had a St
Januarius procession against the plague. It's no use having an Order in Council
against popular shallowness. There is no action possible without a little
acting.«
    »One may be obliged to give way to an occasional necessity,« said Deronda.
»But it is one thing to say, In this particular case I am forced to put on this
foolscap and grin, and another to buy a pocket foolscap and practise myself in
grinning. I can't see any real public expediency that does not keep an ideal
before it which makes a limit of deviation from the direct path. But if I were
to set up for a public man I might mistake my own success for public
expediency.«
    It was after this dialogue, which was rather jarring to him, that Deronda
set out on his meditated second visit to Ezra Cohen's. He entered the street at
the end opposite to the Holborn entrance, and an inward reluctance slackened his
pace while his thoughts were transferring what he had just been saying about
public expediency to the entirely private difficulty which brought him back
again into this unattractive thoroughfare. It might soon become an immediate
practical question with him how far he could call it a wise expediency to
conceal the fact of close kindred. Such questions turning up constantly in life
are often decided in a rough and ready way; and to many it will appear an
over-refinement in Deronda that he should make any great point of a matter
confined to his own knowledge. But we have seen the reasons why he had come to
regard concealment as a bane of life, and the necessity of concealment as a mark
by which lines of action were to be avoided. The prospect of being urged against
the confirmed habit of his mind was naturally grating. He even paused here and
there before the most plausible shop-windows for a gentleman to look into, half
inclined to decide that he would not increase his knowledge about that modern
Ezra, who was certainly not a leader among his people - a hesitation which
proved how, in a man much given to reasoning, a bare possibility may weigh more
than the best-clad likelihood; for Deronda's reasoning had decided that all
likelihood was against this man's being Mirah's brother.
    One of the shop-windows he paused before was that of a second-hand
book-shop, where, on a narrow table outside, the literature of the ages was
represented in judicious mixture, from the immortal verse of Homer to the mortal
prose of the railway novel. That the mixture was judicious was apparent from
Deronda's