lofty grove.
Into a substance glorious as her own,
Yea, with her own incorporated, by power
Capacious and serene."
--WORDSWORTH: _Excursion_, B. IV.

Deronda came out of the narrow house at Chelsea in a frame of mind that
made him long for some good bodily exercise to carry off what he was
himself inclined to call the fumes of his temper. He was going toward
the city, and the sight of the Chelsea Stairs with the waiting boats at
once determined him to avoid the irritating inaction of being driven in
a cab, by calling a wherry and taking an oar.

His errand was to go to Ram's book-shop, where he had yesterday arrived
too late for Mordecai's midday watch, and had been told that he
invariably came there again between five and six. Some further
acquaintance with this remarkable inmate of the Cohens was particularly
desired by Deronda as a preliminary to redeeming his ring: he wished
that their conversation should not again end speedily with that drop of
Mordecai's interest which was like the removal of a drawbridge, and
threatened to shut out any easy communication in future. As he got
warmed with the use of the oar, fixing his mind on the errand before
him and the ends he wanted to achieve on Mirah's account, he
experienced, as was wont with him, a quick change of mental light,
shifting his point of view to that of the person whom he had been
thinking of hitherto chiefly as serviceable to his own purposes, and
was inclined to taunt himself with being not much better than an
enlisting sergeant, who never troubles himself with the drama that
brings him the needful recruits.

"I suppose if I got from this man the information I am most anxious
about," thought Deronda, "I should be contented enough if he felt no
disposition to tell me more of himself, or why he seemed to have some
expectation from me which was disappointed. The sort of curiosity he
stirs would die out; and yet it might be that he had neared and parted
as one can imagine two ships doing, each freighted with an exile who
would have recognized the other if the two could have looked out face
to face. Not that there is any likelihood of a peculiar tie between me
and this poor fellow, whose voyage, I fancy, must soon be over. But I
wonder whether there is much of that momentous mutual missing between
people who interchange blank looks, or even long for one another's
absence in a crowded place. However, one makes one's self chances of
missi