a good many years this
court stood for me as my only image of a convent, and whenever I read
of monks and monasteries, this was my scenery for them."

"You must love this place very much," said Miss Fenn, innocently, not
thinking of inheritance. "So many homes are like twenty others. But
this is unique, and you seem to know every cranny of it. I dare say you
could never love another home so well."

"Oh, I carry it with me," said Deronda, quietly, being used to all
possible thoughts of this kind. "To most men their early home is no
more than a memory of their early years, and I'm not sure but they have
the best of it. The image is never marred. There's no disappointment in
memory, and one's exaggerations are always on the good side."

Gwendolen felt sure that he spoke in that way out of delicacy to her
and Grandcourt--because he knew they must hear him; and that he
probably thought of her as a selfish creature who only cared about
possessing things in her own person. But whatever he might say, it must
have been a secret hardship to him that any circumstances of his birth
had shut him out from the inheritance of his father's position; and if
he supposed that she exulted in her husband's taking it, what could he
feel for her but scornful pity? Indeed it seemed clear to her that he
was avoiding her, and preferred talking to others--which nevertheless
was not kind in him.

With these thoughts in her mind she was prevented by a mixture of pride
and timidity from addressing him again, and when they were looking at
the rows of quaint portraits in the gallery above the cloisters, she
kept up her air of interest and made her vivacious remarks without any
direct appeal to Deronda. But at the end she was very weary of her
assumed spirits, and Grandcourt turned into the billiard-room, she went
to the pretty boudoir which had been assigned to her, and shut herself
up to look melancholy at her ease. No chemical process shows a more
wonderful activity than the transforming influence of the thoughts we
imagine to be going on in another. Changes in theory, religion,
admirations, may begin with a suspicion of dissent or disapproval, even
when the grounds of disapproval are but matter of searching conjecture.

Poor Gwendolen was conscious of an uneasy, transforming process--all
the old nature shaken to its depths, its hopes spoiled, its pleasures
perturbed, but still showing wholeness and strength in the will to
reassert itself. Afte