te not only from herself but even from his friendship for
her brother, she would have checked with rebuking questions:--What was
she but one who had shared his generous kindness with many others? and
his attachment to her brother, was it not begun late to be soon ended?
Other ties had come before, and others would remain after this had been
cut by swift-coming death. But her uneasiness had not reached that
point of self-recognition in which she would have been ashamed of it as
an indirect, presumptuous claim on Deronda's feeling. That she or any
one else should think of him as her possible lover was a conception
which had never entered her mind; indeed it was equally out of the
question with Mrs. Meyrick and the girls, who with Mirah herself
regarded his intervention in her life as something exceptional, and
were so impressed by his mission as her deliverer and guardian that
they would have held it an offense to him at his holding any other
relation toward her: a point of view which Hans also had readily
adopted. It is a little hard upon some men that they appear to sink for
us in becoming lovers. But precisely to this innocence of the Meyricks
was owing the disturbance of Mirah's unconsciousness. The first
occasion could hardly have been more trivial, but it prepared her
emotive nature for a deeper effect from what happened afterward.

It was when Anna Gascoigne, visiting the Meyricks; was led to speak of
her cousinship with Gwendolen. The visit had been arranged that Anna
might see Mirah; the three girls were at home with their mother, and
there was naturally a flux of talk among six feminine creatures, free
from the presence of a distorting male standard. Anna Gascoigne felt
herself much at home with the Meyrick girls, who knew what it was to
have a brother, and to be generally regarded as of minor importance in
the world; and she had told Rex that she thought the University very
nice, because brothers made friends there whose families were not rich
and grand, and yet (like the University) were very nice. The Meyricks
seemed to her almost alarmingly clever, and she consulted them much on
the best mode of teaching Lotta, confiding to them that she herself was
the least clever of her family. Mirah had lately come in, and there was
a complete bouquet of young faces around the tea-table--Hafiz, seated a
little aloft with large eyes on the alert, regarding the whole scene as
an apparatus for supplying his allowance of milk