The drowning scene first begins to stir the better nature within her.  The intensity of terror with which she regards the involuntary murderous thought, and which prompted her leap into the water, the fervour of remorse which followed, all begin to indicate a nature which may yet be attuned to the highest qualities.  On the other hand, the sweet clinging trust with which she hangs on Deronda, looks up to him, feels that for her every possibility of good lies in association with him, are those of a guileless, artless child.  She has been called a hard-hearted, callous woman of the world:  her worldliness is on the surface alone.  Her first cry to Deronda is the piteous wail of a forsaken child; the letter with which their relations close is the fond yearning of a child towards one whom she looks up to as protector and saviour.

Grandcourt is portrayed before us in more massive and simple proportions as a type of concentrated selfishness.  We dare not despise him, we cannot loathe him—­we stand bowed and awe-stricken before him.  He never for a moment falls from that calm dignity of pride and self-isolation—­never for a moment softens into respect for anything without himself.  Without a moment’s exception he is ever consistent, imperturbable in his self-containedness, ruthlessly crushing all things from dog to wife, under his calm, cold, slighting contempt.  He stands up before us, not so much indomitable as simply unassailable.  We cannot conceive the boldest approaching or encroaching on him—­all equally shiver and quail before that embodiment of the devil as represented by human self-love.

Fain would we linger over the Jewish girl, Mirah.  She has been spoken of as characterless; to us it seems as if few characters of more exquisite loveliness have ever been portrayed.  From her first appearance robed in her meek despair, through all her subsequent relations with Deronda, her brother, and Gwendolen, there is the same delicate purity, the same tender meekness, the same full acceptance of the life of a Jewess as—­in harmony with the life of her race—­one of “sufferance.”  Even as her spirits gladden in that sunny Meyrick home, with its delicious interiors, and brighten under the noble-hearted musician Klesmer’s encouragement, the brightness refers to something entirely without herself.  In one sense far more acquainted with the evil that is in the world than Gwendolen with all her alleged worldliness, it is her shrinking from the least approach to this that prompts her strange, apparently hopeless flight in search of the mother she had loved so dearly.  Her sad, humble complaints that she has not been a good Jewess, because she has been inevitably cut off from the use of Jewish books, and restrained by her scoundrel father from attendance at Jewish worship, find their answer in her deep unfailing sense of her share in the national doom of suffering.  We feel with Mrs Meyrick “that she is a pearl, and the mud has only washed her.”  In her