ome root that for the
time compelled the brains of each to the same narrow monotony of action.

Deronda's first thought when his eyes fell on this scene of dull,
gas-poisoned absorption, was that the gambling of Spanish shepherd-boys
had seemed to him more enviable:--so far Rousseau might be justified in
maintaining that art and science had done a poor service to mankind.
But suddenly he felt the moment become dramatic. His attention was
arrested by a young lady who, standing at an angle not far from him,
was the last to whom his eyes traveled. She was bending and speaking
English to a middle-aged lady seated at play beside her: but the next
instant she returned to her play, and showed the full height of a
graceful figure, with a face which might possibly be looked at without
admiration, but could hardly be passed with indifference.

The inward debate which she raised in Deronda gave to his eyes a
growing expression of scrutiny, tending farther and farther away from
the glow of mingled undefined sensibilities forming admiration. At one
moment they followed the movements of the figure, of the arms and
hands, as this problematic sylph bent forward to deposit her stake with
an air of firm choice; and the next they returned to the face which, at
present unaffected by beholders, was directed steadily toward the game.
The sylph was a winner; and as her taper fingers, delicately gloved in
pale-gray, were adjusting the coins which had been pushed toward her in
order to pass them back again to the winning point, she looked round
her with a survey too markedly cold and neutral not to have in it a
little of that nature which we call art concealing an inward exultation.

But in the course of that survey her eyes met Deronda's, and instead of
averting them as she would have desired to do, she was unpleasantly
conscious that they were arrested--how long? The darting sense that he
was measuring her and looking down on her as an inferior, that he was
of different quality from the human dross around her, that he felt
himself in a region outside and above her, and was examining her as a
specimen of a lower order, roused a tingling resentment which stretched
the moment with conflict. It did not bring the blood to her cheeks, but
it sent it away from her lips. She controlled herself by the help of an
inward defiance, and without other sign of emotion than this
lip-paleness turned to her play. But Deronda's gaze seemed to have
acted as an