r eyes!" said the tailor.
"She makes you feel comical when she looks at you."

Gwendolen, in fact, never showed more elasticity in her bearing, more
lustre in her long brown glance: she had the brilliancy of strong
excitement, which will sometimes come even from pain. It was not pain,
however, that she was feeling: she had wrought herself up to much the
same condition as that in which she stood at the gambling-table when
Deronda was looking at her, and she began to lose. There was an
enjoyment in it: whatever uneasiness a growing conscience had created
was disregarded as an ailment might have been, amidst the gratification
of that ambitious vanity and desire for luxury within her which it
would take a great deal of slow poisoning to kill. This morning she
could not have said truly that she repented her acceptance of
Grandcourt, or that any fears in hazy perspective could hinder the
glowing effect of the immediate scene in which she was the central
object. That she was doing something wrong--that a punishment might be
hanging over her--that the woman to whom she had given a promise and
broken it, was thinking of her in bitterness and misery with a just
reproach--that Deronda with his way of looking into things very likely
despised her for marrying Grandcourt, as he had despised her for
gambling--above all, that the cord which united her with this lover and
which she had heretofore held by the hand, was now being flung over her
neck,--all this yeasty mingling of dimly understood facts with vague
but deep impressions, and with images half real, half fantastic, had
been disturbing her during the weeks of her engagement. Was that
agitating experience nullified this morning? No: it was surmounted and
thrust down with a sort of exulting defiance as she felt herself
standing at the game of life with many eyes upon her, daring everything
to win much--or if to lose, still with _eclat_ and a sense of
importance. But this morning a losing destiny for herself did not press
upon her as a fear: she thought that she was entering on a fuller power
of managing circumstances--with all the official strength of marriage,
which some women made so poor a use of. That intoxication of youthful
egoism out of which she had been shaken by trouble, humiliation, and a
new sense of culpability, had returned upon her under a newly-fed
strength of the old fumes. She did not in the least present the ideal
of the tearful, tremulous bride. Poor Gwendolen,