; "but we would
rather hold you cheaper, and have you alive."

Not only the Meyricks, whose various knowledge had been acquired by the
irregular foraging to which clever girls have usually been reduced, but
Deronda himself, with all his masculine instruction, had been roused by
this apparition of Mirah to the consciousness of knowing hardly
anything about modern Judaism or the inner Jewish history. The Chosen
People have been commonly treated as a people chosen for the sake of
somebody else; and their thinking as something (no matter exactly what)
that ought to have been entirely otherwise; and Deronda, like his
neighbors, had regarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric fossilized form
which an accomplished man might dispense with studying, and leave to
specialists. But Mirah, with her terrified flight from one parent, and
her yearning after the other, had flashed on him the hitherto neglected
reality that Judaism was something still throbbing in human lives,
still making for them the only conceivable vesture of the world; and in
the idling excursion on which he immediately afterward set out with Sir
Hugo he began to look for the outsides of synagogues, and the title of
books about the Jews. This awakening of a new interest--this passing
from the supposition that we hold the right opinions on a subject we
are careless about, to a sudden care for it, and a sense that our
opinions were ignorance--is an effectual remedy for _ennui_, which,
unhappily, cannot be secured on a physician's prescription; but Deronda
had carried it with him, and endured his weeks of lounging all the
better. It was on this journey that he first entered a Jewish
synagogue--at Frankfort--where his party rested on a Friday. In
exploring the Juden-gasse, which he had seen long before, he remembered
well enough its picturesque old houses; what his eyes chiefly dwelt on
now were the human types there; and his thought, busily connecting them
with the past phases of their race, stirred that fibre of historic
sympathy which had helped to determine in him certain traits worth
mentioning for those who are interested in his future. True, when a
young man has a fine person, no eccentricity of manners, the education
of a gentleman, and a present income, it is not customary to feel a
prying curiosity about his way of thinking, or his peculiar tastes. He
may very well be settled in life as an agreeable clever young fellow
without passing a special examination on thos