What a beastly den this is!--a worse
hole than Baden. I shall go back to the hotel."

When Sir Hugo and Deronda were alone, the baronet began--

"Rather a pretty story. That girl has something in her. She must be
worth running after--has _de l'imprevu_. I think her appearance on the
scene has bettered my chance of getting Diplow, whether the marriage
comes off or not."

"I should hope a marriage like that would not come off," said Deronda,
in a tone of disgust.

"What! are you a little touched with the sublime lash?" said Sir Hugo,
putting up his glasses to help his short sight in looking at his
companion. "Are you inclined to run after her?"

"On the contrary," said Deronda, "I should rather be inclined to run
away from her."

"Why, you would easily cut out Grandcourt. A girl with her spirit would
think you the finer match of the two," said Sir Hugo, who often tried
Deronda's patience by finding a joke in impossible advice. (A
difference of taste in jokes is a great strain on the affections.)

"I suppose pedigree and land belong to a fine match," said Deronda,
coldly.

"The best horse will win in spite of pedigree, my boy. You remember
Napoleon's _mot--Je suis un ancetre_" said Sir Hugo, who habitually
undervalued birth, as men after dining well often agree that the good
of life is distributed with wonderful equality.

"I am not sure that I want to be an ancestor," said Deronda. "It
doesn't seem to me the rarest sort of origination."

"You won't run after the pretty gambler, then?" said Sir Hugo, putting
down his glasses.

"Decidedly not."

This answer was perfectly truthful; nevertheless it had passed through
Deronda's mind that under other circumstances he should have given way
to the interest this girl had raised in him, and tried to know more of
her. But his history had given him a stronger bias in another
direction. He felt himself in no sense free.

CHAPTER XVI.

Men, like planets, have both a visible and an invisible history. The
astronomer threads the darkness with strict deduction, accounting so
for every visible arc in the wanderer's orbit; and the narrator of
human actions, if he did his work with the same completeness, would
have to thread the hidden pathways of feeling and thought which lead
up to every moment of action, and to those moments of intense
suffering which take the quality of action--like the cry of
Prometheus, whose chained anguish seems