asts, and the tiresome feasts, and my father's endless
discoursing about our people, which was a thunder without meaning in my
ears. I was to care forever about what Israel had been; and I did not
care at all. I cared for the wide world, and all that I could represent
in it. I hated living under the shadow of my father's strictness.
Teaching, teaching for everlasting--'this you must be,' 'that you must
not be'--pressed on me like a frame that got tighter and tighter as I
grew. I wanted to live a large life, with freedom to do what every one
else did, and be carried along in a great current, not obliged to care.
Ah!"--here her tone changed to one of a more bitter incisiveness--"you
are glad to have been born a Jew. You say so. That is because you have
not been brought up as a Jew. That separateness seems sweet to you
because I saved you from it."

"When you resolved on that, you meant that I should never know my
origin?" said Deronda, impulsively. "You have at least changed in your
feeling on that point."

"Yes, that was what I meant. That is what I persevered in. And it is
not true to say that I have changed. Things have changed in spite of
me. I am still the same Leonora"--she pointed with her forefinger to
her breast--"here within me is the same desire, the same will, the same
choice, _but_"--she spread out her hands, palm upward, on each side of
her, as she paused with a bitter compression of her lip, then let her
voice fall into muffled, rapid utterance--"events come upon us like
evil enchantments: and thoughts, feelings, apparitions in the darkness
are events--are they not? I don't consent. We only consent to what we
love. I obey something tyrannic"--she spread out her hands again--"I am
forced to be withered, to feel pain, to be dying slowly. Do I love
that? Well, I have been forced to obey my dead father. I have been
forced to tell you that you are a Jew, and deliver to you what he
commanded me to deliver."

"I beseech you to tell me what moved you--when you were young, I
mean--to take the course you did," said Deronda, trying by this
reference to the past to escape from what to him was the heart-rending
piteousness of this mingled suffering and defiance. "I gather that my
grandfather opposed your bent to be an artist. Though my own experience
has been quite different, I enter into the painfulness of your
struggle. I can imagine the hardship of an enforced renunciation."

"No," said the Princess, shaking her