when I am at ease, it is beginning to make ghosts upon the
daylight. And now you have made it worse for me," she said, with a
sudden return of impetuosity; "but I shall have told you everything.
And what reproach is there against me," she added bitterly, "since I
have made you glad to be a Jew? Joseph Kalonymos reproached me: he said
you had been turned into a proud Englishman, who resented being touched
by a Jew. I wish you had!" she ended, with a new marvelous alternation.
It was as if her mind were breaking into several, one jarring the other
into impulsive action.

"Who is Joseph Kalonymos?" said Deronda, with a darting recollection of
that Jew who touched his arm in the Frankfort synagogue.

"Ah! some vengeance sent him back from the East, that he might see you
and come to reproach me. He was my father's friend. He knew of your
birth: he knew of my husband's death, and once, twenty years ago, after
he had been away in the Levant, he came to see me and inquire about
you. I told him that you were dead: I meant you to be dead to all the
world of my childhood. If I had said that your were living, he would
have interfered with my plans: he would have taken on him to represent
my father, and have tried to make me recall what I had done. What could
I do but say you were dead? The act was done. If I had told him of it
there would have been trouble and scandal--and all to conquer me, who
would not have been conquered. I was strong then, and I would have had
my will, though there might have been a hard fight against me. I took
the way to have it without any fight. I felt then that I was not really
deceiving: it would have come to the same in the end; or if not to the
same, to something worse. He believed me and begged that I would give
up to him the chest that my father had charged me and my husband to
deliver to our eldest son. I knew what was in the chest--things that
had been dinned in my ears since I had had any understanding--things
that were thrust on my mind that I might feel them like a wall around
my life--my life that was growing like a tree. Once, after my husband
died, I was going to burn the chest. But it was difficult to burn; and
burning a chest and papers looks like a shameful act. I have committed
no shameful act--except what Jews would call shameful. I had kept the
chest, and I gave it to Joseph Kalonymos. He went away mournful, and
said, 'If you marry again, and if another grandson is born to him who
is