 Mab thought, rather sarcastically as he said,
»That prospect of everything coming to an end will not guide us far in practice.
Mirah's feelings, she tells us, are concerned with what is.«
    Mab was confused and wished she had not spoken, since Mr. Deronda seemed to
think that she had found fault with Mirah; but to have spoken once is a
tyrannous reason for speaking again, and she said -
    »I only meant that we must have courage to hear things, else there is hardly
anything we can talk about.« Mab felt herself unanswerable here, inclining to
the opinion of Socrates: »What motive has a man to live, if not for the
pleasures of discourse?«
    Deronda took his leave soon after, and when Mrs. Meyrick went outside with
him to exchange a few words about Mirah, he said, »Hans is to share my chambers
when he comes at Christmas.«
    »You have written to Rome about that?« said Mrs. Meyrick, her face lighting
up. »How very good and thoughtful of you! You mentioned Mirah, then?«
    »Yes, I referred to her. I concluded he knew everything from you.«
    »I must confess my folly. I have not yet written a word about her. I have
always been meaning to do it, and yet have ended my letter without saying a
word. And I told the girls to leave it to me. However! -Thank you a thousand
times.«
    Deronda divined something of what was in the mother's mind, and his
divination reinforced a certain anxiety already present in him. His inward
colloquy was not soothing. He said to himself that no man could see this
exquisite creature without feeling it possible to fall in love with her; but all
the fervour of his nature was engaged on the side of precaution. There are
personages who feel themselves tragic because they march into a palpable morass,
dragging another with them, and then cry out against all the gods. Deronda's
mind was strongly set against imitating them.
    »I have my hands on the reins now,« he thought, »and I will not drop them. I
shall go there as little as possible.«
    He saw the reasons acting themselves out before him. How could he be Mirah's
guardian and claim to unite with Mrs. Meyrick, to whose charge he had committed
her, if he showed himself as a lover - whom she did not love - whom she would
not marry? And if he encouraged any germ of lover's feeling in
