

                                  George Eliot

                                 Daniel Deronda

                                     Book I

                               The Spoiled Child

                                   Chapter I

            Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even
            Science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-
            believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars' unceasing
            journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at
            Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been
            understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that
            her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too,
            reckons backwards as well as forwards, divides his unit into
            billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in
            medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and
            whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction
            of that all- presupposing fact with which our story sets out.
 
Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or
expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the
evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect
that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again
felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?
    She who raised these questions in Daniel Deronda's mind was occupied in
gambling: not in the open air under a southern sky, tossing coppers on a ruined
wall, with rags about her limbs; but in one of those splendid resorts which the
enlightenment of ages has prepared for the same species of pleasure at a heavy
cost of gilt mouldings, dark-toned colour and chubby nudities, all
correspondingly heavy - forming a suitable condenser for human breath belonging,
in great part, to the highest fashion, and not easily procurable to be breathed
in elsewhere in the like proportion, at least by persons of little fashion.
    It was near four o'clock on a September day, so that the atmosphere was
well-brewed to a visible haze. There was deep stillness, broken only by a light
rattle, a light chink, a small sweeping sound, and an occasional monotone in
French, such as might be expected to issue from an ingeniously constructed
automaton. Round two long tables were gathered two serried crowds of human
beings, all save one having their faces and attention bent on the tables. The
one exception was a melancholy little boy, with his knees and calves simply in
their natural clothing of epidermis, but for the rest of his person in a fancy
dress. He alone had his face turned towards the doorway,
