k at his pinched features and blonde hair
hanging over his collar reminded one of pale quaint heads by early
German painters; and when this faint coloring was lit up by a joke,
there came sudden creases about the mouth and eyes which might have
been moulded by the soul of an aged humorist. His father, an engraver
of some distinction, had been dead eleven years, and his mother had
three girls to educate and maintain on a meagre annuity. Hans
Meyrick--he had been daringly christened after Holbein--felt himself
the pillar, or rather the knotted and twisted trunk, round which these
feeble climbing plants must cling. There was no want of ability or of
honest well-meaning affection to make the prop trustworthy: the ease
and quickness with which he studied might serve him to win prizes at
Cambridge, as he had done among the Blue Coats, in spite of
irregularities. The only danger was, that the incalculable tendencies
in him might be fatally timed, and that his good intentions might be
frustrated by some act which was not due to habit but to capricious,
scattered impulses. He could not be said to have any one bad habit; yet
at longer or shorter intervals he had fits of impish recklessness, and
did things that would have made the worst habits.

Hans in his right mind, however, was a lovable creature, and in Deronda
he had happened to find a friend who was likely to stand by him with
the more constancy, from compassion for these brief aberrations that
might bring a long repentance. Hans, indeed, shared Deronda's rooms
nearly as much as he used his own: to Deronda he poured himself out on
his studies, his affairs, his hopes; the poverty of his home, and his
love for the creatures there; the itching of his fingers to draw, and
his determination to fight it away for the sake of getting some sort of
a plum that he might divide with his mother and the girls. He wanted no
confidence in return, but seemed to take Deronda as an Olympian who
needed nothing--an egotism in friendship which is common enough with
mercurial, expansive natures. Deronda was content, and gave Meyrick all
the interest he claimed, getting at last a brotherly anxiety about him,
looking after him in his erratic moments, and contriving by adroitly
delicate devices not only to make up for his friend's lack of pence,
but to save him from threatening chances. Such friendship easily
becomes tender: the one spreads strong sheltering wings that delight in
spreading, the othe