
bring much. Ask my uncle what to do with them. I shall certainly not use them
again. I am going to take the veil. I wonder if all the poor wretches who have
ever taken it felt as I do.«
    »Don't exaggerate evils, dear.«
    »How can any one know that I exaggerate, when I am speaking of my own
feeling? I did not say what any one else felt.«
    She took out the torn handkerchief from her pocket again, and wrapt it
deliberately round the necklace. Mrs. Davilow observed the action with some
surprise, but the tone of the last words discouraged her from asking any
question.
    The »feeling« Gwendolen spoke of with an air of tragedy was not to be
explained by the mere fact that she was going to be a governess: she was
possessed by a spirit of general disappointment. It was not simply that she had
a distaste for what she was called on to do: the distaste spread itself over the
world outside her penitentiary, since she saw nothing very pleasant in it that
seemed attainable by her even if she were free. Naturally her grievances did not
seem to her smaller than some of her male contemporaries held theirs to be when
they felt a profession too narrow for their powers, and had an à priori
conviction that it was not worth while to put forth their latent abilities.
Because her education had been less expensive than theirs, it did not follow
that she should have wider emotions or a keener intellectual vision. Her griefs
were feminine; but to her as a woman they were not the less hard to bear, and
she felt an equal right to the Promethean tone.
    But the movement of mind which led her to keep the necklace, to fold it up
in the handkerchief, and rise to put it in her nécessaire, where she had first
placed it when it had been returned to her, was more peculiar, and what would be
called less reasonable. It came from that streak of superstition in her which
attached itself both to her confidence and her terror - a superstition which
lingers in an intense personality even in spite of theory and science; any dread
or hope for self being stronger than all reasons for or against it. Why she
should suddenly determine not to part with the necklace was not much clearer to
her than why she should sometimes have been frightened to find herself in the
fields alone: she had a confused state of emotion about Deronda - was it wounded
pride and resentment, or a certain awe and exceptional trust? It was something
vague and yet mastering, which impelled her
