have felt then - If I could
have chosen, I would not have been a Jew. What I feel now is - that my whole
being is a consent to the fact. But it has been the gradual accord between your
mind and mine which has brought about that full consent.«
    At the moment Deronda was speaking, that first evening in the book-shop was
vividly in his remembrance, with all the struggling aloofness he had then felt
from Mordecai's prophetic confidence. It was his nature to delight in satisfying
to the utmost the eagerly-expectant soul, which seemed to be looking out from
the face before him, like the long-enduring watcher who at last sees the
mounting signal-flame; and he went on with fuller fervour -
    »It is through your inspiration that I have discerned what may be my life's
task. It is you who have given shape to what, I believe, was an inherited
yearning - the effect of brooding, passionate thoughts in many ancestors -
thoughts that seem to have been intensely present in my grandfather. Suppose the
stolen offspring of some mountain tribe brought up in a city of the plain, or
one with an inherited genius for painting, and born blind - the ancestral life
would lie within them as a dim longing for unknown objects and sensations, and
the spell-bound habit of their inherited frames would be like a
cunningly-wrought musical instrument, never played on, but quivering throughout
in uneasy mysterious moanings of its intricate structure that, under the right
touch, gives music. Something like that, I think, has been my experience. Since
I began to read and know, I have always longed for some ideal task, in which I
might feel myself the heart and brain of a multitude - some social captainship,
which would come to me as a duty, and not be striven for as a personal prize.
You have raised the image of such a task for me - to bind our race together in
spite of heresy. You have said to me - Our religion united us before it divided
us - it made us a people before it made Rabbanites and Karaites. I mean to try
what can be done with that union - I mean to work in your spirit. Failure will
not be ignoble, but it would be ignoble for me not to try.«
    »Even as my brother that fed at the breasts of my mother,« said Mordecai,
falling back in his chair with a look of exultant repose, as after some finished
labour.
    To estimate the effect of this ardent outpouring from Deronda we must
remember