“I didn’t mean any harm,” said Mirah. “Only I have been used to thinking about my dress for parts in plays. And I almost always had a part with a plain dress.”
“That makes me think it questionable,” said Hans, who had suddenly become as fastidious and conventional on this occasion as he had thought Deronda was, apropos of the Berenice-pictures. “It looks a little too theatrical. We must not make you a rôle of the poor Jewess—or of being a Jewess at all.” Hans had a secret desire to neutralize the Jewess in private life, which he was in danger of not keeping secret.
“But it is what I am really. I am not pretending anything. I shall never be anything else,” said Mirah. “I always feel myself a Jewess.”
“But we can’t feel that about you,” said Hans, with a devout look. “What does it signify whether a perfect woman is a Jewess or not?”
“That is your kind way of praising me; I never was praised so before,” said Mirah, with a smile, which was rather maddening to Hans and made him feel still more of a cosmopolitan.
“People don’t think of me as a British Christian,” he said, his face creasing merrily. “They think of me as an imperfectly handsome young man and an unpromising painter.”
“But you are wandering from the dress,” said Amy. “If that will not do, how are we to get another before Wednesday? and to-morrow Sunday?”
“Indeed this will do,” said Mirah, entreatingly. “It is all real, you know,” here she looked at Hans—“even if it seemed theatrical. Poor Berenice sitting on the ruins—any one might say that was theatrical, but I know that this is just what she would do.”
“I am a scoundrel,” said Hans, overcome by this misplaced trust. “That is my invention. Nobody knows that she did that. Shall you forgive me for not saying so before?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mirah, after a momentary pause of surprise. “You knew it was what she would be sure to do—a Jewess who had not been faithful—who had done what she did and was penitent. She could have no joy but to afflict herself; and where else would she go? I think it is very beautiful that you should enter so into what a Jewess would feel.”