he more, but with a difference; each nucleus of pain or
pleasure had a deep atmosphere of the excitement or spiritual
intoxication which at once exalts and deadens. But Deronda made no
reflection of this kind. All his thoughts hung on the purport of what
his mother was saying; her tones and her wonderful face entered into
his agitation without being noted. What he longed for with an awed
desire was to know as much as she would tell him of the strange mental
conflict under which it seemed he had been brought into the world; what
his compassionate nature made the controlling idea within him were the
suffering and the confession that breathed through her later words, and
these forbade any further question, when she paused and remained
silent, with her brow knit, her head turned a little away from him, and
her large eyes fixed as if on something incorporeal. He must wait for
her to speak again. She did so with strange abruptness, turning her
eyes upon him suddenly, and saying more quickly--

"Sir Hugo has written much about you. He tells me you have a wonderful
mind--you comprehend everything--you are wiser than he is with all his
sixty years. You say you are glad to know that you were born a Jew. I
am not going to tell you that I have changed my mind about that. Your
feelings are against mine. You don't thank me for what I did. Shall you
comprehend your mother, or only blame her?"

"There is not a fibre within me but makes me wish to comprehend her,"
said Deronda, meeting her sharp gaze solemnly. "It is a bitter reversal
of my longing to think of blaming her. What I have been most trying to
do for fifteen years is to have some understanding of those who differ
from myself."

"Then you have become unlike your grandfather in that." said the
mother, "though you are a young copy of him in your face. He never
comprehended me, or if he did, he only thought of fettering me into
obedience. I was to be what he called 'the Jewish woman' under pain of
his curse. I was to feel everything I did not feel, and believe
everything I did not believe. I was to feel awe for the bit of
parchment in the _mezuza_ over the door; to dread lest a bit of butter
should touch a bit of meat; to think it beautiful that men should bind
the _tephillin_ on them, and women not,--to adore the wisdom of such
laws, however silly they might seem to me. I was to love the long
prayers in the ugly synagogue, and the howling, and the gabbling, and
the dreadful f