ght as he is now--and not merely for a little
while, but continually. How should you bear that! Our religion commands
us to bear. But how should you bear it?"

"Not well, my sister--not well; but it will never happen," said
Mordecai, looking at her with a tender smile. He thought that her heart
needed comfort on his account.

Mirah said no more. She mused over the difference between her own state
of mind and her brother's, and felt her comparative pettiness. Why
could she not be completely satisfied with what satisfied his larger
judgment? She gave herself no fuller reason than a painful sense of
unfitness--in what? Airy possibilities to which she could give no
outline, but to which one name and one figure gave the wandering
persistency of a blot in her vision. Here lay the vaguer source of the
hidden sadness rendered noticeable to Hans by some diminution of that
sweet ease, that ready joyousness of response in her speech and smile,
which had come with the new sense of freedom and safety, and had made
her presence like the freshly-opened daisies and clear bird-notes after
the rain. She herself regarded her uneasiness as a sort of ingratitude
and dullness of sensibility toward the great things that had been given
her in her new life; and whenever she threw more energy than usual into
her singing, it was the energy of indignation against the shallowness
of her own content. In that mood she once said, "Shall I tell you what
is the difference between you and me, Ezra? You are a spring in the
drought, and I am an acorn-cup; the waters of heaven fill me, but the
least little shake leaves me empty."

"Why, what has shaken thee?" said Mordecai. He fell into this antique
form of speech habitually in talking to his sister and to the Cohen
children.

"Thoughts," said Mirah; "thoughts that come like the breeze and shake
me--bad people, wrong things, misery--and how they might touch our
life."

"We must take our portion, Mirah. It is there. On whose shoulder would
we lay it, that we might be free?"

The one voluntary sign she made of her inward care was this distant
allusion.

CHAPTER LIII.

"My desolation does begin to make
A better life."
--SHAKESPEARE: _Antony and Cleopatra._

Before Deronda was summoned to a second interview with his mother, a
day had passed in which she had only sent him a message to say that she
was not yet well enough to receive him again; but on the third morning
he had a note