said Sir Hugo, putting down
his glasses.
    »Decidedly not.«
    This answer was perfectly truthful; nevertheless it had passed through
Deronda's mind that under other circumstances he should have given way to the
interest this girl had raised in him, and tried to know more of her. But his
history had given him a stronger bias in another direction. He felt himself in
no sense free.
 

                                  Chapter XVI

            Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The
            astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so
            for every visible arc in the wanderer's orbit; and the narrator of
            human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would
            have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead
            up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense
            suffering which take the quality of action - like the cry of
            Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems a greater energy than the
            sea and sky he invokes and the deity he defies.
 
Deronda's circumstances, indeed, had been exceptional. One moment had been burnt
into his life as its chief epoch - a moment full of July sunshine and large pink
roses shedding their last petals on a grassy court enclosed on three sides by a
Gothic cloister. Imagine him in such a scene: a boy of thirteen, stretched prone
on the grass where it was in shadow, his curly head propped on his arms over a
book, while his tutor, also reading, sat on a campstool under shelter. Deronda's
book was Sismondi's History of the Italian Republics: - the lad had a passion
for history, eager to know how time had been filled up since the Flood, and how
things were carried on in the dull periods. Suddenly he let down his left arm
and looked at his tutor, saying in purest boyish tones -
    »Mr. Fraser, how was it that the popes and cardinals always had so many
nephews?«
    The tutor, an able young Scotchman who acted as Sir Hugo Mallinger's
secretary, roused rather unwillingly from his political economy, answered with
the clear-cut, emphatic chant which makes a truth doubly telling in Scotch
utterance -
    »Their own children were called nephews.«
    »Why?« said Deronda.
    »It was just for the propriety of the thing; because, as you know very well,
priests don't marry, and the children were illegitimate.«
    Mr. Fraser, thrusting out his lower lip and making his chant of the last
word the more emphatic for a little impatience at being interrupted, had already
turned