ted Thebes, where there may naturally be a
greater and more miscellaneous inrush than through a narrow
beadle-watched portal. No doubt there are abject specimens of the
visionary, as there is a minim mammal which you might imprison in the
finger of your glove. That small relative of the elephant has no harm
in him; but what great mental or social type is free from specimens
whose insignificance is both ugly and noxious? One is afraid to think
of all that the genus "patriot" embraces; or of the elbowing there
might be at the day of judgment for those who ranked as authors, and
brought volumes either in their hands or on trucks.

This apology for inevitable kinship is meant to usher in some facts
about Mordecai, whose figure had bitten itself into Deronda's mind as a
new question which he felt an interest in getting answered. But the
interest was no more than a vaguely-expectant suspense: the
consumptive-looking Jew, apparently a fervid student of some kind,
getting his crust by a quiet handicraft, like Spinoza, fitted into none
of Deronda's anticipations.

It was otherwise with the effect of their meeting on Mordecai. For many
winters, while he had been conscious of an ebbing physical life, and as
widening spiritual loneliness, all his passionate desire had
concentrated itself in the yearning for some young ear into which he
could pour his mind as a testament, some soul kindred enough to accept
the spiritual product of his own brief, painful life, as a mission to
be executed. It was remarkable that the hopefulness which is often the
beneficent illusion of consumptive patients, was in Mordecai wholly
diverted from the prospect of bodily recovery and carried into the
current of this yearning for transmission. The yearning, which had
panted upward from out of over-whelming discouragements, had grown into
a hope--the hope into a confident belief, which, instead of being
checked by the clear conception he had of his hastening decline, took
rather the intensity of expectant faith in a prophecy which has only
brief space to get fulfilled in.

Some years had now gone since he had first begun to measure men with a
keen glance, searching for a possibility which became more and more a
distinct conception. Such distinctness as it had at first was reached
chiefly by a method of contrast: he wanted to find a man who differed
from himself. Tracing reasons in that self for the rebuffs he had met
with and the hindrances that beset him