. I dare say my
English is the better for it."

On this point Daniel kept a respectful silence. The enthusiastic belief
in Sir Hugo's writings as a standard, and in the Whigs as the chosen
race among politicians, had gradually vanished along with the seraphic
boy's face. He had not been the hardest of workers at Eton. Though some
kinds of study and reading came as easily as boating to him, he was not
of the material that usually makes the first-rate Eton scholar. There
had sprung up in him a meditative yearning after wide knowledge which
is likely always to abate ardor in the fight for prize acquirement in
narrow tracks. Happily he was modest, and took any second-rate-*ness in
himself simply as a fact, not as a marvel necessarily to be accounted
for by a superiority. Still Mr. Eraser's high opinion of the lad had
not been altogether belied by the youth: Daniel had the stamp of rarity
in a subdued fervor of sympathy, an activity of imagination on behalf
of others which did not show itself effusively, but was continually
seen in acts of considerateness that struck his companions as moral
eccentricity. "Deronda would have been first-rate if he had had more
ambition," was a frequent remark about him. But how could a fellow push
his way properly when he objected to swop for his own advantage,
knocked under by choice when he was within an inch of victory, and,
unlike the great Clive, would rather be the calf than the butcher? It
was a mistake, however, to suppose that Deronda had not his share of
ambition. We know he had suffered keenly from the belief that there was
a tinge of dishonor in his lot; but there are some cases, and his was
one of them, in which the sense of injury breeds--not the will to
inflict injuries and climb over them as a ladder, but a hatred of all
injury. He had his flashes of fierceness and could hit out upon
occasion, but the occasions were not always what might have been
expected. For in what related to himself his resentful impulses had
been early checked by a mastering affectionateness. Love has a habit of
saying "Never mind" to angry self, who, sitting down for the nonce in
the lower place, by-and-by gets used to it. So it was that as Deronda
approached manhood his feeling for Sir Hugo, while it was getting more
and more mixed with criticism, was gaining in that sort of allowance
which reconciles criticism with tenderness. The dear old beautiful home
and everything within it, Lady Mallinger and her