that was sickly and puling should be
hampered with ideas which, since they left an accomplished Whig like
himself unobstructed, could be no better than spectral illusions;
especially as Deronda set himself against authorship--a vocation which
is understood to turn foolish thinking into funds.

Rowing in his dark-blue shirt and skull-cap, his curls closely clipped,
his mouth beset with abundant soft waves of beard, he bore only
disguised traces of the seraphic boy "trailing clouds of glory." Still,
even one who had never seen him since his boyhood might have looked at
him with slow recognition, due perhaps to the peculiarity of the gaze
which Gwendolen chose to call "dreadful," though it had really a very
mild sort of scrutiny. The voice, sometimes audible in subdued snatches
of song, had turned out merely a high baritone; indeed, only to look at
his lithe, powerful frame and the firm gravity of his face would have
been enough for an experienced guess that he had no rare and ravishing
tenor such as nature reluctantly makes at some sacrifice. Look at his
hands: they are not small and dimpled, with tapering fingers that seem
to have only a deprecating touch: they are long, flexible,
firmly-grasping hands, such as Titian has painted in a picture where he
wanted to show the combination of refinement with force. And there is
something of a likeness, too, between the faces belonging to the
hands--in both the uniform pale-brown skin, the perpendicular brow, the
calmly penetrating eyes. Not seraphic any longer: thoroughly
terrestrial and manly; but still of a kind to raise belief in a human
dignity which can afford to recognize poor relations.

Such types meet us here and there among average conditions; in a
workman, for example, whistling over a bit of measurement and lifting
his eyes to answer our question about the road. And often the grand
meanings of faces as well as of written words may lie chiefly in the
impressions that happen just now to be of importance in relation to
Deronda, rowing on the Thames in a very ordinary equipment for a young
Englishman at leisure, and passing under Kew Bridge with no thought of
an adventure in which his appearance was likely to play any part. In
fact, he objected very strongly to the notion, which others had not
allowed him to escape, that his appearance was of a kind to draw
attention; and hints of this, intended to be complimentary, found an
angry resonance in him, coming from mingled