m, which was the effect of restraining energy,
and the sweet genuine calm of the months when she first felt a return
of her infantine happiness.

Those who have been indulged by fortune and have always thought of
calamity as what happens to others, feel a blind incredulous rage at
the reversal of their lot, and half believe that their wild cries will
alter the course of the storm. Mirah felt no such surprise when
familiar Sorrow came back from brief absence, and sat down with her
according to the old use and wont. And this habit of expecting trouble
rather than joy, hindered her from having any persistent belief in
opposition to the probabilities which were not merely suggested by
Hans, but were supported by her own private knowledge and long-growing
presentiment. An attachment between Deronda and Mrs. Grandcourt, to end
in their future marriage, had the aspect of a certainty for her
feeling. There had been no fault in him: facts had ordered themselves
so that there was a tie between him and this woman who belonged to
another world than hers and Ezra's--nay, who seemed another sort of
being than Deronda, something foreign that would be a disturbance in
his life instead of blending with it. Well, well--but if it could have
been deferred so as to make no difference while Ezra was there! She did
not know all the momentousness of the relation between Deronda and her
brother, but she had seen, and instinctively felt enough to forebode
its being incongruous with any close tie to Mrs. Grandcourt; at least
this was the clothing that Mirah first gave to her mortal repugnance.
But in the still, quick action of her consciousness, thoughts went on
like changing states of sensation unbroken by her habitual acts; and
this inward language soon said distinctly that the mortal repugnance
would remain even if Ezra were secured from loss.

"What I have read about and sung about and seen acted, is happening to
me--this that I am feeling is the love that makes jealousy;" so
impartially Mirah summed up the charge against herself. But what
difference could this pain of hers make to any one else? It must remain
as exclusively her own, and hidden, as her early yearning and devotion
to her lost mother. But unlike that devotion, it was something that she
felt to be a misfortune of her nature--a discovery that what should
have been pure gratitude and reverence had sunk into selfish pain, that
the feeling she had hitherto delighted to pour out in