randcourt, I think, is he?" said Lady
Mallinger, looking at Deronda inquiringly.

"There is no avoiding everybody one doesn't happen to be fond of," said
Deronda. "I will go to Diplow--I don't know that I have anything better
to do--since Sir Hugo wishes it."

"That's a trump!" said Sir Hugo, well pleased. "And if you don't find
it very pleasant, it's so much experience. Nothing used to come amiss
to me when I was young. You must see men and manners."

"Yes; but I have seen that man, and something of his manners too," said
Deronda.

"Not nice manners, I think," said Lady Mallinger.

"Well, you see they succeed with your sex," said Sir Hugo, provokingly.
"And he was an uncommonly good-looking fellow when he was two or three
and twenty--like his father. He doesn't take after his father in
marrying the heiress, though. If he had got Miss Arrowpoint and my land
too, confound him, he would have had a fine principality."

Deronda, in anticipating the projected visit, felt less disinclination
than when consenting to it. The story of that girl's marriage did
interest him: what he had heard through Lush of her having run away
from the suit of the man she was now going to take as a husband, had
thrown a new sort of light on her gambling; and it was probably the
transition from that fevered worldliness into poverty which had urged
her acceptance where she must in some way have felt repulsion. All this
implied a nature liable to difficulty and struggle--elements of life
which had a predominant attraction for his sympathy, due perhaps to his
early pain in dwelling on the conjectured story of his own existence.
Persons attracted him, as Hans Meyrick had done, in proportion to the
possibility of his defending them, rescuing them, telling upon their
lives with some sort of redeeming influence; and he had to resist an
inclination, easily accounted for, to withdraw coldly from the
fortunate. But in the movement which had led him to repurchase
Gwendolen's necklace for her, and which was at work in him still, there
was something beyond his habitual compassionate fervor--something due
to the fascination of her womanhood. He was very open to that sort of
charm, and mingled it with the consciously Utopian pictures of his own
future; yet any one able to trace the folds of his character might have
conceived that he would be more likely than many less passionate men to
love a woman without telling her of it. Sprinkle food before a
delicat