nz, he felt the remaining distance more and
more of an obstruction. It was as if he had found an added soul in
finding his ancestry--his judgment no longer wandering in the mazes of
impartial sympathy, but choosing, with that partiality which is man's
best strength, the closer fellowship that makes sympathy
practical--exchanging that bird's eye reasonableness which soars to
avoid preference and loses all sense of quality for the generous
reasonableness of drawing shoulder to shoulder with men of like
inheritance. He wanted now to be again with Mordecai, to pour forth
instead of restraining his feeling, to admit agreement and maintain
dissent, and all the while to find Mirah's presence without the
embarrassment of obviously seeking it, to see her in the light of a new
possibility, to interpret her looks and words from a new
starting-point. He was not greatly alarmed about the effect of Hans's
attentions, but he had a presentiment that her feeling toward himself
had from the first lain in a channel from which it was not likely to be
diverted into love. To astonish a woman by turning into her lover when
she has been thinking of you merely as a Lord Chancellor is what a man
naturally shrinks from: he is anxious to create an easier transition.

What wonder that Deronda saw no other course than to go straight from
the London railway station to the lodgings in that small square in
Brompton? Every argument was in favor of his losing no time. He had
promised to run down the next day to see Lady Mallinger at the Abbey,
and it was already sunset. He wished to deposit the precious chest with
Mordecai, who would study its contents, both in his absence and in
company with him; and that he should pay this visit without pause would
gratify Mordecai's heart. Hence, and for other reasons, it gratified
Deronda's heart. The strongest tendencies of his nature were rushing in
one current--the fervent affectionateness which made him delight in
meeting the wish of beings near to him, and the imaginative need of
some far-reaching relation to make the horizon of his immediate, daily
acts. It has to be admitted that in this classical, romantic,
world-historic position of his, bringing as it were from its
hiding-place his hereditary armor, he wore--but so, one must suppose,
did the most ancient heroes, whether Semitic or Japhetic--the summer
costume of his contemporaries. He did not reflect that the drab tints
were becoming to him, for he rarely w