ceased to
have the exciting quality of promising any pre-eminence to her; and as
for fascinated gentlemen--adorers who might hover round her with
languishment, and diversify married life with the romantic stir of
mystery, passion, and danger, which her French reading had given her
some girlish notion of--they presented themselves to her imagination
with the fatal circumstance that, instead of fascinating her in return,
they were clad in her own weariness and disgust. The admiring male,
rashly adjusting the expression of his features and the turn of his
conversation to her supposed tastes, had always been an absurd object
to her, and at present seemed rather detestable. Many courses are
actually pursued--follies and sins both convenient and
inconvenient--without pleasure or hope of pleasure; but to solace
ourselves with imagining any course beforehand, there must be some
foretaste of pleasure in the shape of appetite; and Gwendolen's
appetite had sickened. Let her wander over the possibilities of her
life as she would, an uncertain shadow dogged her. Her confidence in
herself and her destiny had turned into remorse and dread; she trusted
neither herself nor her future.

This hidden helplessness gave fresh force to the hold Deronda had from
the first taken on her mind, as one who had an unknown standard by
which he judged her. Had he some way of looking at things which might
be a new footing for her--an inward safeguard against possible events
which she dreaded as stored-up retribution? It is one of the secrets in
that change of mental poise which has been fitly named conversion, that
to many among us neither heaven nor earth has any revelation till some
personality touches theirs with a peculiar influence, subduing them
into receptiveness. It had been Gwendolen's habit to think of the
persons around her as stale books, too familiar to be interesting.
Deronda had lit up her attention with a sense of novelty: not by words
only, but by imagined facts, his influence had entered into the current
of that self-suspicion and self-blame which awakens a new consciousness.

"I wish he could know everything about me without my telling him," was
one of her thoughts, as she sat leaning over the end of a couch,
supporting her head with her hand, and looking at herself in a
mirror--not in admiration, but in a sad kind of companionship. "I wish
he knew that I am not so contemptible as he thinks me; that I am in
deep trouble, and want