which made him want to be at home in foreign
countries, and follow in imagination the travelling students of the middle ages.
He longed now to have the sort of apprenticeship to life which would not shape
him too definitely, and rob him of the choice that might come from a free
growth. One sees that Deronda's demerits were likely to be on the side of
reflective hesitation, and this tendency was encouraged by his position: there
was no need for him to get an immediate income, or to fit himself in haste for a
profession; and his sensibility to the half-known facts of his parentage made
him an excuse for lingering longer than others in a state of social neutrality.
Other men, he inwardly said, had a more definite place and duties. But the
project which flattered his inclination might not have gone beyond the stage of
ineffective brooding, if certain circumstances had not quickened it into action.
    The circumstances arose out of an enthusiastic friendship which extended
into his after-life. Of the same year with himself, and occupying small rooms
close to his, was a youth who had come as an exhibitioner from Christ's
Hospital, and had eccentricities enough for a Charles Lamb. Only to look at his
pinched features and blond hair hanging over his collar reminded one of pale
quaint heads by early German painters; and when this faint colouring was lit up
by a joke, there came sudden creases about the mouth and eyes which might have
been moulded by the soul of an aged humorist. His father, an engraver of some
distinction, had been dead eleven years, and his mother had three girls to
educate and maintain on a meagre annuity. Hans Meyrick - he had been daringly
christened after Holbein - felt himself the pillar, or rather the knotted and
twisted trunk, round which these feeble climbing plants must cling. There was no
want of ability or of honest well-meaning affection to make the prop
trustworthy: the ease and quickness with which he studied might serve him to win
prizes at Cambridge, as he had done among the Blue Coats, in spite of
irregularities. The only danger was, that the incalculable tendencies in him
might be fatally timed, and that his good intentions might be frustrated by some
act which was not due to habit but to capricious, scattered impulses. He could
not be said to have any one bad habit; yet at longer or shorter intervals he had
fits of impish recklessness, and did things that would have made the worst
habits.
    Hans in his right mind, however, was a lovable creature, and in Deronda he
had happened to