a clinging pity
and shame for a reprobate son, but she was out of patience with what
she held an exaggerated susceptibility on behalf of this father, whose
reappearance inclined her to wish him under the care of a turnkey.
Mirah's promise, however, was some security against her weakness.

That incident was the only reason that Mirah herself could have stated
for the hidden sadness which Hans had divined. Of one element in her
changed mood she could have given no definite account: it was something
as dim as the sense of approaching weather-change, and had extremely
slight external promptings, such as we are often ashamed to find all we
can allege in support of the busy constructions that go on within us,
not only without effort, but even against it, under the influence of
any blind emotional stirring. Perhaps the first leaven of uneasiness
was laid by Gwendolen's behavior on that visit which was entirely
superfluous as a means of engaging Mirah to sing, and could have no
other motive than the excited and strange questioning about Deronda.
Mirah had instinctively kept the visit a secret, but the active
remembrance of it had raised a new susceptibility in her, and made her
alive as she had never been before to the relations Deronda must have
with that society which she herself was getting frequent glimpses of
without belonging to it. Her peculiar life and education had produced
in her an extraordinary mixture of unworldliness, with knowledge of the
world's evil, and even this knowledge was a strange blending of direct
observation with the effects of reading and theatrical study. Her
memory was furnished with abundant passionate situation and intrigue,
which she never made emotionally her own, but felt a repelled aloofness
from, as she had done from the actual life around her. Some of that
imaginative knowledge began now to weave itself around Mrs. Grandcourt;
and though Mirah would admit no position likely to affect her reverence
for Deronda, she could not avoid a new painfully vivid association of
his general life with a world away from her own, where there might be
some involvement of his feeling and action with a woman like Gwendolen,
who was increasingly repugnant to her--increasingly, even after she had
ceased to see her; for liking and disliking can grow in meditation as
fast as in the more immediate kind of presence. Any disquietude
consciously due to the idea that Deronda's deepest care might be for
something remo