need have a big fortune that marries her.«
    »That's true, mother,« said Felix, sitting down, snatching up little Job,
and finding a vent for some unspeakable feeling in the pretence of worrying him.
    Esther was rather melancholy as she went home, yet happier withal than she
had been for many days before. She thought, »I need not mind having shown so
much anxiety about his opinion. He is too clear-sighted to mistake our mutual
position; he is quite above putting a false interpretation on what I have done.
Besides, he had not thought of me at all - I saw that plainly enough. Yet he was
very kind. There is something greater and better in him than I had imagined. His
behaviour to-day - to his mother and me too - I should call it the highest
gentlemanliness, only it seems in him to be something deeper. But he has chosen
an intolerable life; though I suppose, if I had a mind equal to his, and if he
loved me very dearly, I should choose the same life.«
    Esther felt that she had prefixed an impossible if to that result. But now
she had known Felix, her conception of what a happy love must be had become like
a dissolving view, in which the once-clear images were gradually melting into
new forms and new colours. The favourite Byronic heroes were beginning to look
something like last night's decorations seen in the sober dawn. So fast does a
little leaven spread within us - so incalculable is the effect of one
personality on another. Behind all Esther's thoughts, like an unacknowledged yet
constraining presence, there was the sense, that if Felix Holt were to love her,
her life would be exalted into something quite new - into a sort of difficult
blessedness, such as one may imagine in beings who are conscious of painfully
growing into the possession of higher powers.
    It was quite true that Felix had not thought the more of Esther because of
that Sunday afternoon's interview which had shaken her mind to the very roots.
He had avoided intruding on Mr Lyon without special reason, because he believed
the minister to be preoccupied with some private care. He had thought a great
deal of Esther with a mixture of strong disapproval and strong liking, which
both together made a feeling the reverse of indifference; but he was not going
to let her have any influence on his life. Even if his determination had not
been fixed, he would have believed that she would utterly scorn him in any other
light than that of an acquaintance