than freedom--with a duteous bond which his
experience had been preparing him to accept gladly, even if it had been
attended with no promise of satisfying a secret passionate longing
never yet allowed to grow into a hope. But now he dared avow to himself
the hidden selection of his love. Since the hour when he left the house
at Chelsea in full-hearted silence under the effect of Mirah's farewell
look and words--their exquisite appealingness stirring in him that
deep-laid care for womanhood which had begun when his own lip was like
a girl's--her hold on his feeling had helped him to be blameless in
word and deed under the difficult circumstances we know of. There
seemed no likelihood that he could ever woo this creature who had
become dear to him amidst associations that forbade wooing; yet she had
taken her place in his soul as a beloved type--reducing the power of
other fascination and making a difference in it that became deficiency.
The influence had been continually strengthened. It had lain in the
course of poor Gwendolen's lot that her dependence on Deronda tended to
rouse in him the enthusiasm of self-martyring pity rather than of
personal love, and his less constrained tenderness flowed with the
fuller stream toward an indwelling image in all things unlike
Gwendolen. Still more, his relation to Mordecai had brought with it a
new nearness to Mirah which was not the less agitating because there
was no apparent change in his position toward her; and she had
inevitably been bound up in all the thoughts that made him shrink from
an issue disappointing to her brother. This process had not gone on
unconsciously in Deronda: he was conscious of it as we are of some
covetousness that it would be better to nullify by encouraging other
thoughts than to give it the insistency of confession even to
ourselves: but the jealous fire had leaped out at Hans's pretensions,
and when his mother accused him of being in love with a Jewess any
evasion suddenly seemed an infidelity. His mother had compelled him to
a decisive acknowledgment of his love, as Joseph Kalonymos had
compelled him to a definite expression of his resolve. This new state
of decision wrought on Deronda with a force which surprised even
himself. There was a release of all the energy which had long been
spent in self-checking and suppression because of doubtful conditions;
and he was ready to laugh at his own impetuosity when, as he neared
England on his way from Mai