Daniel Deronda (with an introduction by Esther Wood)

DANIEL DERONDA

By GEORGE ELIOT

Introduction by ESTHER WOOD

Daniel Deronda

By George Eliot

Introduction by Esther Wood

Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5783-9

eBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-5784-6

This edition copyright © 2018. Digireads.com Publishing.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Cover Image: a detail of The Fair Toxophilites, c. 1872, by William Powell Frith (1819-1909) / Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter, Devon, UK / Bridgeman Images.

Please visit www.digireads.com

CONTENTS

Introduction

Book I. The Spoiled Child

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

Book II. Meeting Streams

Chapter XI

Chapter XII

Chapter XIII

Chapter XIV

Chapter XV

Chapter XVI

Chapter XVII

Chapter XVIII

Book III. Maidens Choosing

Chapter XIX

Chapter XX

Chapter XXI

Chapter XXII

Chapter XXIII

Chapter XXIV

Chapter XXV

Chapter XXVI

Chapter XXVII

Book IV. Gwendolen Gets Her Choice

Chapter XXVIII

Chapter XXIX

Chapter XXX

Chapter XXXI

Chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

Chapter XXXIV

Book V. Mordecai

Chapter XXXV

Chapter XXXVI

Chapter XXXVII

Chapter XXXVIII

Chapter XXXIX

Chapter XL

Book VI. Revelations

Chapter XLI

Chapter XLII

Chapter XLIII

Chapter XLIV

Chapter XLV

Chapter XLVI

Chapter LXVII

Chapter XLVIII

Chapter XLIX

Book VII. The Mother and the Son

Chapter L

Chapter LI

Chapter LII

Chapter LIII

Chapter LIV

Chapter LV

Chapter LVI

Chapter LVII

Book VIII. Fruit and Seed

Chapter LVIII

Chapter LIX

Chapter LX

Chapter LXI

Chapter LXII

Chapter LXIII

Chapter LXIV

Chapter LXV

Chapter LXVI

Chapter LXVII

Chapter LXVIII

Chapter LXIX

Chapter LXX

Biographical Afterword

Introduction

When Middlemarch was finished, in the autumn of 1872, George Eliot went with Lewes to Homburg, where the sight of a young girl at the gaming-tables suggested to her the scene which opens her next book. She alludes to it in letters written home during this holiday:—"The Kursaal is to me a hell, not only for the gambling, but for the light and heat of the gas, and we have seen enough of its monstrous hideousness. There is very little dramatic Stoff to be picked up by watching or listening. The saddest thing to be witnessed is the play of a young lady, who is only twenty-six years old and is completely in the grasp of this mean, money-making demon. It made me cry to see her fresh young face among the hags and brutally stupid men around her. . . . The air, the waters, the plantations here, are all perfect—‘only man is vile.’ I am not fond of denouncing my fellow-sinners, but gambling being a vice I ‘have no mind to,’ it stirs my disgust even more than my pity. The sight of the dull faces bending round the gaming-tables, the raking-up of the money, and the flinging of the coins towards the winners by the hard-faced croupiers, the hateful, hideous women staring at the board like stupid monomaniacs,—all this seems to me the most abject presentation of mortals grasping after something called a good that can be seen on the face of this little earth. Burglary is heroic compared with it."

But it is not until November of the following year (1873) that we find in a letter to her publisher the first definite promise of the new work:—"I am slowly simmering towards another big book; but people seem so bent on giving supremacy to Middlemarch that they are sure not to like any future book so well. I had a letter from Mr. Bancroft (the American minister at Berlin) the other day, in which he says that everybody in Berlin reads Middlemarch. He had to buy two copies for his house, and he found the Rector of the University, a stupendous mathematician, occupied with it in the solid part of the day. In the same strain she writes when the task is nearly finished:—Apparently there are wild reports about the subject-matter of Deronda,—among the rest, that it represents French life! But that is hardly more ridiculous than the supposition that after refusing to go to America, I should undertake to describe society there! It is wonderful how Middlemarch keeps afloat in people’s minds. Somebody told me that Mr. Henry Sidgwick said it was a bold thing to write another book after it."

At all events, Daniel Deronda is no mere echo of its next predecessor, but a complete contrast in scene and materials. Like Middlemarch, it is open to criticism in construction; being made up of two separate stories told side by side, and not vitally related to each other. But its dominant interest—the point at which it called forth at once the highest praise and the keenest controversy—is its treatment of Judaism; its poetic idealization of the Jewish religion, and national and family life.

To many of her friends it seems to have been a surprise, and even astonishment, that George Eliot should have found inspiration in such a theme. These persons must have been ill acquainted with the wide range of her intellectual sympathies, and the immense charity of thought and feeling which transfused her imaginative power. They must also have failed to realize how intimately her art depends upon the stimulus of religious ideas and how strongly the conception of a chosen and suffering people, working ont some high and mysterious destiny among the nations, was likely to appeal to her mind. I wrote about the Jews, she answers a little testily, perhaps, to one of these protestants, because I consider them a fine old race who have done great things for humanity. I feel the same admiration for them as I do for the Florentines. Probably no Gentile woman, and certainly no English novelist, had ever been so well equipped to do them justice in fiction. George Eliot—as one of their own people, Mr. Joseph Jacobs, has said—brought to the world of art a greater extent of culture than any predecessor, with the possible exception of Goethe. By her own training she made herself probably the most accomplished woman the century has seen. Not alone was she a veritable pundit in languages, with mastery of French, German, and Italian, and serviceable knowledge of Latin, Greek, Spanish and Hebrew. She was widely learned in science and philosophy, and deeply read in history, and her works teem with evidence of her intimate knowledge of music and painting." Add to this that she was versed in Hebrew literature of all ages, and had learned the language in early life, when translating Strauss’s Leben Jesu, and it seems well within the tenor of her work that Daniel Deronda should have been written.

One or two outward points of similarity with Middlemarch can hardly escape notice. The hero, Deronda, and the leading lady, Gwendolen (one can hardly call her a heroine) are not lovers, and only speak across to each other, as it were, from the two distinct parts of the tale. And in Gwendolen we have again a study of a woman’s spirit broken by marriage; a warm and buoyant heart slowly petrified by the cold one beside it; a soul, capable of goodness, brought so low that the chief good left to it is its capacity for remorse.

But Gwendolen, the most modern of George Eliot’s women in her youthful boredom and cynicism, her smart, sarcastic sayings, her morbid craving for excitement at any cost, is also one of the least lovable, and has very little of the author’s self in her, except that unequal sensitiveness (consistent with great courage) which overwhelms her at certain moments, especially at nights; and is a recollection of George Eliot’s own susceptibility to terror in childhood, which made all her soul become a quivering fear. We do not follow her disillusionment, her chastening experiences, with the same sympathy that we feel for Dorothea. She interests us chiefly, as the story proceeds, by her gradual subjection to a nature stronger and finer than her own. The study of Deronda’s influence upon her, from the moment at the gaming-table when she felt the darting sense that he was measuring her and looking down on her as an inferior, that he was of different quality from the human dross around her—this is the psychological tour-de-force of the book.

Her friendship with Mr. Emmanual Deutsch also may have deepened very considerably her interest in the Jewish race. The original of Mordecai was once thought to be a man of the same surname—Cohen. The coincidence of the surname and trade of Mordecai Cohen, watchmaker, with that of his supposed prototype, however, was purely accidental, as Lewes frequently stated. He appears as the inspirer and sponsor of Deronda, a sort of Jewish Mazzini, dreaming of the deliverance and glorious destiny of his nation. Professor Kaufmann, touching on this point in his Attempt at an Appreciation of Daniel Deronda (George Eliot and Judaism) says:—"In contemplating a work of art, it is not a matter of primary importance whether an idea be true or false, whether a sentiment be authorized or not; we have only to consider whether, or not the work has succeeded in adequately representing the power of that idea and the dominion of that sentiment." She deals in Daniel Deronda with no common passion of mankind, well known and easy to understand, but a special sentiment shared by a few, strange and therefore incomprehensible to the many. . . . This ardent desire for a national future on the part of the Israelites forms the intellectual center and heart of her book.

Very little is recorded of her struggles with the early chapters of Deronda, but soon the old plaints of slow progress, ill-health, depression, and self-distrust creep in. I am suffering much (she writes in her journal) from doubt as to the worth of what I am doing, and fear lest I may not be able to complete it so as to make itacontribution to literature, and not a mere addition to the heap of books. In August, 1875, she writes to Mr. Cross:—My book seems to me so unlikely ever to be finished in a way that will make it worth giving to the world, that it is a kind f glass in which I behold my infirmities. In October she has completed half the book, but writes to her publisher:—I can’t say that I am at all satisfied with it, or that I have a comfortable sense of doing in it what I want to do; but Mr. Lewes is satisfied with it, and insists that since he is as anxious as possible for it to be fine, I ought to accept his impressions as trustworthy, so I resign myself. A little later, she replies to Mr. Blackwood’s praise of the manuscript and anxiety about the fate of Gwendolen:—It will perhaps be a little comfort to you to know that poor Gwen is spiritually saved, but ‘so as by fire.’ Don’t you see the process already beginning? I have no doubt you do, for you are a wide-awake reader. On Christmas Day, 1875, her journal tells us that the two first volumes are in print, and the first book is to be published on February 1st. "I have thought very poorly of it myself throughout, but George and the Blackwoods are full of satisfaction in it. Each part as I see it before me im Werden seems less likely to be anything else than a failure; but I see on looking back this morning—Christmas Day—that I really was in worse health and suffered equal depression about Romola, and so far as I have recorded, the same thing seems to be true of Middlemarch. I have finished the fifth book, but am not far on in the sixth, as I hoped to have been,—the oppression under which I have been laboring having positively suspended my power of writing anything that I could feel satisfaction in."

The chronicles become fuller in the journal and letters of 1876. Mr. Lewes has not heard any complaints of not understanding Gwendolen, but a strong partisanship for and against her. My correspondence about the misquotation of Tennyson has quieted itself since the fifth letter. But one gentleman has written me a very pretty note, taxing me with having wanted insight into the technicalities of Newmarket, when I made Lush say, ‘I will take odds.’ He judges that I should have written ‘I will lay odds.’ On the other hand, another expert contends that the case is one in which Lush would be more likely to say, ‘I will take odds.’ I told my correspondent that I had a dream of being righteously pelted with mistakes that would make a cairn above me,—a monument and a warning to people who write novels without being omniscient and infallible.

Then follow some interesting fragments of contemporary opinion on Deronda. "The success of the work at present (April 12, 1876) is greater than that of Middlemarch up to the corresponding point of publication. What will be the feeling of the public as the story advances, I am entirely doubtful. The Jewish element seems to me likely to satisfy nobody. I must share with you a rather neat coincidence which pleased us last week. ... A critic opined that the scenes between Lush and Grandcourt were not vraisemblable,—were of the imperious feminine, not the masculine, character. Just afterwards, Mr. Lewes was chatting with a friend who, without having read the criticism, said that he had been at Lady Waldegrave’s, where the subject was being discussed, and Bernal Osborne said the very best parts were the scenes between Grandcourt and Lush! . . . People in their eagerness about my characters are quite angry, it appears, when their own expectations are not fulfilled,—angry, for example, that Gwendolen accepts Grandcourt, etc. One reader is sure that Mirah is going to die very soon, and I suppose will be disgusted at her remaining alive."

As to the Jewish element in the book, she writes most fully to Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe.

October, 1876.—I expected from first to last, in writing it, that it would create much stronger resistance, and even repulsion, than it has actually met with. But precisely because I felt that the usual attitude of Christians towards Jews is—I hardly know whether to say more impious or more stupid, when viewed in the light of their professed principles, I therefore felt urged to treat Jews with such sympathy and understanding as my nature and knowledge could attain to. Moreover, not only towards the Jews, but towards all Oriental peoples with whom we English come in contact, a spirit of arrogance and contemptuous dictatorialness is observable which has become a national disgrace to us. There is nothing I should care more to do, if it were possible, than to rouse the imagination of men and women to a vision of human claims in those races of their fellow-men who most differ from them in customs and beliefs. But towards the Hebrews we western people, who have been reared in Christianity, have a peculiar debt, and, whether we acknowledge it or not, a peculiar thoroughness of fellowship in religious and moral sentiment. Can anything be more disgusting than to hear people called ‘educated’ making small jokes about eating ham, and showing themselves empty of any real knowledge as to the relation of their own social and religious life to the history of the people they think themselves witty in insulting? They hardly know that Christ was a Jew. And I find men, educated, supposing that Christ spoke Greek. To my feeling, this deadness to the history which has prepared half our world for us, this inability to find interest in any form of life that is not clad in the same coat-tails and flounces as our own, lies very close to the worst kind of irreligion.

We are not left, however, without a glimpse of that harder and more unlovely side of Judaism on which ritual becomes a tyranny and tradition, a yoke galling to every free and ardent spirit. It is thus with every great established church east or west, Gentile or Jewish. How many a Christian woman might echo almost in the same words, from the bitterness of her heart, that magnificent outburst of Deronda’s mother in which she repudiates the faith in which she was brought up! It is the scene in which she tells her son how she has concealed from him the fact of his Jewish birth; and he, instead of appreciating her motives, reproaches her for having kept him from his birthright. How could I know, she cries, "that you would love what I hated?—love to be a Jew! . . . My father only thought of fettering me into obedience. I was to be what he called ‘the Jewish woman,’ under pain of his curse. I was to feel awe for the bit of parchment in the mezuza over the door; to dread lest a bit of batter should touch a bit of meat; to think it beautiful that men should bind the tephillin on them and women not,—to adore the wisdom of such laws, however silly they might seem to me. I was to love the long prayers in the ugly synagogue, and the howling, and the gabbling, and the dreadful fasts, and the tiresome feasts, and my father’s endless discoursing about Our People, which was a thunder without meaning in my ears. I was to care for ever about what Israel had been; and I did not care at all. I cared for the wide world, and all I could represent in it. I hated living under the shadow of my father’s strictness. Teaching, teaching for everlasting—‘this you must be’—‘that you must not be’—pressed on me like a frame that got tighter and tighter as I grew. I wanted to live a large life, with freedom to do what everyone else did, and be carried along in a great current, not obliged to care. Ah! you are glad to have been born a Jew. You say so. That is because you have not been brought up as a Jew. . . . And you are not a woman. You may try, but you can never imagine what it is to have all a man’s force of genius in you and yet to suffer the slavery of being a girl. To have a pattern cut out,—‘this is the Jewish woman; this is what you must be; this is what you are wanted for; a woman’s heart must be of such a size and no larger, else it must be pressed small, like Chinese feet; her happiness is to be made as cakes are, by a fixed receipt.’ . . . That was what my father wanted."

Has Magda herself said more? George Eliot is not generally quoted upon the platforms of women emancipations; she is often thought too conservative, too insistent upon domestic virtues and the supremacy of family ties. But where in the pioneer literature of the last thirty years shall be found a higher and bolder claim for woman as an individual, as a citizen, and as an artist? Such passages show how deep was her sympathy with all rebellion that has for its aim the utterance of a sincere personality, the happiness proper to a life finding its natural outlet in talents and affections bounded only by the capacities of its being. Some of the words put into the mouth of Deronda’s mother are sometimes taken to refer to George Eliot’s own girlhood, and to that time in it when she first angered her father and scandalized the pious neighborhood of Coventry by refusing to go to church. But however literal and significant such words may be, George Eliot wisely chose the path of emancipation through the most strenuous self-culture, the most patient and ungrudging labors at her literary craft. She has done—as has been well said by a critic already quoted, Mr. Joseph Jacobs—A great deal for the cause of woman by direct teaching, but she has done most by giving the world assurance of the possibilities of women’s excellence.

ESTHER WOOD.

1901.

Let thy chief terror be of thine own soul:

There, ’mid the throng of hurrying desires

That trample on the dead to seize their spoil,

Lurks vengeance, footless, irresistible

As exhalations laden with slow death,

And o’er the fairest troop of captured joys

Breathes pallid pestilence.

Book I. The Spoiled Child

Chapter I

Men can do nothing without the make-believe of a beginning. Even science, the strict measurer, is obliged to start with a make-believe unit, and must fix on a point in the stars’ unceasing journey when his sidereal clock shall pretend that time is at Nought. His less accurate grandmother Poetry has always been understood to start in the middle; but on reflection it appears that her proceeding is not very different from his; since Science, too, reckons backward as well as forward, divides his unit into billions, and with his clock-finger at Nought really sets off in medias res. No retrospect will take us to the true beginning; and whether our prologue be in heaven or on earth, it is but a fraction of that all-presupposing fact with which our story sets out.

Was she beautiful or not beautiful? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance? Was the good or the evil genius dominant in those beams? Probably the evil; else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm? Why was the wish to look again felt as coercion and not as a longing in which the whole being consents?

She who raised these questions in Daniel Deronda’s mind was occupied in gambling: not in the open air under a southern sky, tossing coppers on a ruined wall, with rags about her limbs; but in one of those splendid resorts which the enlightenment of ages has prepared for the same species of pleasure at a heavy cost of guilt mouldings, dark-toned color and chubby nudities, all correspondingly heavy—forming a suitable condenser for human breath belonging, in great part, to the highest fashion, and not easily procurable to be breathed in elsewhere in the like proportion, at least by persons of little fashion.

It was near four o’clock on a September day, so that the atmosphere was well-brewed to a visible haze. There was deep stillness, broken only by a light rattle, a light chink, a small sweeping sound, and an occasional monotone in French, such as might be expected to issue from an ingeniously constructed automaton. Round two long tables were gathered two serried crowds of human beings, all save one having their faces and attention bent on the tables. The one exception was a melancholy little boy, with his knees and calves simply in their natural clothing of epidermis, but for the rest of his person in a fancy dress. He alone had his face turned toward the doorway, and fixing on it the blank gaze of a bedizened child stationed as a masquerading advertisement on the platform of an itinerant show, stood close behind a lady deeply engaged at the roulette-table.

About this table fifty or sixty persons were assembled, many in the outer rows, where there was occasionally a deposit of new-comers, being mere spectators, only that one of them, usually a woman, might now and then be observed putting down a five-franc with a simpering air, just to see what the passion of gambling really was. Those who were taking their pleasure at a higher strength, and were absorbed in play, showed very distant varieties of European type: Livonian and Spanish, Græco-Italian and miscellaneous German, English aristocratic and English plebeian. Here certainly was a striking admission of human equality. The white bejewelled fingers of an English countess were very near touching a bony, yellow, crab-like hand stretching a bared wrist to clutch a heap of coin—a hand easy to sort with the square, gaunt face, deep-set eyes, grizzled eyebrows, and ill-combed scanty hair which seemed a slight metamorphosis of the vulture. And where else would her ladyship have graciously consented to sit by that dry-lipped feminine figure prematurely old, withered after short bloom like her artificial flowers, holding a shabby velvet reticule before her, and occasionally putting in her mouth the point with which she pricked her card? There too, very near the fair countess, was a respectable London tradesman, blonde and soft-handed, his sleek hair scrupulously parted behind and before, conscious of circulars addressed to the nobility and gentry, whose distinguished patronage enabled him to take his holidays fashionably, and to a certain extent in their distinguished company. Not his gambler’s passion that nullifies appetite, but a well-fed leisure, which, in the intervals of winning money in business and spending it showily, sees no better resource than winning money in play and spending it yet more showily—reflecting always that Providence had never manifested any disapprobation of his amusement, and dispassionate enough to leave off if the sweetness of winning much and seeing others lose had turned to the sourness of losing much and seeing others win. For the vice of gambling lay in losing money at it. In his bearing there might be something of the tradesman, but in his pleasures he was fit to rank with the owners of the oldest titles. Standing close to his chair was a handsome Italian, calm, statuesque, reaching across him to place the first pile of napoleons from a new bagful just brought him by an envoy with a scrolled mustache. The pile was in half a minute pushed over to an old bewigged woman with eye-glasses pinching her nose. There was a slight gleam, a faint mumbling smile about the lips of the old woman; but the statuesque Italian remained impassive, and—probably secure in an infallible system which placed his foot on the neck of chance—immediately prepared a new pile. So did a man with the air of an emaciated beau or worn-out libertine, who looked at life through one eye-glass, and held out his hand tremulously when he asked for change. It could surely be no severity of system, but rather some dream of white crows, or the induction that the eighth of the month was lucky, which inspired the fierce yet tottering impulsiveness of his play.

But, while every single player differed markedly from every other, there was a certain uniform negativeness of expression which had the effect of a mask—as if they had all eaten of some root that for the time compelled the brains of each to the same narrow monotony of action.

Deronda’s first thought when his eyes fell on this scene of dull, gas-poisoned absorption, was that the gambling of Spanish shepherd-boys had seemed to him more enviable:—so far Rousseau might be justified in maintaining that art and science had done a poor service to mankind. But suddenly he felt the moment become dramatic. His attention was arrested by a young lady who, standing at an angle not far from him, was the last to whom his eyes traveled. She was bending and speaking English to a middle-aged lady seated at play beside her: but the next instant she returned to her play, and showed the full height of a graceful figure, with a face which might possibly be looked at without admiration, but could hardly be passed with indifference.

The inward debate which she raised in Deronda gave to his eyes a growing expression of scrutiny, tending farther and farther away from the glow of mingled undefined sensibilities forming admiration. At one moment they followed the movements of the figure, of the arms and hands, as this problematic sylph bent forward to deposit her stake with an air of firm choice; and the next they returned to the face which, at present unaffected by beholders, was directed steadily toward the game. The sylph was a winner; and as her taper fingers, delicately gloved in pale-gray, were adjusting the coins which had been pushed toward her in order to pass them back again to the winning point, she looked round her with a survey too markedly cold and neutral not to have in it a little of that nature which we call art concealing an inward exultation.

But in the course of that survey her eyes met Deronda’s, and instead of averting them as she would have desired to do, she was unpleasantly conscious that they were arrested—how long? The darting sense that he was measuring her and looking down on her as an inferior, that he was of different quality from the human dross around her, that he felt himself in a region outside and above her, and was examining her as a specimen of a lower order, roused a tingling resentment which stretched the moment with conflict. It did not bring the blood to her cheeks, but it sent it away from her lips. She controlled herself by the help of an inward defiance, and without other sign of emotion than this lip-paleness turned to her play. But Deronda’s gaze seemed to have acted as an evil eye. Her stake was gone. No matter; she had been winning ever since she took to roulette with a few napoleons at command, and had a considerable reserve. She had begun to believe in her luck, others had begun to believe in it: she had visions of being followed by a cortège who would worship her as a goddess of luck and watch her play as a directing augury. Such things had been known of male gamblers; why should not a woman have a like supremacy? Her friend and chaperon who had not wished her to play at first was beginning to approve, only administering the prudent advice to stop at the right moment and carry money back to England—advice to which Gwendolen had replied that she cared for the excitement of play, not the winnings. On that supposition the present moment ought to have made the flood-tide in her eager experience of gambling. Yet, when her next stake was swept away, she felt the orbits of her eyes getting hot, and the certainty she had (without looking) of that man still watching her was something like a pressure which begins to be torturing. The more reason to her why she should not flinch, but go on playing as if she were indifferent to loss or gain. Her friend touched her elbow and proposed that they should quit the table. For reply Gwendolen put ten louis on the same spot: she was in that mood of defiance in which the mind loses sight of any end beyond the satisfaction of enraged resistance; and with the puerile stupidity of a dominant impulse includes luck among its objects of defiance. Since she was not winning strikingly, the next best thing was to lose strikingly. She controlled her muscles, and showed no tremor of mouth or hands. Each time her stake was swept off she doubled it. Many were now watching her, but the sole observation she was conscious of was Deronda’s, who, though she never looked toward him, she was sure had not moved away. Such a drama takes no long while to play out: development and catastrophe can often be measured by nothing clumsier than the moment-hand. Faites votre jeu, mesdames et messieurs, said the automatic voice of destiny from between the mustache and imperial of the croupier: and Gwendolen’s arm was stretched to deposit her last poor heap of napoleons. Le jeu ne va plus, said destiny. And in five seconds Gwendolen turned from the table, but turned resolutely with her face toward Deronda and looked at him. There was a smile of irony in his eyes as their glances met; but it was at least better that he should have disregarded her as one of an insect swarm who had no individual physiognomy. Besides, in spite of his superciliousness and irony, it was difficult to believe that he did not admire her spirit as well as her person: he was young, handsome, distinguished in appearance—not one of these ridiculous and dowdy Philistines who thought it incumbent on them to blight the gaming-table with a sour look of protest as they passed by it. The general conviction that we are admirable does not easily give way before a single negative; rather when any of Vanity’s large family, male or female, find their performance received coldly, they are apt to believe that a little more of it will win over the unaccountable dissident. In Gwendolen’s habits of mind it had been taken for granted that she knew what was admirable and that she herself was admired. This basis of her thinking had received a disagreeable concussion, and reeled a little, but was not easily to be overthrown.

In the evening the same room was more stiflingly heated, was brilliant with gas and with the costumes of ladies who floated their trains along it or were seated on the ottomans.

The Nereid in sea-green robes and silver ornaments, with a pale sea-green feather fastened in silver falling backward over her green hat and light brown hair, was Gwendolen Harleth. She was under the wing, or rather soared by the shoulder, of the lady who had sat by her at the roulette-table; and with them was a gentleman with a white mustache and clipped hair: solid-browed, stiff and German. They were walking about or standing to chat with acquaintances, and Gwendolen was much observed by the seated groups.

A striking girl—that Miss Harleth—unlike others.

Yes, she has got herself up as a sort of serpent now—all green and silver, and winds her neck about a little more than usual.

Oh, she must always be doing something extraordinary. She is that kind of girl, I fancy. Do you think her pretty, Mr. Vandernoodt?

Very. A man might risk hanging for her—I mean a fool might.

"You like a nez retroussé, then, and long narrow eyes?"

"When they go with such an ensemble."

"The ensemble du serpent?"

If you will. Woman was tempted by a serpent; why not man?

She is certainly very graceful; but she wants a tinge of color in her cheeks. It is a sort of Lamia beauty she has.

On the contrary, I think her complexion one of her chief charms. It is a warm paleness; it looks thoroughly healthy. And that delicate nose with its gradual little upward curve is distracting. And then her mouth—there never was a prettier mouth, the lips curled backward so finely, eh, Mackworth?

Think so? I cannot endure that sort of mouth. It looks so self-complacent, as if it knew its own beauty—the curves are too immovable. I like a mouth that trembles more.

For my part, I think her odious, said a dowager. It is wonderful what unpleasant girls get into vogue. Who are these Langens? Does anybody know them?

"They are quite comme il faut. I have dined with them several times at the Russie. The baroness is English. Miss Harleth calls her cousin. The girl herself is thoroughly well-bred, and as clever as possible."

Dear me! and the baron?.

A very good furniture picture.

Your baroness is always at the roulette-table, said Mackworth. I fancy she has taught the girl to gamble.

Oh, the old woman plays a very sober game; drops a ten-franc piece here and there. The girl is more headlong. But it is only a freak.

I hear she has lost all her winnings to-day. Are they rich? Who knows?

Ah, who knows? Who knows that about anybody? said Mr. Vandernoodt, moving off to join the Langens.

The remark that Gwendolen wound her neck about more than usual this evening was true. But it was not that she might carry out the serpent idea more completely: it was that she watched for any chance of seeing Deronda, so that she might inquire about this stranger, under whose measuring gaze she was still wincing. At last her opportunity came.

Mr. Vandernoodt, you know everybody, said Gwendolen, not too eagerly, rather with a certain languor of utterance which she sometimes gave to her clear soprano. Who is that near the door?