to me with the highest praise. He seemed to know you quite well."

"Oh, I was poor and needed help," said Mirah, in a new tone of feeling,
"and Mr. Deronda has given me the best friends in the world. That is
the only way he came to know anything about me--because he was sorry
for me. I had no friends when I came. I was in distress. I owe
everything to him."

Poor Gwendolen, who had wanted to be a struggling artist herself, could
nevertheless not escape the impression that a mode of inquiry which
would have been rather rude toward herself was an amiable condescension
to this Jewess who was ready to give her lessons. The only effect on
Mirah, as always on any mention of Deronda, was to stir reverential
gratitude and anxiety that she should be understood to have the deepest
obligation to him.

But both he and Hans, who were noticing the pair from a distance, would
have felt rather indignant if they had known that the conversation had
led up to Mirah's representation of herself in this light of neediness.
In the movement that prompted her, however, there was an exquisite
delicacy, which perhaps she could not have stated explicitly--the
feeling that she ought not to allow any one to assume in Deronda a
relation of more equality or less generous interest toward her than
actually existed. Her answer was delightful to Gwendolen: she thought
of nothing but the ready compassion which in another form she had
trusted in and found herself; and on the signals that Klesmer was about
to play she moved away in much content, entirely without presentiment
that this Jewish _protege_ would ever make a mo