Gwendolen did not, for all this, part with her recovered
faith;--rather, she kept it with a more anxious tenacity, as a
Protestant of old kept his bible hidden or a Catholic his crucifix,
according to the side favored by the civil arm; and it was
characteristic of her that apart from the impression gained concerning
Deronda in that visit, her imagination was little occupied with Mirah
or the eulogised brother. The one result established for her was, that
Deronda had acted simply as a generous benefactor, and the phrase
"reading Hebrew" had fleeted unimpressively across her sense of
hearing, as a stray stork might have made its peculiar flight across
her landscape without rousing any surprised reflection on its natural
history.

But the issue of that visit, as it regarded her husband, took a
strongly active part in the process which made an habitual conflict
within her, and was the cause of some external change perhaps not
observed by any one except Deronda. As the weeks went on bringing
occasional transient interviews with her, he thought that he perceived
in her an intensifying of her superficial hardness and resolute
display, which made her abrupt betrayals of agitation the more marked
and disturbing to him.

In fact, she was undergoing a sort of discipline for the refractory
which, as little as possible like conversion, bends half the self with
a terrible strain, and exasperates the unwillingness of the other half.
Grandcourt had an active divination rather than discernment of
refractoriness in her, and what had happened about Mirah quickened his
suspicion that there was an increase of it dependent on the occasions
when she happened to see Deronda: there was some "confounded nonsense"
between them: he did not imagine it exactly as flirtation, and his
imagination in other branches was rather restricted; but it was
nonsense that evidently kept up a kind of simmering in her mind--an
inward action which might become disagreeable outward. Husbands in the
old time are known to have suffered from a threatening devoutness in
their wives, presenting itself first indistinctly as oddity, and ending
in that mild form of lunatic asylum, a nunnery: Grandcourt had a vague
perception of threatening moods in Gwendolen which the unity between
them in his views of marriage required him peremptorily to check. Among
the means he chose, one was peculiar, and was less ably calculated than
the speeches we have just heard.

He determ