holding it before him as if they
had entered a room or an actual church. He, like others, happened to be
looking at her, and their eyes met--to her intense vexation, for it
seemed to her that by looking at him she had betrayed the reference of
her thoughts, and she felt herself blushing: she exaggerated the
impression that even Sir Hugo as well as Deronda would have of her bad
taste in referring to the possession of anything at the Abbey: as for
Deronda, she had probably made him despise her. Her annoyance at what
she imagined to be the obviousness of her confusion robbed her of her
usual facility in carrying it off by playful speech, and turning up her
face to look at the roof, she wheeled away in that attitude. If any had
noticed her blush as significant, they had certainly not interpreted it
by the secret windings and recesses of her feeling. A blush is no
language: only a dubious flag-signal which may mean either of two
contradictories. Deronda alone had a faint guess at some part of her
feeling; but while he was observing her he was himself under
observation.

"Do you take off your hat to horses?" said Grandcourt, with a slight
sneer.

"Why not?" said Deronda, covering himself. He had really taken off the
hat automatically, and if he had been an ugly man might doubtless have
done so with impunity; ugliness having naturally the air of involuntary
exposure, and beauty, of display.

Gwendolen's confusion was soon merged in the survey of the horses,
which Grandcourt politely abstained from appraising, languidly
assenting to Sir Hugo's alternate depreciation and eulogy of the same
animal, as one that he should not have bought when he was younger, and
piqued himself on his horses, but yet one that had better qualities
than many more expensive brutes.

"The fact is, stables dive deeper and deeper into the pocket nowadays,
and I am very glad to have got rid of that _demangeaison_," said Sir
Hugo, as they were coming out.

"What is a man to do, though?" said Grandcourt. "He must ride. I don't
see what else there is to do. And I don't call it riding to sit astride
a set of brutes with every deformity under the sun."

This delicate diplomatic way of characterizing Sir Hugo's stud did not
require direct notice; and the baronet, feeling that the conversation
had worn rather thin, said to the party generally, "Now we are going to
see the cloister--the finest bit of all--in perfect preservation; the
monks might have been