 herself was getting
frequent glimpses of without belonging to it. Her peculiar life and education
had produced in her an extraordinary mixture of unworldliness, with knowledge of
the world's evil, and even this knowledge was a strange blending of direct
observation with the effects of reading and theatrical study. Her memory was
furnished with abundant passionate situation and intrigue, which she never made
emotionally her own, but felt a repelled aloofness from, as she had done from
the actual life around her. Some of that imaginative knowledge began now to
weave itself around Mrs. Grandcourt; and though Mirah would admit no position
likely to affect her reverence for Deronda, she could not avoid a new painfully
vivid association of his general life with a world away from her own, where
there might be some involvement of his feeling and action with a woman like
Gwendolen, who was increasingly repugnant to her - increasingly, even after she
had ceased to see her; for liking and disliking can grow in meditation as fast
as in the more immediate kind of presence. Any disquietude consciously due to
the idea that Deronda's deepest care might be for something remote not only from
herself but even from his friendship for her brother, she would have checked
with rebuking questions: - What was she but one who had shared his generous
kindness with many others? and his attachment to her brother, was it not begun
late to be soon ended? Other ties had come before, and others would remain after
this had been cut by swift-coming death. But her uneasiness had not reached that
point of self-recognition in which she would have been ashamed of it as an
indirect, presumptuous claim on Deronda's feeling. That she or any one else
should think of him as her possible lover was a conception which had never
entered her mind; indeed it was equally out of the question with Mrs. Meyrick
and the girls, who with Mirah herself regarded his intervention in her life as
something exceptional, and were so impressed by his mission as her deliverer and
guardian that they would have held it an offence to hint at his holding any
other relation towards her: a point of view which Hans also had readily adopted.
It is a little hard upon some men that they appear to sink for us in becoming
lovers. But precisely to this innocence of the Meyricks was owing the
disturbance of Mirah's unconsciousness. The first occasion could hardly have
been more trivial, but it prepared her emotive nature for a deeper effect from
what happened afterwards.
    It was when Anna Gascoigne, visiting the Meyricks, was led to speak of her
cousinship with Gwendolen
