which was making a difference in the history of the world. In
fact poor Gwendolen's memory had been stunned, and all outside the
lava-lit track of her troubled conscience, and her effort to get
deliverance from it, lay for her in dim forgetfulness.

CHAPTER LXVI.

"One day still fierce 'mid many a day struck calm."
--BROWNING: _The King and the Book_.

Meanwhile Ezra and Mirah, whom Gwendolen did not include in her
thinking about Deronda, were having their relation to him drawn closer
and brought into fuller light.

The father Lapidoth had quitted his daughter at the doorstep, ruled by
that possibility of staking something in play or betting which
presented itself with the handling of any sum beyond the price of
staying actual hunger, and left no care for alternative prospects or
resolutions. Until he had lost everything he never considered whether
he would apply to Mirah again or whether he would brave his son's
presence. In the first moment he had shrunk from encountering Ezra as
he would have shrunk from any other situation of disagreeable
constraint; and the possession of Mirah's purse was enough to banish
the thought of future necessities. The gambling appetite is more
absolutely dominant than bodily hunger, which can be neutralized by an
emotional or intellectual excitation; but the passion for watching
chances--the habitual suspensive poise of the mind in actual or
imaginary play--nullifies the susceptibility of other excitation. In
its final, imperious stage, it seems the unjoyous dissipation of
demons, seeking diversion on the burning marl of perdition.

But every form of selfishness, however abstract and unhuman, requires
the support of at least one meal a day; and though Lapidoth's appetite
for food and drink was extremely moderate, he had slipped into a
shabby, unfriendly form of life in which the appetite could not be
satisfied without some ready money. When, in a brief visit at a house
which announced "Pyramids" on the window-blind, he had first doubled
and trebled and finally lost Mirah's thirty shillings, he went out with
her empty purse in his pocket, already balancing in his mind whether he
should get another immediate stake by pawning the purse, or whether he
should go back to her giving himself a good countenance by restoring
the purse, and declaring that he had used the money in paying a score
that was standing against him. Besides, among the sensibilities still