East, sank before the bewildering
vision of these wide-stretching purposes in which she felt herself reduced to a
mere speck. There comes a terrible moment to many souls when the great movements
of the world, the larger destinies of mankind, which have lain aloof in
newspapers and other neglected reading, enter like an earthquake into their own
lives - when the slow urgency of growing generations turns into the tread of an
invading army or the dire clash of civil war, and grey fathers know nothing to
seek for but the corpses of their blooming sons, and girls forget all vanity to
make lint and bandages which may serve for the shattered limbs of their
betrothed husbands. Then it is as if the Invisible Power that has been the
object of lip-worship and lip-resignation became visible, according to the
imagery of the Hebrew poet, making the flames his chariot, and riding on the
wings of the wind, till the mountains smoke and the plains shudder under the
rolling fiery visitation. Often the good cause seems to lie prostrate under the
thunder of unrelenting force, the martyrs live reviled, they die, and no angel
is seen holding forth the crown and the palm branch. Then it is that the
submission of the soul to the Highest is tested, and even in the eyes of
frivolity life looks out from the scene of human struggle with the awful face of
duty, and a religion shows itself which is something else than a private
consolation.
    That was the sort of crisis which was at this moment beginning in
Gwendolen's small life: she was for the first time feeling the pressure of a
vast mysterious movement, for the first time being dislodged from her supremacy
in her own world, and getting a sense that her horizon was but a dipping onward
of an existence with which her own was revolving. All the troubles of her
wifehood and widowhood had still left her with the implicit impression which had
accompanied her from childhood, that whatever surrounded her was somehow
specially for her, and it was because of this that no personal jealousy had been
roused in her in relation to Deronda: she could not spontaneously think of him
as rightfully belonging to others more than to her. But here had come a shock
which went deeper than personal jealousy - something spiritual and vaguely
tremendous that thrust her away, and yet quelled all anger into
self-humiliation.
    There had been a long silence. Deronda had stood still, even thankful for an
interval before he needed to say more, and Gwendolen had sat like a statue with
her wrists lying over each other and her eyes fixed - the intensity of her
mental action