hing like that of a fawn or other gentle animal before it
turns to run away: no blush, no special alarm, but only some timidity
which yet could not hinder her from a long look before she turned. In
fact, it seemed to Deronda that she was only half conscious of her
surroundings: was she hungry, or was there some other cause of
bewilderment? He felt an outleap of interest and compassion toward her;
but the next instant she had turned and walked away to a neighboring
bench under a tree. He had no right to linger and watch her:
poorly-dressed, melancholy women are common sights; it was only the
delicate beauty, picturesque lines and color of the image that was
exceptional, and these conditions made it more markedly impossible that
he should obtrude his interest upon her. He began to row away and was
soon far up the river; but no other thoughts were busy enough quite to
expel that pale image of unhappy girlhood. He fell again and again to
speculating on the probable romance that lay behind that loneliness and
look of desolation; then to smile at his own share in the prejudice
that interesting faces must have interesting adventures; then to
justify himself for feeling that sorrow was the more tragic when it
befell delicate, childlike beauty.

"I should not have forgotten the look of misery if she had been ugly
and vulgar," he said to himself. But there was no denying that the
attractiveness of the image made it likelier to last. It was clear to
him as an onyx cameo; the brown-black drapery, the white face with
small, small features and dark, long-lashed eyes. His mind glanced over
the girl-tragedies that are going on in the world, hidden, unheeded, as
if they were but tragedies of the copse or hedgerow, where the helpless
drag wounded wings forsakenly, and streak the shadowed moss with the
red moment-hand of their own death. Deronda of late, in his solitary
excursions, had been occupied chiefly with uncertainties about his own
course; but those uncertainties, being much at their leisure, were wont
to have such wide-sweeping connections with all life and history that
the new image of helpless sorrow easily blent itself with what seemed
to him the strong array of reasons why he should shrink from getting
into that routine of the world which makes men apologize for all its
wrong-doing, and take opinions as mere professional equipment--why he
should not draw strongly at any thread in the hopelessly-entangled
scheme of things.