“Do sit down now,” said Kate, moving a chair forward, while Amy ran to get some tea.
Mirah resisted no longer, but seated herself with perfect grace, crossing her little feet, laying her hands one over the other on her lap, and looking at her friends with placid reverence; whereupon Hafiz, who had been watching the scene restlessly came forward with tail erect and rubbed himself against her ankles. Deronda felt it time to go.
“Will you allow me to come again and inquire—perhaps at five to-morrow?” he said to Mrs. Meyrick.
“Yes, pray; we shall have had time to make acquaintance then.”
“Good-bye,” said Deronda, looking down at Mirah, and putting out his hand. She rose as she took it, and the moment brought back to them both strongly the other moment when she had first taken that outstretched hand. She lifted her eyes to his and said with reverential fervor, “The God of our fathers bless you and deliver you from all evil as you have delivered me. I did not believe there was any man so good. None before have thought me worthy of the best. You found me poor and miserable, yet you have given me the best.”
Deronda could not speak, but with silent adieux to the Meyricks, hurried away.
BOOK III.—MAIDENS CHOOSING.
CHAPTER XIX.
“I pity the man who can travel from Dan to Beersheba, and say, ‘’Tis all barren’: and so it is: and so is all the world to him who will not cultivate the fruits it offers.”—STERNE: Sentimental Journey.
To say that Deronda was romantic would be to misrepresent him; but under his calm and somewhat self-repressed exterior there was a fervor which made him easily find poetry and romance among the events of everyday life. And perhaps poetry and romance are as plentiful as ever in the world except for those phlegmatic natures who I suspect would in any age have regarded them as a dull form of erroneous thinking. They exist very easily in the same room with the microscope and even in railway carriages: what banishes them in the vacuum in gentlemen and lady passengers. How should all the apparatus of heaven and earth, from the farthest firmament to the tender bosom of the mother who nourished us, make poetry for a mind that had no movements of awe and tenderness, no sense of fellowship which thrills from the near to the distant, and back again from the distant to the near?