within her: there
was another sort of susceptibility in Esther, which her present circumstances
tended to encourage, though she had come to regard it as not at all lofty, but
rather as something which condemned her to littleness in comparison with a mind
she had learned to venerate. She knew quite well that, to Harold Transome, Felix
Holt was one of the common people who could come into question in no other than
a public light. She had a native capability for discerning that the sense of
ranks and degrees has its repulsions corresponding to the repulsions dependent
on difference of race and colour; and she remembered her own impressions too
well not to foresee that it would come on Harold Transome as a shock, if he
suspected there had been any love-passages between her and this young man, who
to him was of course no more than any other intelligent member of the working
class. »To him,« said Esther to herself, with a reaction of her newer, better
pride, »who has not had the sort of intercourse in which Felix Holt's cultured
nature would have asserted its superiority.« And in her fluctuations on this
matter, she found herself mentally protesting that, whatever Harold might think,
there was a light in which he was vulgar compared with Felix. Felix had ideas
and motives which she did not believe that Harold could understand. More than
all, there was this test: she herself had no sense of inferiority and just
subjection when she was with Harold Transome; there were even points in him for
which she felt a touch, not of angry, but of playful scorn; whereas with Felix
she had always a sense of dependence and possible illumination. In those large,
grave, candid grey eyes of his, love seemed something that belonged to the high
enthusiasm of life, such as might now be for ever shut out from her.
    All the same, her vanity winced at the idea that Harold should discern what,
from his point of view, would seem like a degradation of her taste and
refinement. She could not help being gratified by all the manifestations from
those around her that she was thought thoroughly fitted for a high position -
could not help enjoying, with more or less keenness, a rehearsal of that
demeanour amongst luxuries and dignities which had often been a part of her
daydreams, and the rehearsal included the reception of more and more emphatic
attentions from Harold, and of an effusiveness in his manners, which, in
proportion as it would have been offensive if it had appeared earlier, became
flattering as the effect of a growing acquaintance and daily contact.