ght
words.

"I wanted to tell you that I have always been thinking of your advice,
but is it any use?--I can't make myself different, because things about
me raise bad feelings--and I must go on--I can alter nothing--it is no
use."

She paused an instant, with the consciousness that she was not finding
the right words, but began again hurriedly, "But if I go on I shall get
worse. I want not to get worse. I should like to be what you wish.
There are people who are good and enjoy great things--I know there are.
I am a contemptible creature. I feel as if I should get wicked with
hating people. I have tried to think that I would go away from
everybody. But I can't. There are so many things to hinder me. You
think, perhaps, that I don't mind. But I do mind. I am afraid of
everything. I am afraid of getting wicked. Tell me what I can do."

She had forgotten everything but that image of her helpless misery
which she was trying to make present to Deronda in broken allusive
speech--wishing to convey but not express all her need. Her eyes were
tearless, and had a look of smarting in their dilated brilliancy; there
was a subdued sob in her voice which was more and more veiled, till it
was hardly above a whisper. She was hurting herself with the jewels
that glittered on her tightly-clasped fingers pressed against her heart.

The feeling Deronda endured in these moments he afterward called
horrible. Words seemed to have no more rescue in them than if he had
been beholding a vessel in peril of wreck--the poor ship with its
many-lived anguish beaten by the inescapable storm. How could he grasp
the long-growing process of this young creature's wretchedness?--how
arrest and change it with a sentence? He was afraid of his own voice.
The words that rushed into his mind seemed in their feebleness nothing
better than despair made audible, or than that insensibility to
another's hardship which applies precept to soothe pain. He felt
himself holding a crowd of words imprisoned within his lips, as if the
letting them escape would be a violation of awe before the mysteries of
our human lot. The thought that urged itself foremost was--"Confess
everything to your husband; have nothing concealed:"--the words carried
in his mind a vision of reasons which would have needed much fuller
expressions for Gwendolen to apprehend them, but before he had begun
those brief sentences, the door opened and the husband entered.

Grandcourt had deliberately