can hardly be held open to exceptional
reproach. He had been a bachelor till he was five-and-forty, had always
been regarded as a fascinating man of elegant tastes; what could be
more natural, even according to the index of language, than that he
should have a beautiful boy like the little Deronda to take care of?
The mother might even, perhaps, be in the great world--met with in Sir
Hugo's residence abroad. The only person to feel any objection was the
boy himself, who could not have been consulted. And the boy's
objections had never been dreamed of by anybody but himself.

By the time Deronda was ready to go to Cambridge, Lady Mallinger had
already three daughters--charming babies, all three, but whose sex was
announced as a melancholy alternative, the offspring desired being a
son; if Sir Hugo had no son the succession must go to his nephew,
Mallinger Grandcourt. Daniel no longer held a wavering opinion about
his own birth. His fuller knowledge had tended to convince him that Sir
Hugo was his father, and he conceived that the baronet, since he never
approached a communication on the subject, wished him to have a tacit
understanding of the fact, and to accept in silence what would be
generally considered more than the due love and nurture. Sir Hugo's
marriage might certainly have been felt as a new ground of resentment
by some youths in Deronda's position, and the timid Lady Mallinger with
her fast-coming little ones might have been images to scowl at, as
likely to divert much that was disposable in the feelings and
possessions of the baronet from one who felt his own claim to be prior.
But hatred of innocent human obstacles was a form of moral stupidity
not in Deronda's grain; even the indignation which had long mingled
itself with his affection for Sir Hugo took the quality of pain rather
than of temper; and as his mind ripened to the idea of tolerance toward
error, he habitually liked the idea with his own silent grievances.

The sense of an entailed disadvantage--the deformed foot doubtfully
hidden by the shoe, makes a restlessly active spiritual yeast, and
easily turns a self-centered, unloving nature into an Ishmaelite. But
in the rarer sort, who presently see their own frustrated claim as one
among a myriad, the inexorable sorrow takes the form of fellowship and
makes the imagination tender. Deronda's early-weakened susceptibility,
charged at first with ready indignation and resistant pride, had raised
in him