mother, laying her hands on his
shoulders, and perusing his face, while she spoke in a low meditative
tone, pausing between her sentences. "Poor boy!----I wonder how it
would have been if I had kept you with me----whether you would have
turned your heart to the old things against mine----and we should have
quarreled----your grandfather would have been in you----and you would
have hampered my life with your young growth from the old root."

"I think my affection might have lasted through all our quarreling,"
said Deronda, saddened more and more, "and that would not have
hampered--surely it would have enriched your life."

"Not then, not then----I did not want it then----I might have been glad
of it now," said the mother, with a bitter melancholy, "if I could have
been glad of anything."

"But you love your other children, and they love you?" said Deronda,
anxiously.

"Oh, yes," she answered, as to a question about a matter of course,
while she folded her arms again. "But,"----she added in a deeper
tone,----"I am not a loving woman. That is the truth. It is a talent to
love--I lack it. Others have loved me--and I have acted their love. I
know very well what love makes of men and women--it is subjection. It
takes another for a larger self, enclosing this one,"--she pointed to
her own bosom. "I was never willingly subject to any man. Men have been
subject to me."

"Perhaps the man who was subject was the happier of the two," said
Deronda--not with a smile, but with a grave, sad sense of his mother's
privation.

"Perhaps--but I _was_ happy--for a few years I was happy. If I had not
been afraid of defeat and failure, I might have gone on. I
miscalculated. What then? It is all over. Another life! Men talk of
'another life,' as if it only began on the other side of the grave. I
have long entered on another life." With the last words she raised her
arms till they were bare to the elbow, her brow was contracted in one
deep fold, her eyes were closed, her voice was smothered: in her dusky
flame-colored garment, she looked like a dreamed visitant from some
region of departed mortals.

Deronda's feeling was wrought to a pitch of acuteness in which he was
no longer quite master of himself. He gave an audible sob. His mother,
opened her eyes, and letting her hands again rest on his shoulders,
said--

"Good-bye, my son, good-bye. We shall hear no more of each other. Kiss
me."

He clasped his arms round her neck, and they