she did not wish me to know I was a Jew."

"_A Jew_!" Gwendolen exclaimed, in a low tone of amazement, with an
utterly frustrated look, as if some confusing potion were creeping
through her system.

Deronda colored, and did not speak, while Gwendolen, with her eyes
fixed on the floor, was struggling to find her way in the dark by the
aid of various reminiscences. She seemed at last to have arrived at
some judgment, for she looked up at Deronda again and said, as if
remonstrating against the mother's conduct--

"What difference need that have made?"

"It has made a great difference to me that I have known it," said
Deronda, emphatically; but he could not go on easily--the distance
between her ideas and his acted like a difference of native language,
making him uncertain what force his words would carry.

Gwendolen meditated again, and then said feelingly, "I hope there is
nothing to make you mind. _You_ are just the same as if you were not a
Jew."

She meant to assure him that nothing of that external sort could affect
the way in which she regarded him, or the way in which he could
influence her. Deronda was a little helped by this misunderstanding.

"The discovery was far from being painful to me," he said, "I had been
gradually prepared for it, and I was glad of it. I had been prepared
for it by becoming intimate with a very remarkable Jew, whose ideas
have attracted me so much that I think of devoting the best part of my
life to some effort at giving them effect."

Again Gwendolen seemed shaken--again there was a look of frustration,
but this time it was mingled with alarm. She looked at Deronda with
lips childishly parted. It was not that she had yet connected his words
with Mirah and her brother, but that they had inspired her with a
dreadful presentiment of mountainous travel for her mind before it
could reach Deronda's. Great ideas in general which she had attributed
to him seemed to make no great practical difference, and were not
formidable in the same way as these mysteriously-shadowed particular
ideas. He could not quite divine what was going on within her; he could
only seek the least abrupt path of disclosure.

"That is an object," he said, after a moment, "which will by-and-by
force me to leave England for some time--for some years. I have
purposes which will take me to the East."

Here was something clearer, but all the more immediately agitating.
Gwendolen's lips began to tremble. "But you wi