. However, that's nobody's business but his own. The affair
has sunk below the surface."

"I wonder you could have learned so much about it," said Deronda,
rather drily.

"Oh, there are plenty of people who knew all about it; but such stories
get packed away like old letters. They interest me. I like to know the
manners of my time--contemporary gossip, not antediluvian. These
Dryasdust fellows get a reputation by raking up some small scandal
about Semiramis or Nitocris, and then we have a thousand and one poems
written upon it by all the warblers big and little. But I don't care a
straw about the _faux pas_ of the mummies. You do, though. You are one
of the historical men--more interested in a lady when she's got a rag
face and skeleton toes peeping out. Does that flatter your imagination?"

"Well, if she had any woes in her love, one has the satisfaction of
knowing that she's well out of them."

"Ah, you are thinking of the Medea, I see."

Deronda then chose to point to some giant oaks worth looking at in
their bareness. He also felt an interest in this piece of contemporary
gossip, but he was satisfied that Mr. Vandernoodt had no more to tell
about it.

Since the early days when he tried to construct the hidden story of his
own birth, his mind had perhaps never been so active in weaving
probabilities about any private affair as it had now begun to be about
Gwendolen's marriage. This unavowed relation of Grandcourt's--could she
have gained some knowledge of it, which caused her to shrink from the
match--a shrinking finally overcome by the urgence of poverty? He could
recall almost every word she had said to him, and in certain of these
words he seemed to discern that she was conscious of having done some
wrong--inflicted some injury. His own acute experience made him alive
to the form of injury which might affect the unavowed children and
their mother. Was Mrs. Grandcourt, under all her determined show of
satisfaction, gnawed by a double, a treble-headed grief--self-reproach,
disappointment, jealousy? He dwelt especially on all the slight signs
of self-reproach: he was inclined to judge her tenderly, to excuse, to
pity. He thought he had found a key now by which to interpret her more
clearly: what magnifying of her misery might not a young creature get
into who had wedded her fresh hopes to old secrets! He thought he saw
clearly enough now why Sir Hugo had never dropped any hint of this
affair to him; and immedi