occur on his father's death, and had provided against every
            evil chance save only one: it had never come into his mind that when
            his father died, his own death would quickly follow.
 
Grandcourt's importance as a subject of this realm was of the grandly passive
kind which, consists in the inheritance of land. Political and social movements
touched him only through the wire of his rental, and his most careful biographer
need not have read up on Schleswig-Holstein, the policy of Bismarck,
trade-unions, household suffrage, or even the last commercial panic. He glanced
over the best newspaper columns on these topics, and his views on them can
hardly be said to have wanted breadth, since he embraced all Germans, all
commercial men, and all voters liable to use the wrong kind of soap, under the
general epithet of »brutes;« but he took no action on these much agitated
questions beyond looking from under his eyelids at any man who mentioned them,
and retaining a silence which served to shake the opinions of timid thinkers.
    But Grandcourt within his own sphere of interest showed some of the
qualities which have entered into triumphal diplomacy of the widest continental
sort.
    No movement of Gwendolen in relation to Deronda escaped him. He would have
denied that he was jealous; because jealousy would have implied some doubt of
his own power to hinder what he had determined against. That his wife should
have more inclination to another man's society than to his own would not pain
him: what he required was that she should be as fully aware as she would have
been of a locked hand-cuff, that her inclination was helpless to decide anything
in contradiction with his resolve. However much of vacillating whim there might
have been in his entrance on matrimony, there was no vacillating in his
interpretation of the bond. He had not repented of his marriage; it had really
brought more of aim into his life, new objects to exert his will upon; and he
had not repented of his choice. His taste was fastidious, and Gwendolen
satisfied it: he would not have liked a wife who had not received some elevation
of rank from him; nor one who did not command admiration by her mien and beauty;
nor one whose nails were not of the right shape; nor one the lobe of whose ear
was at all too large and red; nor one who, even if her nails and ears were
right, was at the same time a ninny, unable to make spirited answers. These
requirements may not seem too exacting to refined contemporaries whose own
ability to fall in