martyring
pity rather than of personal love, and his less constrained tenderness flowed
with the fuller stream towards an indwelling image in all things unlike
Gwendolen. Still more, his relation to Mordecai had brought with it a new
nearness to Mirah which was not the less agitating because there was no apparent
change in his position towards her; and she had inevitably been bound up in all
the thoughts that made him shrink from an issue disappointing to her brother.
This process had not gone on unconsciously in Deronda: he was conscious of it as
we are of some covetousness that it would be better to nullify by encouraging
other thoughts than to give it the insistency of confession even to ourselves:
but the jealous fire had leaped out at Hans's pretensions, and when his mother
accused him of being in love with a Jewess, any evasion suddenly seemed an
infidelity. His mother had compelled him to a decisive acknowledgment of his
love, as Joseph Kalonymos had compelled him to a definite expression of his
resolve. This new state of decision wrought on Deronda with a force which
surprised even himself. There was a release of all the energy which had long
been spent in self-checking and suppression because of doubtful conditions; and
he was ready to laugh at his own impetuosity when, as he neared England on his
way from Mainz, he felt the remaining distance more and more of an obstruction.
It was as if he had found an added soul in finding his ancestry - his judgment
no longer wandering in the mazes of impartial sympathy, but choosing, with that
noble partiality which is man's best strength, the closer fellowship that makes
sympathy practical - exchanging that bird's-eye reasonableness which soars to
avoid preference and loses all sense of quality, for the generous reasonableness
of drawing shoulder to shoulder with men of like inheritance. He wanted now to
be again with Mordecai, to pour forth instead of restraining his feeling, to
admit agreement and maintain dissent, and all the while to find Mirah's presence
without the embarrassment of obviously seeking it, to see her in the light of a
new possibility, to interpret her looks and words from a new starting-point. He
was not greatly alarmed about the effect of Hans's attentions, but he had a
presentiment that her feeling towards himself had from the first lain in a
channel from which it was not likely to be diverted into love. To astonish a
woman by turning into her lover when she has been thinking of you merely as a
Lord Chancellor is what a man naturally shrinks from: he is anxious to create an
easier transition.
    What wonder
