likelihood, under the circumstances, that he will get a
        distaste for the neighbourhood, and there will be the notion of the
        money sticking by him without being urged. I would bet on your ultimate
        success. As I am not to be exiled to Siberia, but am to be within call,
        it is possible that, by-and- by, I may be of more service to you. But at
        present I can think of no medium so good as Mr. Deronda. Nothing puts
        Grandcourt in worse humour than having the lawyers thrust their paper
        under his nose uninvited.
            Trusting that your visit to Leubronn has put you in excellent
        condition for the winter, I remain, my dear Sir Hugo, yours very
        faithfully,
                                                           THOMAS CRANMER LUSH.«
 
Sir Hugo, having received this letter at breakfast, handed it to Deronda, who,
though he had chambers in town, was somehow hardly ever in them, Sir Hugo not
being contented without him. The chatty baronet would have liked a young
companion even if there had been no peculiar reasons for attachment between
them: one with a fine harmonious unspoiled face fitted to keep up a cheerful
view of posterity and inheritance generally, not-withstanding particular
disappointments; and his affection for Deronda was not diminished by the
deep-lying though not obtrusive difference in their notions and tastes. Perhaps
it was all the stronger; acting as the same sort of difference does between a
man and a woman in giving a piquancy to the attachment which subsists in spite
of it. Sir Hugo did not think unapprovingly of himself; but he looked at men and
society from a liberal-menagerie point of view, and he had a certain pride in
Deronda's differing from him, which, if it had found voice, might have said -
»You see this fine young fellow - not such as you see every day, is he? - he
belongs to me in a sort of way, I brought him up from a child; but you would not
ticket him off easily, he has notions of his own, and he's as far as the poles
asunder from what I was at his age.« This state of feeling was kept up by the
mental balance in Deronda, who was moved by an affectionateness such as we are
apt to call feminine, disposing him to yield in ordinary details, while he had a
certain inflexibility of judgment, and independence of opinion, held to be
rightfully masculine.
    When he had read the letter, he returned it without speaking, inwardly
wincing under Lush's mode of attributing a neutral usefulness to him in the
family