hearing, as a stray stork might have
made its peculiar flight across her landscape without rousing any surprised
reflection on its natural history.
    But the issue of that visit, as it regarded her husband, took a strongly
active part in the process which made an habitual conflict within her, and was
the cause of some external change perhaps not observed by any one except
Deronda. As the weeks went on bringing occasional transient interviews with her,
he thought that he perceived in her an intensifying of her superficial hardness
and resolute display, which made her abrupt betrayals of agitation the more
marked and disturbing to him.
    In fact, she was undergoing a sort of discipline for the refractory which,
as little as possible like conversion, bends half the self with a terrible
strain, and exasperates the unwillingness of the other half. Grandcourt had an
active divination rather than discernment of refractoriness in her, and what had
happened about Mirah quickened his suspicion that there was an increase of it
dependent on the occasions when she happened to see Deronda: there was some
»confounded nonsense« between them: he did not imagine it exactly as flirtation,
and his imagination in other branches was rather restricted; but it was nonsense
that evidently kept up a kind of simmering in her mind - an inward action which
might become disagreeably outward. Husbands in the old time are known to have
suffered from a threatening devoutness in their wives, presenting itself first
indistinctly as oddity, and ending in that mild form of lunatic asylum, a
nunnery: Grandcourt had a vague perception of threatening moods in Gwendolen
which the unity between them in his views of marriage required him peremptorily
to check. Among the means he chose, one was peculiar, and was less ably
calculated than the speeches we have just heard.
    He determined that she should know the main purport of the will he was
making, but he could not communicate this himself, because it involved the fact
of his relation to Mrs. Glasher and her children; and that there should be any
overt recognition of this between Gwendolen and himself was supremely repugnant
to him. Like all proud, closely-wrapped natures, he shrank from explicitness and
detail, even on trivialities, if they were personal: a valet must maintain a
strict reserve with him on the subject of shoes and stockings. And clashing was
intolerable to him: his habitual want was to put collision out of the question
by the quiet massive pressure of his rule. But he wished Gwendolen to know that
before he made her an offer it was no secret to him that she was aware of his
relations with Lydia, her previous knowledge being the apology