, aware that his chambers were sufficiently tenanted by Hans
Meyrick. This was what he expected; but he found other things not
altogether according to his expectations.

Most of us remember Retzsch's drawing of destiny in the shape of
Mephistopheles playing at chess with man for his soul, a game in which
we may imagine the clever adversary making a feint of unintended moves
so as to set the beguiled mortal on carrying his defensive pieces away
from the true point of attack. The fiend makes preparation his favorite
object of mockery, that he may fatally persuade us against our taking
out waterproofs when he is well aware the sky is going to clear,
foreseeing that the imbecile will turn this delusion into a prejudice
against waterproofs instead of giving a closer study to the
weather-signs. It is a peculiar test of a man's metal when, after he
has painfully adjusted himself to what seems a wise provision, he finds
all his mental precaution a little beside the mark, and his excellent
intentions no better than miscalculated dovetails, accurately cut from
a wrong starting-point. His magnanimity has got itself ready to meet
misbehavior, and finds quite a different call upon it. Something of
this kind happened to Deronda.

His first impression was one of pure pleasure and amusement at finding
his sitting-room transformed into an _atelier_ strewed with
miscellaneous drawings and with the contents of two chests from Rome,
the lower half of the windows darkened with baize, and the blonde Hans
in his weird youth as the presiding genius of the littered place--his
hair longer than of old, his face more whimsically creased, and his
high voice as usual getting higher under the excitement of rapid talk.
The friendship of the two had been kept up warmly since the memorable
Cambridge time, not only by correspondence but by little episodes of
companionship abroad and in England, and the original relation of
confidence on one side and indulgence on the other had been developed
in practice, as is wont to be the case where such spiritual borrowing
and lending has been well begun.

"I knew you would like to see my casts and antiquities," said Hans,
after the first hearty greetings and inquiries, "so I didn't scruple to
unlade my chests here. But I've found two rooms at Chelsea not many
hundred yards from my mother and sisters, and I shall soon be ready to
hang out there--when they've scraped the walls and put in some new
lights. That's all