"I can't vouch for that exactly. I have not seen enough of her. But I
have seen nothing in her that I could wish to be different. She has had
an unhappy life. Her troubles began in early childhood, and she has
grown up among very painful surroundings. But I think you will say that
no advantages could have given her more grace and truer refinement."

"I wonder what sort of trouble hers were?"

"I have not any very precise knowledge. But I know that she was on the
brink of drowning herself in despair."

"And what hindered her?" said Gwendolen, quickly, looking at Deronda.

"Some ray or other came--which made her feel that she ought to
live--that it was good to live," he answered, quietly. "She is full of
piety, and seems capable of submitting to anything when it takes the
form of duty."

"Those people are not to be pitied," said Gwendolen, impatiently. "I
have no sympathy with women who are always doing right. I don't believe
in their great sufferings." Her fingers moved quickly among the edges
of the music.

"It is true," said Deronda, "that the consciousness of having done
wrong is something deeper, more bitter. I suppose we faulty creatures
can never feel so much for the irreproachable as for those who are
bruised in the struggle with their own faults. It is a very ancient
story, that of the lost sheep--but it comes up afresh every day."

"That is a way of speaking--it is not acted upon, it is not real," said
Gwendolen, bitterly. "You admire Miss Lapidoth because you think her
blameless, perfect. And you know you would despise a woman who had done
something you thought very wrong."

"That would depend entirely upon her own view of what she had done,"
said Deronda.

"You would be satisfied if she were very wretched, I suppose," said
Gwendolen, impetuously.

"No, not satisfied--full of sorrow for her. It was not a mere way of
speaking. I did not mean to say that the finer nature is not more
adorable; I meant that those who would be comparatively uninteresting
beforehand may become worthier of sympathy when they do something that
awakens in them a keen remorse. Lives are enlarged in different ways. I
dare say some would never get their eyes opened if it were not for a
violent shock from the consequences of their own actions. And when they
are suffering in that way one must care for them more than for the
comfortably self-satisfied." Deronda forgot everything but his vision
of what Gwendolen's experience had pr