for you than being with me. I did not
think I deprived you of anything worth having."

"You cannot wish me to believe that your affection would not have been
worth having," said Deronda, finding that she paused as if she expected
him to make some answer.

"I don't mean to speak ill of myself," said the princess, with proud
impetuosity, "But I had not much affection to give you. I did not want
affection. I had been stifled with it. I wanted to live out the life
that was in me, and not to be hampered with other lives. You wonder
what I was. I was no princess then." She rose with a sudden movement,
and stood as she had done before. Deronda immediately rose too; he felt
breathless.

"No princess in this tame life that I live in now. I was a great
singer, and I acted as well as I sang. All the rest were poor beside
me. Men followed me from one country to another. I was living a myriad
lives in one. I did not want a child."

There was a passionate self-defence in her tone. She had cast all
precedent out of her mind. Precedent had no excuse for her and she
could only seek a justification in the intensest words she could find
for her experience. She seemed to fling out the last words against some
possible reproach in the mind of her son, who had to stand and hear
them--clutching his coat-collar as if he were keeping himself above
water by it, and feeling his blood in the sort of commotion that might
have been excited if he had seen her going through some strange rite of
a religion which gave a sacredness to crime. What else had she to tell
him? She went on with the same intensity and a sort of pale
illumination in her face.

"I did not want to marry. I was forced into marrying your
father--forced, I mean, by my father's wishes and commands; and
besides, it was my best way of getting some freedom. I could rule my
husband, but not my father. I had a right to be free. I had a right to
seek my freedom from a bondage that I hated."

She seated herself again, while there was that subtle movement in her
eyes and closed lips which is like the suppressed continuation of
speech. Deronda continued standing, and after a moment or two she
looked up at him with a less defiant pleading as she said--

"And the bondage I hated for myself I wanted to keep you from. What
better could the most loving mother have done? I relieved you from the
bondage of having been born a Jew."

"Then I _am_ a Jew?" Deronda burst out with a deep-voiced e