what you are doing?"

"Certainly. I got her to throw herself precisely into this attitude.
Little mother sat for Gessius Florus, and Mirah clasped her knees."
Here Hans went a little way off and looked at the effect of his touches.

"I dare say she knows nothing about Berenice's history," said Deronda,
feeling more indignation than he would have been able to justify.

"Oh, yes, she does--ladies' edition. Berenice was a fervid patriot, but
was beguiled by love and ambition into attaching herself to the
arch-enemy of her people. Whence the Nemesis. Mirah takes it as a
tragic parable, and cries to think what the penitent Berenice suffered
as she wandered back to Jerusalem and sat desolate amidst desolation.
That was her own phrase. I couldn't find it in my heart to tell her I
invented that part of the story."

"Show me your Trasteverina," said Deronda, chiefly in order to hinder
himself from saying something else.

"Shall you mind turning over that folio?" said Hans. "My studies of
heads are all there. But they are in confusion. You will perhaps find
her next to a crop-eared undergraduate."

After Deronda had been turning over the drawings a minute or two, he
said--

"These seem to be all Cambridge heads and bits of country. Perhaps I
had better begin at the other end."

"No; you'll find her about the middle. I emptied one folio into
another."

"Is this one of your undergraduates?" said Deronda, holding up a
drawing. "It's an unusually agreeable face."

"That! Oh, that's a man named Gascoigne--Rex Gascoigne. An uncommonly
good fellow; his upper lip, too, is good. I coached him before he got
his scholarship. He ought to have taken honors last Easter. But he was
ill, and has had to stay up another year. I must look him up. I want to
know how he's going on."

"Here she is, I suppose," said Deronda, holding up a sketch of the
Trasteverina.

"Ah," said Hans, looking at it rather contemptuously, "too coarse. I
was unregenerate then."

Deronda was silent while he closed the folio, leaving the Trasteverina
outside. Then clasping his coat-collar, and turning toward Hans, he
said, "I dare say my scruples are excessive, Meyrick, but I must ask
you to oblige me by giving up this notion."

Hans threw himself into a tragic attitude, and screamed, "What! my
series--my immortal Berenice series? Think of what you are saying,
man--destroying, as Milton says, not a life but an immortality. Wait
before you, answer, that I