nergy that
made his mother shrink a little backward against her cushions. "My
father was a Jew, and you are a Jewess?"

"Yes, your father was my cousin," said the mother, watching him with a
change in her look, as if she saw something that she might have to be
afraid of.

"I am glad of it," said Deronda, impetuously, in the veiled voice of
passion. He could not have imagined beforehand how he would have come
to say that which he had never hitherto admitted. He could not have
dreamed that it would be in impulsive opposition to his mother. He was
shaken by a mixed anger which no reflection could come soon enough to
check, against this mother who it seemed had borne him unwillingly, had
willingly made herself a stranger to him, and--perhaps--was now making
herself known unwillingly. This last suspicion seemed to flash some
explanation over her speech.

But the mother was equally shaken by an anger differently mixed, and
her frame was less equal to any repression. The shaking with her was
visibly physical, and her eyes looked the larger for her pallid
excitement as she said violently--

"Why do you say you are glad? You are an English gentleman. I secured
you that."

"You did not know what you secured me. How could you choose my
birthright for me?" said Deronda, throwing himself sideways into his
chair again, almost unconsciously, and leaning his arm over the back,
while he looked away from his mother.

He was fired with an intolerance that seemed foreign to him. But he was
now trying hard to master himself and keep silence. A horror had swept
in upon his anger lest he should say something too hard in this moment
which made an epoch never to be recalled. There was a pause before his
mother spoke again, and when she spoke her voice had become more firmly
resistant in its finely varied tones:

"I chose for you what I would have chosen for myself. How could I know
that you would have the spirit of my father in you? How could I know
that you would love what I hated?--if you really love to be a Jew." The
last words had such bitterness in them that any one overhearing might
have supposed some hatred had arisen between the mother and son.

But Deronda had recovered his fuller self. He was recalling his
sensibilities to what life had been and actually was for her whose best
years were gone, and who with the signs of suffering in her frame was
now exerting herself to tell him of a past which was not his alone but
also her