 the difference only in her feeling? The strangely various emotions
of the last few hours had exhausted her; she was faint with fatigue and want of
food. Deronda, observing her pallor and tremulousness, longed to show more
feeling, but dared not. She put out her hand with an effort to smile, and then
he opened the door for her. That was all.
    A man of refined pride shrinks from making a lover's approaches to a woman
whose wealth or rank might make them appear presumptuous or low-motived; but
Deronda was finding a more delicate difficulty in a position which,
superficially taken, was the reverse of that - though to an ardent reverential
love, the loved woman has always a kind of wealth and rank which makes a man
keenly susceptible about the aspect of his addresses. Deronda's difficulty was
what any generous man might have felt in some degree; but it affected him
peculiarly through his imaginative sympathy with a mind in which gratitude was
strong. Mirah, he knew, felt herself bound to him by deep obligations, which to
her sensibilities might give every wish of his the aspect of a claim; and an
inability to fulfil it would cause her a pain continually revived by their
inevitable communion in care for Ezra. Here were fears not of pride only, but of
extreme tenderness. Altogether, to have the character of a benefactor seemed to
Deronda's anxiety an insurmountable obstacle to confessing himself a lover,
unless in some inconceivable way it could be revealed to him that Mirah's heart
had accepted him beforehand. And the agitation on his own account, too, was not
small.
    Even a man who has practised himself in love-making till his own glibness
has rendered him sceptical, may at last be overtaken by the lover's awe - may
tremble, stammer, and show other signs of recovered sensibility no more in the
range of his acquired talents than pins and needles after numbness: how much
more may that energetic timidity possess a man whose inward history has
cherished his susceptibilities instead of dulling them, and has kept all the
language of passion fresh and rooted as the lovely leafage about the hillside
spring!
    As for Mirah her dear head lay on its pillow that night with its former
suspicions thrown out of shape but still present, like an ugly story which has
been discredited but not therefore dissipated. All that she was certain of about
Deronda seemed to prove that he had no such fetters upon him as she had been
allowing herself to believe in. His whole manner as well as his words implied
that there were no hidden bonds remaining to have any
