are not worth reckoning,
I suppose« (she shot a mischievous glance at her own daughters), »and a dead
mother is worth more than a living one?«
    »Well, and so she may be, little mother,« said Kate; »but we would rather
hold you cheaper, and have you alive.«
    Not only the Meyricks, whose various knowledge had been acquired by the
irregular foraging to which clever girls have usually been reduced, but Deronda
himself, with all his masculine instruction, had been roused by this apparition
of Mirah to the consciousness of knowing hardly anything about modern Judaism or
the inner Jewish history. The Chosen People have been commonly treated as a
people chosen for the sake of somebody else; and their thinking as something (no
matter exactly what) that ought to have been entirely otherwise; and Deronda,
like his neighbours, had regarded Judaism as a sort of eccentric fossilised form
which an accomplished man might dispense with studying, and leave to
specialists. But Mirah, with her terrified flight from one parent, and her
yearning after the other, had flashed on him the hitherto neglected reality that
Judaism was something still throbbing in human lives, still making for them the
only conceivable vesture of the world; and in the idling excursion on which he
immediately afterwards set out with Sir Hugo he began to look for the outsides
of synagogues, and the titles of books about the Jews. This wakening of a new
interest - this passing from the supposition that we hold the right opinions on
a subject we are careless about, to a sudden care for it, and a sense that our
opinions were ignorance - is an effectual remedy for ennui, which unhappily
cannot be secured on a physician's prescription; but Deronda had carried it with
him, and endured his weeks of lounging all the better. It was on this journey
that he first entered a Jewish synagogue - at Frankfort - where his party rested
on a Friday. In exploring the Juden-gasse, which he had seen long before, he
remembered well enough its picturesque old houses; what his eyes chiefly dwelt
on now were the human types there; and his thought, busily connecting them with
the past phases of their race, stirred that fibre of historic sympathy which had
helped to determine in him certain traits worth mentioning for those who are
interested in his future. True, when a young man has a fine person, no
eccentricity of manners, the education of a gentleman, and a present income, it
is not customary to feel a prying curiosity about his way of thinking, or his
peculiar tastes.