Deronda smiled at the irregular, blonde face, brought into strange contrast by the side of Mirah’s—smiled, Mab thought, rather sarcastically as he said, “That prospect of everything coming to an end will not guide us far in practice. Mirah’s feelings, she tells us, are concerned with what is.” Mab was confused and wished she had not spoken, since Mr. Deronda seemed to think that she had found fault with Mirah; but to have spoken once is a tyrannous reason for speaking again, and she said, “I only meant that we must have courage to hear things, else there is hardly anything we can talk about.” Mab felt herself unanswerable here, inclining to the opinion of Socrates: “What motive has a man to live, if not for the pleasure of discourse?” Deronda took his leave soon after, and when Mrs. Meyrick went outside with him to exchange a few words about Mirah, he said, “Hans is to share my chambers when he comes at Christmas.” “You have written to Rome about that?” said Mrs. Meyrick, her face lighting up. “How very good and thoughtful of you! You mentioned Mirah, then?” “Yes, I referred to her. I concluded he knew everything from you.” “I must confess my folly. I have not yet written a word about her. I have always been meaning to do it, and yet have ended my letter without saying a word. And I told the girls to leave it to me. However!—Thank you a thousand times.” Deronda divined something of what was in the mother’s mind, and his divination reinforced a certain anxiety already present in him. His inward colloquy was not soothing. He said to himself that no man could see this exquisite creature without feeling it possible to fall in love with her; but all the fervor of his nature was engaged on the side of precaution. There are personages who feel themselves tragic because they march into a palpable morass, dragging another with them, and then cry out against all the gods. Deronda’s mind was strongly set against imitating them. “I have my hands on the reins now,” he thought, “and I will not drop them. I shall go there as little as possible.” He saw the reasons acting themselves out before him. How could he be Mirah’s guardian and claim to unite with Mrs. Meyrick, to whose charge he had committed her, if he showed himself as a lover—whom she did not love—whom she would not marry? And if he encouraged any germ of lover’s feeling in himself it would lead up to that issue. Mirah’s was not a nature that would bear dividing against itself; and even if love won her consent to marry a man who was not of her race and religion, she would never be happy in acting against that strong native bias which would still reign in her conscience as remorse.